Making full use of the clown makeup he revealed just yesterday, The Game Awards creator and Gamescom 2025 host Geoff Keighley couldn't pass up one last chance to tell us stuff we already knew about Hollow Knight: Silksong.
Keighley briefly touched on Team Cherry's long-awaited Metroidvania sequel during the Gamescom Opening Night Live show, reiterating that the game is finally launching this year (we knew that) and that the devs will reveal more information, presumably including a release date, this Thursday, August 21 during a special event (we also knew that).
A whopping 30 seconds of new Silksong gameplay – I timed it – debuted on stage in the background, and I'll give Keighley a pass here, because it is technically new. And, this will sound far-fetched: it looks good! It looked good when we saw it at that Nintendo Treehouse session somewhere around the Cretaceous period, and it looks good now.
The heightened agility of new protagonist Hornet seems to have bled into level design and combat, with some of the platforming shown today building on the kinetic delight of bouncing off surfaces mid-air, and enemies often attacking at angles from the air.
Design-wise, if Hollow Knight's titular knight was a square, Hornet strikes me as more of a triangle, and Silksong looks to have been tuned and sharpened to match. I realize now, one sentence later, that this also loosely mirrors their character silhouettes, and I have to wonder if that's intentional, a happy accident, or just my brain losing the battle with Silksong fever.
