Hollow Knight: Silksong sure was mentioned a lot at Summer Game Fest, but it didn't deign to show up, with developer Team Cherry only reiterating via a timely Discord message that the game will be out before the holiday season.
The long-awaited Metroidvania sequel did, however, briefly appear via gameplay footage shown on the newly announced ROG Xbox Ally, raising more than one eyebrow among the fatigued Hollow Knight community.
"I hear it's gonna play Silksong when it comes out," Official Xbox Podcast host Jeff Rubenstein tells Spencer in the podcast's latest episode, rounding out a discussion on the Xbox Ally reveal.
"That's right, that's right," Spencer begins. "Thank you. That was a good partnership, to kind of feed them in and have them play a role in our hardware lineup."
Spencer stops the Silksong train then and there. Xbox has been burned on Silksong hype before, famously indicating three years ago that the game would be out within a year, but has grown more reserved as Team Cherry's lips grew tighter and its development pipeline stretched ever longer.
The Silksong army, burrowing through even the thinnest Steam backend updates like termites through wood, has kept a close record of every tease, trace, and theory around, and a lot of them do orbit Xbox. I can't definitively say that Spencer spoke with the expectations of the Skong faithful weighing on his nerves, but he was certainly quick to talk about what are now the most commonplace games of all time instead.
"But it is really about playing the Windows games that you wanna play," he says of the Xbox Ally. "So if you're a big Roblox player, if you're a Fortnite player, if you're a Minecraft player, if you love Game Pass, we want to make sure the way you've built your library as a player, and the games that you want to go play, are available on this device and that they play incredibly well."
