Hollow Knight fans, driven to madness by the Silksong wait, are still fighting a war that already ended and pretending the Metroidvania sequel isn't out yet

Hollow Knight: Silksong still of Hornet dueling a sword wielding bug
(Image credit: Team Cherry)

That's it, I'm diagnosing some Hollow Knight: Silksong fans with Silkholm Syndrome. Symptoms include reminiscing about the six-year wait for Team Cherry to release the Metroidvania adventure, imagining that the dark little game still isn't out yet, and imposing masochistic limitations on how and when it can be played.

I have witnessed this grave phenomenon plague the r/silksong Reddit. It seems that, after spending so many nights that bled into days, that faded into more nights distinguished only by what pixel on an Xbox showcase trailer they'd happened to have been analyzing at the time, the most ardent Silksong believers aren't ready to let go. There's a thrill to every never-ending wait: feeling how much you want something.

"We were so close... so close…" says one post imagining that an asteroid – "named Evil Fucking Asteroid" according to a Photoshopped CNN article – was due to obliterate the Earth and everything on it, including Silksong e-store listings.

"Hold your loved ones close," it warns, "Attempt Pantheon 5 one more time. There is no Silksong… and no Earth.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!" cries out another Silksong fan, who I'm worried is too far gone into their Silkholm Syndrome. In their fanfiction, Team Cherry tweets, "The Countdown is off! [...] We at Team Cherry games will not launch Silksong ever."

"NOOOOO SILKSONG IN 2027," says a comment in a Reddit thread for a similar fake tweet with 12,000 upvotes, while another person makes the dangerous declaration that "I will NOT play silksong 1 Hour for every upvote this has." The post is quickly approaching 6,000 upvotes. I'm just saying that it didn't have to be this way.

Read our Hollow Knight Silksong review in progress: "Worth the wait and then some, this isn't just more Hollow Knight but an evolved, spindly beast all its own – even if it's fiddly at times."

Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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