| Hollow Knight: Silksong | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
In the span of two days, Silksong received both a teaser and a massive trailer, all in the service of finally giving fans a concrete release date. But that's not all that Silksong has in store for fans this week. Read on for details about the Gamescom demo and a deep dive into everything new we know so far on the game.
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Pharloom’s No Longer Far, No Longer Just Looming
Of Silk and Song
It has been six years. Six years of fans wearing clown noses and clinging to hope, shouting at every gaming event for even a drop of information regarding Silksong’s release. But after all the Silkposts and summoning circles and Reddit "sacrifices," Team Cherry finally did it: They showed Hollow Knight: Silksong, they let people play it, and they put a date on it—September 4, 2025, just two weeks from now—complete with a "day one on Xbox Game Pass" tag and confirmation for all the usual platforms (plus the Switch 2). That clears the fog. But the better news is what the new trailer and Gamescom demo confirm about the sequel’s actual look.
First, the broad strokes. The release trailer and subsequent posts reassert the same pitch as previous promotional materials—"ascend to the peak of a haunted kingdom," with this kingdom being Pharloom, "a kingdom dedicated to faith and pilgrimage," where Hornet finds herself waking up in after being captured.
How did Hornet End up in Pharloom?
Note: Thie following section contains spoilers for some of the late-game content and the endings of Hollow Knight. If you do not want to be spoiled, scroll to the next section.
But that in itself is worth pausing to ask: How did Hornet end up in Pharloom in the first place? Team Cherry has played this one close to their chest, but Ari Gibson—co-director of the studio—dropped an important breadcrumb back in a 2017 Reddit Ask-Me-Anything (AMA), when Silksong was still pitched as DLC. Asked about the canonicity of each ending, Gibson replied "All endings are equally canon. We're not into 'True Endings.' You choose the path yourself. We'll do our best in all future Hollow Knight content to account for all of them." That matters because Hollow Knight has five endings (six if you count the optional Mister-Musheroom "Passing of the Age" epilogue), each pulling Hornet in slightly different directions.
For context, here’s brief summary of each ending:
⚫︎ In the Sealed Siblings ending, Hornet is knocked out in the fight against the Hollow Knight. The Knight, the protagonist, defeats the Hollow Knight but becomes the new vessel, sealing the infection and trapping Hornet outside the temple’s black egg shell.
⚫︎ In Dream No More, the Knight and the Radiance—a moth-like creature and the secret final boss of the game—fall together into oblivion, the infection fades, and Hornet kneels in silence, before the Knight’s mask, broken in half.
⚫︎ The Embrace the Void ending has the Knight ascend as the new Void Entity, a monstrous being and is considered in-game as the "God of Gods," effectively ruling over the abyss. Here, Hornet again watches, powerless at the threshold.
⚫︎ In Void Heart, the Knight accepts their nature, and together with the Hollow Knight defeats Radiance, leading to a bittersweet end with Hornet still a guardian at the shrine.
⚫︎ And finally, in The Hollow Knight ending, if you don’t cleanse the vessel’s infection, the Knight simply takes its place, with the cycle again repeating. Hornet does not appear in this ending.
What unites all five is Hornet’s liminality. Whether kneeling, watching, or standing guard, she’s always the outsider at the door of endings, her story unresolved even as the Knight’s concludes. That’s fertile ground for Silksong’s premise, if all endings are equally canon, then Pharloom may instead be what’s next across every branch, with Hornet drawn away, summoned, or even captured, depending on how you want to imagine the connective tissue. Maybe she’s conscripted by Pharloom’s powers, or maybe, as the trailer hints, she’s simply climbing out of one prison and into another.
The point is that we don’t actually know what the hell is happening in Silksong yet because Team Cherry has been so good at being secretive for years. What we do know is what they’ve shown us in demos. And the demos paint a consistent picture. Silksong still looks like Hollow Knight (lacquered art, melancholy strings), yet it moves more quickly. Multiple hands-on reports call out the new rhythm of fights: you evade, parry, riposte, commit. In the Deep Docks slice, even rank-and-file enemies answer Hornet’s speed with their own.
Silksong Demo Gameplay: What’s New?
We know that there are two demo locations—Moss Grotto and Deep Docks—and both do a lot of narrative lifting without saying much.
Based on hands-on-previews, Moss Grotto feels built to do one thing very well, which is to introduce Hornet’s new toolkit while reminding you while you love the original’s Hallownest. It’s bright where Hollow Knight often hid in dusk. There are lime-green moss, clear water pools, and folding platforms that encourage you to mantle and make use of Hornet’s acrobatic movements.
The encounters here seem pedagogical, low-to-mid threat, enemies that merely teach you how to Bind (heal) and the Tool behave in live combat. There’s a boss at the end, the Moss Mother in many previews, that strings together the movement windows Hornet now owns.
It definitely brings to mind the level designs of the first game, with mazes of tunnels all pointing you in various directions—directions you’d want to explore for that sense of discovery. This still frames Hornet’s escape, and it'll be interesting where this goes from here.
Deep Docks, by contrast, is where Team Cherry reminds you that you’re no longer controlling the slow Knight of the first game. The area reads like an industrial underbelly, with docks and molten pits and metal carapaces, and the encounter design snaps the opposite way from Moss Grotto. It’s darker, there are more enemies, more environmental hazards, and an insistence that foes become more aggressive.
Flying enemies pepper you from angles while armored workers obstruct movement. Platforming here is less forgiving, but the Lace fight at the end of the demo is the moment the sequel differentiates itself. She mirrors Hornet’s speed, parries, and shifts patterns left and right.
Mechanically, the most consequential reveal here is the Tools system, as it’ll be your bread and butter in your explorations. Tools appear to be craftable, equippable abilities that alter your kit in huge ways. Two shown in the demo are the Straight Pin, a knife-like ranged attack, and the Silkspear, a forceful thrust that recharges only through being more aggressive. That means that you’d be more rewarded by pressuring your enemies rather than turtling and waiting for them to come to you. As there are going to be a lot of Tools at your disposal, it appears you can vary builds.
And the economy behind those Tools have seemingly been revealed. You collect Rosaries (the game’s currency) and Shell Shards (crafting materials), both visible in the demo HUB, even if vendors and workshops were gated off for the show floor. Based on available footage, it appears that you can use Shell Shards while sitting on benches, which largely have the same function to the original game.
Healing and Death, two things that you’d probably do a lot of, are also tweaked in ways that change encounters. Hornet’s Bind is near-instant when you’ve banked enough Silk, which creates spikes of survivability when compared to the Knight’s rather slower method of healing. Several previews also note a new cocoon-on-death mechanic that stores Silk at your corpse. This reframes the first game's Soulslike mechanic where you had to run back to where you died to reclaim your "Shade" that holds all your Geo (currency) and "Soul" (essentially, mana). .
How Big is Silksong Compared to Hollow Knight?
We now have firmer ranges for boss and enemy counts. Based on the release trailer, there are over 200 foes and more than 40 bosses. Numbers are often marketing’s favorite Mad Libs, but they track with the scope jump from being a DLC for Hollow Knight to being a full-fledged sequel.
In contrast, Hollow Knight had 47 bosses and 146 enemy types (Hunter's Journal entries) across its base game and four expansions. According to Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen in an interview with Jason Schrier from Bloomberg, they could have added even more new areas, bosses, and enemy types because they were having so much fun creating content for the game. And they’re not even done with the project!
From the same article, they mentioned that they will keep on working on Silksong, as they find working on the game still enjoyable even after seven years of working on it. In fact, they already have plans for what content to add to Silksong in the coming years. "We got a plan. Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well, but hopefully we can achieve some of it," Gibson said.
Hollow Knight already felt massive, which is crazy to think about. Seeing as Silksong is even bigger, getting more content on top of that is honestly the perfect payoff for the long wait fans have gone through to get their hands on the game.
If you’ve been worried Silksong would sand off Hollow Knight’s personality in the name of a wider appeal, the Gamescom previews argue the opposite. It’s meaner in possibly the best ways, quicker under the right fingers, and more expressive in how you can solve the same room differently—as you "SHAW!" your way through it.
Personally, as someone who joined the community mid-way through its six-year-long radio silence, it’s surreal to witness such a historic moment. As excited as I am for Silksong’s release, we’ve already waited six years for this; what’s two weeks more?
Source:
Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Trailer
Silksong Teaser at Gamescom 2025
Team Cherry | HOLLOW KNIGHT: SILKSONG RELEASE TRAILER
Hollow Knight: Silksong Official Website
Team Cherry | LATE ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION!
Reddit r/gaming | We are Team Cherry, the developers of Hollow Knight! Ask us anything!
Why ‘Silksong’ Took Seven Years to Make
