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Hollow Knight's developers grew up playing games before online forums and social media took some of the mystique out of their worlds, but Team Cherry tried to design Silksong in a way where players could make discoveries without picking up their phones.
When asked about those Zelda 2-era adventures in an interview with the ACMI museum in Australia, Melbourne - also available as a paperback guide - Ari Gibson explained that he and fellow studio head William Pellen "were playing those games in an era before the internet [where] all the information you could gleam would come from friends at school, through whispers and rumors - so the sense was that there could be all this other stuff hiding in the game that you hadn't yet uncovered."
"With those games it just always feels like there's more in there," Pellen added. "They're really just games about exploring a world, meeting characters, meeting monsters - building up a map in your head of the world, poking at it and exploring it."
Gibson continued to say that "it's very hard to preserve mystery these days" because everything in the game can get decompiled almost immediately: "People can't quite have that same mystical experience when the guts of the thing are out on the table in a day or two. But we try to build our games from that same context or idea - if a player was divorced from the internet, they could make all those discoveries for themselves, and it would always feel like there was more to find."
One way Team Cherry achieved that feeling in Hollow Knight: Silksong was by having the player and Hornet discover the world with fresh eyes - the entire game is new to both us and our slick red friend. "As Hornet discovers things, you as a player get to discover them as Hornet encounters them for the first time," Gibson said.
