Team Cherry fans will regretfully agree that we know precious little aboutHollow Knight: Silksongat this time, a whopping six years after the game’s original announcement. It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before we had a serious community meltdown over at the biggestSilksongsubreddit.
There are layers upon layers of memes and sheer desperation to be uncovered here, and honestly, they’re not for the faint of heart. To begin with, it’s important to keep in mind that Team Cherry, the developer ofHollow Knight, hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information aboutSilksong. We know that the game exists, yes, and its rough outline is more-or-less set in place, but everything else is a huge unknown. The reasons for such an opaque approach to development are unclear, but its effects on the communitysure are transparent.
Most fans just want an update ofsomesort, but since Team Cherry isn’t providing one, it’s oh-so-easy to start grasping for straws. It doesn’t help, either, that some members of Team Cherry are seemingly keen to outrightgivethe community members straws to hold onto, rather than concreteSilksonginformation. For example,Hollow Knightdesigner William Pellen provided us with a mysterious Tweet back on January 16:
something big is coming. keep your eyes closed tomorrow
The obvious expectation, then, is that Pellen was referring to something to do withHollow Knight: Silksong. Except, the big thing that came about about a day after wasthe announcement of Nintendo Switch 2. The sensible takeaway would be that Pellen had insider information that made him lampshade the looming console announcement, but that’s not what the community’s initial reading of the situation was.
The really curious bit about Pellen’s post was that he changed his profile picture to that of a cake ahead of posting.Fans over at theSilksongsubreddit quickly foundthat it was sourced from a cake recipe posted on June 28, 2025. If that specific date rings a bell, you’ve been paying attention to industry news, because Nintendo’s big Switch 2 Direct isdue to release on August 04, 2025. Coincidence? Oh, r/Silksong didn’t think so, opting instead to believe that Team Cherry is kicking off a fancy new Alternate Reality Game (i.e. ARG). Thing is, that doesn’t seem to have been the case.
Hollow Knight: Silksongwas originally supposed to be a Hornet-focused expansion to the originalHollow Knight, but Team Cherry quickly discovered (all the way back in 2019) that she deserved a standalone entry all of her own. Updates since have been very far and few between, which is particularly surprising when you consider that Team Cherryhad a playableSilksongdemoover half a decade ago.
Silksongwas supposed to release sometime early in 2023 only to receive asubstantial pushback in May of that year. This obviously wasn’t great news for the community, but Team Cherry’s work has historically been extremely high-quality and well worth the wait, so it was understandable. The bit that fans haven’t taken a liking to is how Team Cherry seemingly refuses to communicate its plans, which is atypical for a studio that got its wings thanks to an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign.
Really though, it’s the lack of information followed by cryptic will-they-won’t-they approach to community outreach that has sentSilksongfans into a frenzy, and things haven’t been going well on that front since.
The question that needs to be posed, from my point of view, is whether Team Cherry has provided any real reason for theSilksongcommunity to have its meltdown in the first place. Though the developer has been cryptic and stealthy when it comes toHollow Knight‘s production, I fail to see any real reason to think that Team Cherry wouldn’t be able to deliver a masterpiece. Time and again, this small team has delivered high-quality content that’s made people as eager as they are for their next release. Though more information aboutSilksongwould certainly be welcome, the fact of the matter is that it’s being actively developed and will release at some point in the future. That really ought to be enough. Predictably, the r/Silksong community doesn’t appear to agree.
Circling back to the non-starter ARG, the r/Silksong community has a bunch of theories as to what’s happening withHollow Knight: Silksongat this time. One of the most popular takes is thatTeam Cherry has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Nintendofor a Switch 2 day-and-date release ofSilksong. Many have come to believe thatSilksongwill be bundled with the handheld console, and that the reveal of this monumental deal will come about as part of the upcoming Nintendo Direct. One thing I will say is that Team Cherry’s insistence on not sharing more information aboutSilksongdoes seem like something Nintendo would wish to enforce, even if it isn’t a first-party studio. Otherwise, such a severe dearth of information about a game as desirable asSilksongis definitely strange.
At face value, this sounds like exceedingly fanciful thinking, but even I feel uneasy dismissing the claims. After all, that profile cake picture seems like an oddly specific choice for a Team Cherry dev to suddenly switch to… yet, I also can’t help but wonder does it really matterthatmuch? How far can theorycrafting be stretched before it devolves into schizophrenic connection-making that evenIt’s Always Sunny‘s Charlie Kelly wouldn’t be ashamed of? Whatever the case may be, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into r/Silksong at this time.
If you’d like to get a sense of things we actually, verifiably do know aboutHollow Knight: Silksong,there’s an article for thatright here at Destructoid. Everything else is at this time mere theorycrafting that could end up going either way in the end. And speaking of theorycrafting, did you hearwhat happened withGravity Fallsnot too long ago? Yeah, me neither. Funny thing, that.
I would advise you to keep an eye out for Nintendo’s April Direct, but heck, everyone’s going to be watching it anyways. Who knows, maybe Team Cherry’s logo will come to greet us there, in the end.
