After seven years of virtual silence since the release of their first video game, Hollow Knight, Australian developer Team Cherry has released their new title Hollow Knight: Silksong. The news came as a surprise the gaming community that had long considered it a running joke that the sequel had been shelved, forgotten, and stuck in what creators know all too well as “development hell.” On August 21st, Team Cherry dropped an official trailer on their neglected YouTube channel, officially announcing the release of Silksong for September 4th, an astoundingly short notice of two weeks until release. Other indie developers pushed their releases months back to accommodate for the inevitable press magnet of the game, Steam’s store promptly crashed for a full day thanks to the influx of traffic, and Hollow Knight: Silksong broke records as the most wishlisted game on Steam ever (yes, over any AAA title), rocketing past the previous 562,000 player count record within two days.  

Ultimately, Silksong is so well-loved because it feels like a breath of fresh air—originality is hard to come by in games these days. It makes use of all aspects of the Metroidvania genre (Even Hornet’s pivot animation is an homage to Alucard’s from Castlevania) and invents so much of its own. Everything is an expansion on ideas that began in Hollow Knight, like the increased movement options of the player character Hornet, including a sprint and grapple mechanic, the addition of tools and crafting, and a proper three act structure that makes effective use of a world that is nearly double the size of the one in the previous game. Hollow Knight flourished in the uncanny nature of playing as an empty vessel in an infected and dying world, but Silksong is much more narratively driven. This is fitting, given the fact that Hornet herself is such an opinionated and compellingly written bug. NPCs have more to say and do, and the harsh anti-capitalism/industrialism messages of the game are communicated very clearly through her eyes. Every bit of dialogue is a delight, and the world is full to the brim with new places to discover and bugs to meet. It’s clear that the developers of this game truly love this little world they’ve created, and the player can’t help but love it too.  

So, how is it that a tiny studio like Team Cherry (Ari Gibson, William Pellen, and Jack Vine) were able to make something with as much polish and appeal as Hollow Knight: Silksong? Put simply, their creative process puts fun and fulfillment at the forefront, not only for the player but for Team Cherry as creative minds. “We’ve been having fun,” Gibson says to Jason Schreier in an interview with Bloomberg. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.” The game started as a DLC update for Hollow Knight, and while other studios might force themselves to cut things and rein in their ideas to meet deadlines or requirements, Team Cherry followed where their ideas took them and expanded the DLC into an entire game, never keeping to tight deadlines, allowing themselves to explore every new idea to its fullest extent. Admittedly, there are elements of the game that are obviously just there because someone in the writers’ room found them amusing (sorry, side quests and lengthy NPC songs), but the commitment to the creative fulfillment of the developers over everything else is admirable. Even the in-game art has improved since the first title, which almost seems impossible with how beautifully detailed Hollow Knight was, but that extra time taken to really polish and decorate every corner of the screen shines through in Silksong. Seven years is still an impressive production period for such a large and technically sound Metroidvania, but it seems that Team Cherry went through the entire process not really knowing when it would be finished, a lesson to other companies in the value of not rushing their developers, and of not sacrificing fun ideas for a quick buck.  

A great many AAA games recently have been released in half-finished states: Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Unity come to mind for being nearly unplayable upon launch and only made palatable by constant updates and patches over the months after their release. Over time, the expectation that any game one buys will never be truly “finished” has become the norm. GaaS, or games as a service, is a marketing model used by big developers like Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Nintendo, that treats video games as an ongoing service provided to the consumer, updated through subscriptions, seasonal bonuses, and microtransactions, rather than one complete product. Perhaps it is this way of thinking that allows these companies to charge customers $60+ per title. And it’s this way of thinking that makes the success of a $20, fully polished, independently developed game like Hollow Knight: Silksong, a relief to a gaming community that desperately needs it. Team Cherry’s success can be attributed to their prioritization of a fun and creatively fulfilling process, along with their determination to explore every idea that moves them, and they will be an inspiration to their industry for decades to come.