"SILKSONG IS IMMORTAL AND SO ARE WE": Desperate for answers, Hollow Knight Silksong fans are ritualistically banning mods in savage sacrifice to their fickle god Team Cherry

Hollow Knight: Silksong
(Image credit: Team Cherry)

For centuries, people have sought to divine meaning from the universe's apparent nonsense, examining tea dregs, sheep liver, or squeezing blood from deep cuts as warm sacrifices to their cold, mercurial gods. Today – a time of algorithms and frozen food – these methods might seem extreme, even barbaric, but a few dreamers understand the power of ancient desperation, and they all happen to be on the Hollow Knight: Silksong subreddit.

Fed up with the hourglass drip of information they've been getting over the past few months – the Metroidvania sequel is apparently finally releasing this year, it keeps getting gnat-sized Steam updates, etc. – Hollow Knight fans (as noted by PC Gamer) have taken to ritualistically banning r/Silksong members in exchange for information. Again.

"We made the choice, there's no alternative," a r/Silksong moderator says in a recent thread with over 3,000 upvotes. The mod team decided to ban one of their own, u/sand-sky-stars, as "an ultimate sacrifice"; as of writing, the user is still listed as a r/Silksong mod on their profile, but as past sacrifices have indicated, a ritual Silksong "ban" simply means being discouraged from posting about Hollow Knight on either Reddit or Discord.

Anyway. "Every r/silksong user holds a certain amount of power," the mod team explains in its thread, "that only gets released when we make a sacrifice, but no matter how many goodbyes we say, it's never enough for our Cherry Gods to respond to our prayers."

Hollow Knight: Silksong Reveal Trailer - YouTube Hollow Knight: Silksong Reveal Trailer - YouTube
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"WE WILL LEAVE TRACKS ON SAND AS WE VENTURE INTO THIS NEW CHAPTER, OUR CRIES WILL REACH THE SKIES AS WE SING FOR SILKSONG, OUR POTENTIAL WILL GO EVEN HIGHER THAN THE STARS," the mods cry out with age-old longing, "WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN BAITED MANY TIMES, WE HAD OUR LOWS, BUT TODAY WE OPEN A NEW CHAPTER AND WE SHALL KNOW NO FEAR."

"WE ARE THE HOPE GIVEN FORM" – scream it! Part the clouds with your desire! – AND WE WILL ENDURE EVERYTHING / FOR SILKSONG IS IMMORTAL AND SO ARE WE."

So what did the Silksong devotees earn from developer Team Cherry 16 hours after their uninhibited sacrifice? Concept art? A new trailer? A release date?

No, it's, uh, another incomprehensible Steam update. Well, at least they tried.

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.

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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