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During a gold rush, sell shovels. During Silksong fever, sell games that are kinda like Silksong but won't actually launch until people have had their fill of Silksong. This seems to have been the reasoning of the makers of Constance, an upcoming 2D hand-drawn action platformer that has seen comparisons to Team Cherry's Hollow Knight Metroidvanias, several of them drawn by the game's own developer, btf (it's just called btf).
After a recent, now-deleted post criticizing the way the official Constance Twitter account has piggybacked on the Hollow Knight: Silksong hype in multiple marketing posts, the developer spoke up to explain the thinking here. It's an interesting discussion at this time of Silkposting, and it gets to the heart of one way that games, especially indie games, are shared.
"If you are as excited as we are about the upcoming Silksong release but can't make it to Gamescom for the demo… you can still play ours on Steam right now, you might enjoy it as well," btf wrote on August 22.
I do understand the direction. When I put on my curator hat and want to suggest an indie game to readers, either because I personally know that game is fun or I think it looks interesting, they may have never heard of it and probably won't care about the title. So, I'll often make comparisons as reference points.
Some games make it easy, like the proud Sekiro-like I wrote about a few weeks ago. It's a reliable entrance for newcomers: if you like that game, you might like this game too. The key difference is that I'm just trying to help people parse the ceaseless typhoon of new and easy-to-miss games because it's part of my job and I like doing it, not because I'm invested in those games as products or bottom lines.
Like the rest of the GamesRadar+ team, I do try to avoid comparing games to death lest the conversation about a game devolve into anything but that game. That's the danger here, and I think there's a kernel of truth to the argument that some marketing tactics can be overdone.
But I'm not a marketer or the marketing police, and to be fair, btf has spoken at length about what makes Constance distinct from other games, and it has compared it to more than just Silksong to give readers some idea of how it plays. (The trailers and GIFs accompanying many of these posts also do some heavy lifting here, and a summer trailer is what got me.)
"So if you're excited for Silksong and like games like Hollow Knight, Ori, Celeste or even Splatoon, this might be right up your alley!" btf said on August 25.
"All you Hollow Knight, Silksong, Ori, Celeste, Super Mario, Metroid and Splatoon fans who wishlisted so far - THANK YOU from the whole team!!" a September 5 post reads. And yeah, that's a lot of shiny keywords.
Very directly, the devs said on August 23: "Now with Silksong coming out I need to change my marketing strats. Ok - let's for a change check out what makes Constance different from Hollow Knight." They pointed to Constance's "zero-float controls," heavier platforming focus (hence the Celeste comparisons), "unique respawn system," its central paint mechanic (hello, Splatoon), and its "emotional/human story" (though I'd argue Silksong also has a pretty emotional story).
The list goes on. Art builds on art, comparisons can be valid, and sometimes inspirations are fairly direct. Constance does look like a post-Hollow Knight game, especially in its downward pogo – which is itself similar to a mechanic in Shovel Knight, which was in turn built out of inspiration from Zelda 2 on NES, further proving that art simply builds on art – but it strikes me as a different experience than the one I just had with Silksong's inky, hostile corridors and breakneck boss fights. And hey, there is a demo if you want to see for yourself.
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