Hollow Knight: Silksong

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a 2025 Metroidvania developed and published by Team Cherry, released September 4, 2025 for Windows, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox One/Series X|S, arriving day one on Xbox Game Pass. It’s the sequel to Hollow Knight, casting players as Hornet instead of the silent Knight, and it holds a Metacritic score around 90–93 depending on platform — reviews strong enough to match the original, after a wait long enough to become a genuine internet phenomenon in its own right.

Silksong was first announced in February 2019. It released more than six and a half years later. Understanding this game means understanding both halves of that sentence — what Team Cherry actually built, and what an entire generation of players did with themselves while waiting for it.

Technical Specifications

A DLC That Became a Full Game

Team Cherry revealed Silksong’s existence on Valentine’s Day 2019, initially framed as an expansion built around Hornet — one of several stretch goals promised to Hollow Knight‘s original Kickstarter backers back in 2014. Over the following years the project outgrew that framing entirely, becoming a standalone sequel roughly comparable in scope to the base game it started as a footnote to. Co-designer Ari Gibson would later put the delay simply: “It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”

The Wait

What followed Silksong’s 2019 reveal was, functionally, years of near-total silence from Team Cherry — and one of the more remarkable examples of a fanbase filling that silence with its own culture. Starting in January 2021, a fan named Araraura began posting daily videos to a channel called Daily Silksong News, most running under thirty seconds and consisting almost entirely of the phrase “there has been no news to report for Silksong today.” The channel ran for more than 1,600 consecutive days, gathered over 243,000 subscribers and 25 million views, and became a genuine touchstone of the wait — Araraura later admitted to IGN that without the project, he might have stopped following the game entirely. Elsewhere, fans adopted clown emoji as an in-joke acknowledging how absurd it was to keep hoping for news at every Nintendo Direct and Game Awards, and Silksong sat atop Steam’s wishlist charts for years — reportedly the platform’s single most-wishlisted game — without a single traditional marketing push behind it.

Delays and the Long Road to a Release Date

Team Cherry had targeted a first-half-2023 release before delaying “to ensure quality,” according to the studio’s head of marketing and publishing, Matthew Griffin. That delay became indefinite in May 2023, and communication mostly went quiet again until Silksong resurfaced in an April 2025 Nintendo Direct. The official release date — September 4, 2025 — was confirmed that August at Gamescom, ending the wait at just over six and a half years from the original announcement. Araraura’s Daily Silksong News channel posted its final video, titled “THE END,” the day after release.

Hornet’s Ascension Through Pharloom

Where Hollow Knight sent the Knight descending into the ruined kingdom of Hallownest, Silksong inverts the structure: Hornet is captured and taken to Pharloom, an unfamiliar kingdom she must climb toward, ascending through mossy grottos, gilded cities, and misted moors on the way to a shining citadel at its peak. The story is told the way the first game’s was — through ruins, statues, and fragments of environmental history rather than long dialogue sequences — while gradually tying Pharloom’s fate back to Hornet’s own nature and history.

Needle, Silk, and Crests

Hornet plays meaningfully differently from the Knight: faster, more acrobatic, wielding a needle instead of a nail, with combat and movement reviewers consistently described as having a much higher skill ceiling than the original. Silk, generated by landing hits, replaces the Soul resource and fuels both healing and special moves. The biggest structural change is Crests, which replace Hollow Knight’s charm system outright — rather than simply stacking passive bonuses, each Crest changes Hornet’s entire moveset and fighting style, with color-coded slots forcing genuine trade-offs between offensive, defensive, and utility Tools rather than allowing every build to run everything at once. True to Team Cherry’s habit of under-explaining its own systems, the game also includes a hidden parry mechanic it never directly teaches the player.

A Harder, Faster Hollow Knight

Difficulty became one of the most-discussed aspects of the game almost immediately, enough to prompt dedicated explainer pieces from outlets like Ars Technica. The general critical consensus wasn’t that Silksong is simply harder than its predecessor, but that it’s difficult in different ways — Hornet’s speed and expanded moveset let Team Cherry design tighter platforming and more demanding boss patterns around abilities the Knight never had, meaning experience with the first game only prepares players for roughly its opening stretch. Most reviewers ultimately judged the difficulty curve as fair and well-signposted rather than punishing for its own sake, though it remained a genuinely divisive talking point among players well after launch.

No Review Copies, $19.99

Team Cherry made two notable choices around launch itself: no review copies were sent out ahead of release, letting critics and players experience the game at the same time, and the price was set at $19.99 — only a few dollars above the original 2017 game’s launch price, despite Silksong’s larger scope and years of additional development. Both decisions were widely read as consistent with the studio’s existing reputation for prioritizing goodwill over standard industry practice.

Reception

Critical reception matched or exceeded the original: Metacritic scores landed in the low-to-mid 90s across platforms, with reviewers praising the expanded world, Hornet’s combat depth, and Christopher Larkin’s score, while difficulty and a handful of obtuse design choices — including crest-specific respawn points that don’t always favor the player — were the most common points of friction. Demand at launch was substantial enough to cause server strain on both Steam and the Nintendo eShop, with concurrent Steam players peaking above 500,000. The game surpassed 5 million copies sold within its first few weeks.

The Kickstarter Promise, Kept

Silksong’s release also closed out a promise Team Cherry had carried since 2014: every original Hollow Knight Kickstarter backer who pledged A$10 or more received a full copy of Silksong for free on their platform of choice, honored in full more than a decade after the original campaign — a gesture that became one of the most-cited examples of the goodwill that helped drive years of unpaid, entirely organic hype for the game in the first place.

Where to Play It Today

Hollow Knight: Silksong is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux (Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store), Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox One/Series X|S, and remains available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. A separate paid expansion, The Lost Harvest, adds a standalone story and cosmetic content for $12.99.