Throughout early 2017, team cherry produced their first video game titled Hollow Knight , a popular metroidvania classic of today’s video game society. Since 2017, Hollow Knight has sold 15 million copies on Windows, Linux, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox. If it hadn’t been for Hollow Knight, we would not have Silksong today.
Hollow Knight Silksong was released on September 4, 2025 on almost every gaming platform on the internet. Like its predecessor, Hollow Knight, Silksong is a single-player metroidvania sequel. The game is played through the perspective of Hornet, a character from Hollow Knight born of Godly descent. Originally, this game was to be a mod pack for Hollow Knight, but when working on the project, Team Cherry went into game production heaven. In 2019, Team Cherry announced that their half a year project would become its own sequel. On release date it sold three million copies on steam alone, breaking Steam servers for over four hours.Silksong on top of everything else not only shut down Steam servers but the Nintendo Eshop, PlayStation, and Xbox. The only other game that had an impact like this was Deltarune, a game related to Undertale: not a sequel or a prequel, but a different universe. The community of Hollow Knight and Silksong has a great chance of being game of the year right next to Expedition 33.
To understand the lore of Silksong, we will have to return to the Hollow Knight lore to understand it. In Hollow Knight you play as the character the Vessel, a child born from the White Lady and the Pale King imbued with the void, a force strong enough to fight the Radiance and cure the “infection”. The Pale King, the White Lady, and the Dreamers tried to stop the radiance from spreading its Infection, before The Vessel was born. The infection in other words, is a mind disease that turns the lesser minds of Hollownest into living drones. Due to this, the Hollow Knight was created, same as the Vessel, a child of the White lady and the Pale King imbued with The Void, an entity capable of imprisoning the Radiance. Though the Hollow Knight was not capable of holding in the radiance and so the plan failed. The infection spread across Hollownest taking over the minds of all the lesser beings. You the vessel are born to replace the Hollow Knight or kill the radiance to free the people of Hollownest.
Now that we understand what happens in Hollow Knight we can talk about Silksong. Remember the Dreamers? Well one of the three, Herrah the beast in exchange for becoming a dreamer wanted an heir, HORNET. Daughter of a queen and a god is one of the most powerful beings in Hollownest being able to create silk as a weapon. After the Vessel killed the Radiance and frees Hollownest, Hornet begins her own journey traveling across distant lands far from her home. Due to some unfortunate events she was captured and taken to Pharloom. She frees herself from her captors and falls a tremendous distance to the bottom of the new kingdom. She wakes up in a fluorescent green biome confused by her surroundings and travels up to a remote town named Bone Bottom. The people tell her she must travel to the tops of the Pharloom to reach the citadel. In her travels she meets unexpected allies, friends and enemies. My most favorite of the new friends is Sherma, a cute little guy who only wants the best for us. The worst of any character from Pharloom is Lace. She is an early boss who comes up later in the game who is absolutely the worst. Not her boss fight just her character. Though there is more after the Citadel I do not know because I don’t want to spoil myself or you the reader.
The Silksong fandom like myself love this game for everything about it, from its low price to its amazing game play. I interviewed two people and asked for commentary of the game and in my opinion they had expected answers.
I asked Oliver Maggitti about the skill level required to play Silksong and if the community needs a process to begin the game.
“To play silksong you have to play Hollow Knight. there really isn’t a tutorial when you start playing, you’re more or so just thrown into the fire training yourself to not get burned alive.”
I asked an anonymous person about whether the game should be even more hyped or does it not deserve the hype.
“I think the game should be even more hyped than it should be. The community has been waiting 8 years for Silksong to come out and when the game got announced it was a surprise. We thought it wouldn’t happen.”