Fans have been waiting for Hollow Knight Silksong for so long that they “banned” Steam and other stores in the first minutes after the release. It was not in vain — the game has 90% positive reviews.
The development of the sequel about the warrior princess Hornet, who wants to explore her past, lasted seven years. Recently, Team Cherry unexpectedly announced the release date with the trailer that forced other indie games to quickly postpone their releases. And finally, September 4 came. After 17:00, users struggled to simply open the page of the digital stores Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, as well as the eShop for Nintendo Switch. And those who were lucky enough to download it on Xbox received errors on launch due to overloaded verification servers.
“Finally was able to buy it after trying for two and a half hours of non stop refreshing the page. The main boss were the delays and not being able to buy it even after it being released because the whole steam crashed for hours,” they write in the comments.
When the services gradually resumed, metroidvania
It is a genre of games with a large world that gradually opens up through exploration, gaining new abilities, and returning to previously inaccessible areas. Silksong began to break records. Only in Steam The game garnered more than 534 thousand online players at launch. For comparison, the peak online of the original Hollow Knight was just over 72 thousand, and that record has stood since 2017. The sequel to the game about bugs entered the TOP 20 games by the number of players on Steam. It is even outperformed the record-breaking Battlefield 6 beta testing.
Gamers praised the bosses, soundtracks, and environments in Hollow Knight Silksong. According to them, the gameplay is very similar to Hollow Knight with the Knight, but Hornet remains unique enough to be a unique hero, not just a shadow. Team Cherry has retained all the features of the original game: you need to buy maps and equip a compass, checkpoints are rare and sometimes for money, you lose currency after death (if you don’t come back for it on the first try), and so on. No one leads you by the hand and there is no difficulty, because it is already hardcore.
“The one and only game to ever get me this excited, what a masterpiece. Already from the first moment it draws you in and reminds you what’s so great about this game. There is just a certain magic to it and it will never get topped by any other game. SILKSONG IS REAL!” — fans add.
Silksong was originally conceived as a DLC for Hollow Knight in 2018, but in 2019 it turned into a full-fledged sequel. Since then, it has become almost a legend: every major game show turned into a hunt for the release date. But for a long time, fans only gave birth to memes and jokes.
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Another success factor was the pricing. Many were sure that Silksong would cost the standard $60, but developers set the price at $20 (₴415). This instantly increased the potential audience, and now sales are looking surprisingly good. After all, Steam’s statistics still include players on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and those who have purchased the game in Game Pass.
“Jokes aside literal ten minutes of starting the game I got hit by the nostalgia. It felt like I went back in time when I was playing Hollow Knight for the first time. I literally stopped playing to listen to the awesome music and it was literally the first area. The long wait was worth it. This is what gaming is all about and I’m grateful that I was able to experience this masterpiece ,” the fan writes.
Interestingly, despite the scale of expectations, journalists were not given access to Hollow Knight Silksong before the release. No press codes, only short demos at exhibitions. So everyone, from fans to critics, is getting their first impressions of Silksong at the same time. We can already see that the game has over 90% positive reviews on Steam. By the way, if you’re not familiar with the metroidvania genre and don’t know where to start (except for the legendary Hollow Knight), here are a list of 10 interesting projects with different atmospheres and plots.
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