Hollow Knight: Silksong, the most anticipated video game of all time, finally had its release. This release nearly instantly crashed every online game store it was available on.
Team Cherry’s “Hollow Knight” is a well known 2017 metroidvania, known for its artsy backgrounds, loveable characters, music and hard boss fights. This game built up a passionate fanbase that stayed engaged with the game due to the exciting DLCs still being released for the game and community involvement.
One of the most iconic characters from Hollow Knight was an important NPC and boss, Hornet. The community’s excitement can only be imagined when, in February of 2019, Team Cherry announced that they were making a new DLC to Hollow Knight, named Silksong. This DLC would add Hornet as a playable character, with her own small story for players to explore. Six years then passed.
The reason for this massive delay was that Team Cherry had decided that Silksong had become much too big to just be a DLC, and would instead be its own entire game, a full sequel to Hollow Knight. Six years may still seem like a long time, when you take into account the fact that Team Cherry is only a three person development team, it becomes clear that they were not slacking off at all in those six years.
In this time, news on Silksong was scarce or non-existent. Release windows came and went, but the game was always delayed. Several members of the community even started to wonder if Silksong was still in development, and if it would ever actually have a full release. This all changed, when with only a few weeks of warning, Silksong finally released on Sept. 4.
Silksong’s reputation had built up so much that the fact that it was actually releasing gained the attention of video game fans all over, even ones who hadn’t played the original Hollow Knight.
This combined with the fact that it was only $20 – compared to the current industry standard of $70-$80 – led to a massive rush of people on all platforms attempting to buy the game on release. The online stores, which were not designed with that much traffic in mind, all quickly crashed. Steam? Down. Playstation Store? Down. Nintendo Eshop? Down. Xbox Store and Gamepass? As you can guess, also both down.
Silksong was breaking records left and right on its release, and for good reason.
Team Cherry spent their time working on Silksong adding small details everywhere making the world feel alive. Although lots of the game’s initial players didn’t realize the difficulty curve would be so steep and criticized Silksong because of it, most praised the game and it is currently thought to be one of the most likely candidates for the “Game of the Year” award.
