When Hollow Knight was released on February 24, 2017, it quickly became the gold standard for platformers in the current gaming generation. Seven years later, people are still discovering and replaying this addictive game. The game is stylistically beautiful, features phenomenal combat, and (perhaps most famously of all) offers up quite the challenge. Hollow Knight, alongside Hades and Elden Ring, helped a whole new audience discover the joys of difficult video games.
Naturally, the entire gaming community was elated when Team Cherry, the Adelaide-based indie developer behind Hollow Knight, shared the first trailer for Hollow Knight: Silksong in 2019. Silksong serves as a sequel, but this time you play as Hornet, the “princess-protector of Hollownest.” Everything about the trailer—from the new kingdom to the new characters to the newly acrobatic combat—left fans eager for more.
And eager they have remained, five years later. But, really—is there a Silksong release date?
The wait for Silksong explained
The wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong has become a meme within the gaming community. In the five years since the trailer dropped, fans have only received one additional trailer and little news of the sequel.
Now, when announcement wishlists for every new Nintendo Direct or gaming event come up on social media, “Silksong release date” is equal parts genuine wish and joke. No one knows when to expect an announcement because developer Team Cherry is only working on Silksong. But everyone always hopes that the announcement is just around the corner. And it could be! But it could also be a year from now. Who knows!
It’s incredibly similar to how The Legend of Zelda fans felt between the 2019 announcement of a Breath of the Wild sequel and the torturous years of waiting before Tears of the Kingdom was released. Interestingly, just like Silksong, Tears of the Kingdom began its life as a DLC for its 2017 predecessor but became its own game as its scope organically grew. And grew, and grew.
Both games were announced in the same year, but the wait for Silksong is still growing longer. There’s an obvious reason for the delay: Silksong is developed by a small indie team, whereas Nintendo is arguably the biggest name in the gaming world.
The wait is … not over
Now that we’re here, I won’t make you wait. The answer is no, there is not currently an official release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong.
I wish I could tell you differently. However, despite plenty of rumors and theories swirling around online, I can confirm that the game is not canceled. Team Cherry is a small company that has sunk over seven years into developing this game. Although the gaming world has sadly gotten used to this kind of story, this isn’t a “big bad parent company swoops in and cancels project”-type scenario. Unless Team Cherry sells themselves which—as a company that funded their first game via Kickstarter—seems to be quite against their ethos.
I can also share that there’s a good reason for the delay. Matthew Griffin, head of marketing and publishing for indie developer Team Cherry, went to Twitter / X in May 2023 to directly offer fans an explanation. The plan was apparently to release Silksong in 2023 (although the initial release date might have been earlier, if not for COVID). However, “It’s gotten quite big, so we want to take the time to make the game as good as we can,” he explained.
The idea of a new Hollow Knight game with a gigantic, sprawling map is an incredibly exciting prospect. In fact, the game will have over double the number of checkpoints than Hollow Knight did, which means the size of Silksong’s map will also likely be twice as big as Hollow Knight‘s. And Team Cherry is a small company that has said, again and again, that they run on “Cherry Time,” meaning they refuse to rush a project. This is a good thing, for both the game itself and the people making it.
So we’ll have to wait some more. But it seems like Silksong will be worth it when it finally comes out and will have a lot for players to explore.
(featured image: Team Cherry)
