Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry has been slow-roasting Silksong for over seven years now, and in that time a few things remained constant for the studio: it hasn't given up hope that the sequel can be a good jumping-on point for players who missed the original, and for a while it wasn't really sure where it was going.
With everyone replaying or discovering Hollow Knight in the run-up to Silksong's September 4 launch (I just finished my 108% replay over the weekend), now seemed like a good time to revisit Team Cherry's comments to Edge magazine way back in 2020.
If you've played Hollow Knight, and especially if you've overcome grueling challenges like the Path of Pain or Pantheon gauntlets, you'll surely have an edge going into Silksong. That said, Team Cherry has always said the sequel was designed to be welcoming to players of all backgrounds.
Silksong was built as "a perfect jumping-on point for new players," Team Cherry's Ari Gibson told Edge for its December 2020 issue. "We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game - that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way."
Even if you don't dig into the brutal optional content, Hollow Knight still lands on the harder side of Metroidvanias, so I'd imagine many fans are relieved the sequel won't be torquing the difficulty. Sometimes you just want to explore.
And even with Silksong's launch so close, the phrase "first Hollow Knight game," implying that this Metroidvania masterwork is, at last, a series rather than just a one-off, still doesn't feel real. So it's doubly fascinating to hear that, even way back then, Silksong was pretty loose-goosey.
"The way we approach these games is that they are just a web of ideas, and notions, that all pass through this filter of bugs, and caves, and ruined civilizations and whatnot," Gibson said at the time.
Co-lead William Pellen added: "With destinations that we're comfortable with not knowing what they are for a while - just building up or down to them."
Rather fittingly for a Metroidvania, Gibson said, "the really interesting things are the things you sort of discover along the way."
Much more recently, Gibson and Pellen explained that Silksong took so long not because it was lurching in development hell, as some fans had feared, but because the team had a hard time putting an end to the development heaven they'd been enjoying.
