Check in on the Hollow Knight: Silksong fans in your life, because the triple-whammy of mentions, no-shows, and clarifications at Summer Game Fest was absolutely brutal

The fatigued yet determined Hollow Knight: Silksong community, perpetually waiting for a sequel that at times has felt like a hallucination, is used to disappointment and accustomed to being the butt of a joke. Prepare your clown makeup, and so on. But after years of letdowns, and even with a 2025 Silksong launch now firmly in sight, this year's string of not-E3 showings has been especially painful. We have a date, we know it's real, and we know it's coming before the holiday season, but sure, here's one last volley of no-shows for the books.

It's bad enough that the genuinely significant news around Silksong – the fact it's out "before" the holidays – arrived not during any of the big showcases teed up this month, but in a trace Discord post initially seen only by the Skong devoted. Separately, marketing lead Matthew Griffin reckoned "DLC is likely, but that decision isn't up to me."

This news was a welcome but flimsy bandage on fresh wounds from Summer Game Fest, where Geoff Keighley and Microsoft teamed up to piledrive Silksong fans into the trenches of desperation.

Silksong was indeed mentioned at the big SGF opening night live, but only in passing as a launchpad for a new Deadpool VR game. "You're gonna do me a solid and skip that Silksong trailer so you can hit my revolutionary VR gaming venture that will shock the industry, probably," Keighley said, reading off a card purportedly sent by Deadpool himself. (I don't believe it, personally; it was probably a ghost writer.)

Worse still, we actually saw Silksong footage in Microsoft's reveal of the new Asus ROG Xbox Ally, its new portable PC running an Xbox-ified version of Windows that hopefully makes up for the fact that this is otherwise an ROG Ally with Xbox branding so thin you could see your hand through it.

ROG Xbox Ally World Premiere Reveal Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase - YouTube

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It was right there! The first thing we saw on the handheld's app list was Silksong, joined by Gears Tactics, Balatro, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The reveal trailer went straight into Silksong gameplay, with new protagonist Hornet pirouetting and pogoing over enemies in a field. Microsoft was really lingering on this, but it all came to nothing.

Several years after Xbox said the game would be out within a year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer says the Silksong appearance at the Xbox Ally reveal was just a "good partnership" and a fun way to include Team Cherry. The game itself is totally divorced from the handheld, which will simply provide another way to play it.

Bear in mind, this string of duds came on the heels of the umpteenth round of Steam backend spying, with some fans convincing themselves once again that something could be on the horizon. A shadow drop? A demo? A new trailer? An actual release date, dare we dream? It's summer showcase season, now's the time! But no, it was all another mirage. More often than not, Hollow Knight fans do this to themselves, but this really was a perfect storm of setup with no payoff. But hey, we're only a few months away. Surely.

Hollow Knight: Silksong has its own GTA 6-like release date blast zone – "I hope Silksong will release this year coz we are avoiding them," says boss of lovely JRPG-flavored Metroidvania.