One of 2025’s splashiest games, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is getting its first major DLC expansion, developer Team Cherry announced in a blog post. The nautically-themed Sea of Sorrow update will come to the moody Metroidvania some time in 2026, and better still, it will be free for all players.
The DLC will include “new areas, bosses, tools and more,” the developer wrote. There aren’t a lot of clues to the gameplay in the short trailer below, but the four shots definitely relay the vibe. The first shows what looks like fishing tackle, then we see something (or someone) on a tomb-like wooden platform tied under a canvas sheet. Next an orb-like structure crackling with electricity looms and finally the game’s protagonist, Hornet, appears.
In related news, Team Cherry gave updates on its Nintendo Switch 2 version of the original Hollow Knight that will bring it up to visual parity with the the Hollow Knight: Silksong Switch 2 edition. As part of that, the studio also released a beta update to the Steam and GOG PC versions of the original Hollow Knight.
In another life, we’d all be talking about The Batman Part II this weekend. The sequel to Matt Reeves’ 2022 hit was first meant for October 3, 2025, only to be repeatedly put off by the Hollywood strikes and other woes. It’s now coming October 1, 2027, and whether it lands that release date or not, fans are waiting with bated breath to learn anything they can about the film. Will it introduce Robin? Are the Court of Owls the villain, or is it Mr. Freeze? Will the powers that be make Robert Pattinson the Batman of the newly launched DC Universe?
Demand for answers escalated to the point DC boss James Gunn has played defense for Reeves a handful of times, at one point telling people to leave the man alone as he works on the script.
Rampant speculation and anticipation have always been part of fandoms, particularly for superheroes. But it’s safe to say it’s grown into a larger beast over the years thanks to leaks and rumors from scoopers implying or outright stating what they’ve learned on social media, rarely with anyone official pushing back on what’s going out and being shared by those eager to hear any and everything related to their favorite thing.
Some discoveries end up being true, others wildly incorrect. Either way, they do their job keeping something in the conversation when the official channels aren’t doing what some would consider their due diligence and providing a frequent stream of updates. Any silence that lasts longer than a couple of days is a sign that the upcoming project is washed and its creators have lost their spark or that it’s been quietly canceled.
Image: Insomniac Games/PlayStation
There’s no point in pretending The Batman Part II or Insomniac’s Wolverine game—which similarly went without years of any news before being officially unveiled in late September, following the studio being hacked in 2024—would face quiet ends. WB and Sony are loud companies, and if something of that stature had been gutted, we’d have known about it by now.
But the fear of them going away exists thanks to both companies (and plenty more) killing off projects like Batgirl, Naughty Dog’s multiplayer-focused Last of Us spinoff, and too many more to count. Depending on who you ask, the fear of not knowing something is coming is worse than knowing it’ll never come, as made clear by Hollow Knight: Silksongbecoming a meme thanks to its dubious existence from 2018 up until this past August.
After years of what fans would consider a feast of great IP works—and the occasional nibble on decent enough ones—this string of cancellations in recent years has left a sense of resentment and betrayal in their wake. It’s one thing to see Leslie Grace in Batgirl’s Burnside costume and hear that movie was basically done before its untimely end. It’s another to get vague ideas of what a game’s developer is intending or see minutes’ worth of footage at a major showcase, as we saw with Monolith’s Wonder Woman and The Initiative’s Perfect Dark.
Between cancelled movies and games, news of the latter stings so much more thanks to the layoffs that follow in the immediate aftermath and the post-cancellation news revealing development was roughin some shape or form, or the developer’s parent company wasn’t willing to see the project through to the end. All the fan love in the world can work wonders, but it can’t do anything against “market conditions,” crunch, or corporations’ growing interest in AI.
At the end of the 2010s, io9 wrote about how fandoms became gradually intertwined with the corporations that own the IP they love. Five years into the ’20s, and fandoms are now seeing the backlash of that synthesis by being cursed with knowledge. Many fans have taken it upon themselves to know everything about a game, movie, show, or artist and end up spiraling should news not emerge or arrive with potentially worrying implications. They have to know who’s involved with the project from top to bottom and how it’s progressing so they know which creatives to rally support or disdain for, or if they need to, shake those creators back to life if their pulse starts to fade.
The fixation on the things to come, like The Batman Part II and Wolverine, will not end. We’re already seeing this with a TikTok creator’s alleged trip to Scotland to demand Rockstar North give more info, put out a new trailer, and say something about May 2026’s Grand Theft Auto 6: to be a fan of something is to constantly want something, then look forward to the next big thing on the horizon.
In that respect, Reeves and company should take as much time as they need on Batman II—unless something catastrophic happens, it’s not like this epic crime saga is in danger of truly losing its momentum or place in the superhero landscape.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is damn hard. I know that when I reviewed it, I said that it wasn’t actually more difficult than the first Hollow Knight, but those were the words of someone that hadn’t been to Bilewater or tried the High Halls gauntlet yet.
Judging by posts on YouTube and Reddit, as well as my own playing, the difficulty spike comes from two areas. One, the runback for bosses can be a nightmare. Silksong has several long stretches between save benches and bosses where getting a second try at defeating them involves hard platforming and annoying enemy placement. I lost count of the times another attempt at a boss miscarried on the way.
Two, the number of regular enemy gauntlets. Some of these are bosses in and of themselves, such as the High Halls, and some are part of a real boss fight, such as the three Heart bosses in Act 3. That’s where I’m stuck right now, grimly carving my way through Skarrsinger Karmelita by inches after at least 20 tries.
Both of these irritations involve the same thing: regular enemies you have to cut your way through to fight the boss each time. There’s little opportunity to concentrate on the muscle memory of a one-on-one dance with a single opponent, arguably the mechanical aspect of the Hollow Knight series that is most rewarding. At its best, Hollow Knight is like Cuphead, a series of fighting game scenarios framed as a side-scroller. The mobs muck that up by making you refocus on several individuals rather than one boss.
I think that’s the point, though. The story of Silksong is about how a mad god keeps a population in thrall to serve her own ends. The hero, Hornet, is constantly running into other bugs that have been turned into crazed attackers. Some of these are even former friends she meets along the way. In Bellhart, Hornet finds an entire town bound in spider silk, caught in worshipful slavery until she cuts the strings.
Hollow Knight had a similar theme with the Radiance’s infection, but that was more uncontrolled and wild. The work of the main boss in Silksong, Grand Mother Silk, is deliberate and calculating. We see numerous reminders of her terrible authoritarianism. Guards in the Slab prison are born in servitude; workers in the Underworks have to pay to sit down or to receive religious penance; and a room near the end chronicles Grand Mother Silk’s ruthless pursuit of spider children like Hornet, callously spending the lives of follower as long as she gets what she wants.
Contrast this with Hornet. Having watched Hallownest fall to the infection in the first game, she is keen to avoid another collapse in Pharloom. At every turn, she tries to free the bugs of Pharloom from Grand Mother Silk, often without considering the consequences. When her actions lead to the destruction of Pharloom and the invasion of the void in Act 3, she is emotionally devastated. Everyone around her is dead, consumed by the void, or hopelessly preparing for the end of the world. Desperately, Hornet pledges to fix things.
This is where the narrative brilliance of the difficulty shines. Regular bugs matter. The rot in Pharloom is not just the work of a few bad apples under a mad god. This is a community full of connections intertwined in a web. When Hornet is forced through long runbacks full of Pharloom’s inhabitants or caught killing pawns in a fight with a boss, it reminds us that everything in the game affects the bugs living there.
Is it mechanically enraging? Absolutely. Developer Team Cherry could have made this point with fewer regular enemies or easier platforming challenges, but the mobs and runbacks should still absolutely be there. They remind the player and Hornet that there are lives at stake in this fight. This is a kingdom, not an empty space full of mindless obstacles to stab.
Evil never happens in a vacuum. It is enabled through the petty cooperation of millions of participants. Battles to destroy great evil result in collateral damage to the innocent in 100 percent of cases. By filling these game milestones with the common bugs of Pharloom, Silksong keeps this theme front and center where it cannot be ignored. There is literally no moving forward without confronting it.
I agree with everyone cursing the difficulty of this game. There were near wins that left me shaking with rage. However, if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that confronting authoritarianism is going to be very hard and full of casualties. You’ll constantly be running into the haunted servants of the powerful, some of whom you once trusted, and you will have to find a way through them to get to the heart of darkness. Doing so is traumatizing.
Often, I found myself yelling at these random Silksong mobs that made beating the boss harder. “Why are you even here? I’ve got no beef with you!” I could be using those same words every time some random Nazis yells at me in real life. Silksong has a lesson to teach us about the human cost of authoritarianism, and the runbacks and gauntlets are a part of that. Why wouldn’t they be frustrating?
Hollow Knight: Silksong is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, and X Box Series X/S. $19.99.
Oliver Brandt is a Contributing Pop Culture Writer based in Tasmania, Australia. Their focus is reporting on video games, film, and TV. They have extensive knowledge of video game history and communities both in Australia and abroad, animated films and television shows, and international cinema. Oliver joined Newsweek in 2024 and has previously worked at Men’s Journal, Parade, and more. They are a graduate of Curtin University. You can get in touch with Oliver by emailing o.brandt@newsweek.com. You can find them on X and Bluesky @chocobalt. Languages: English.
While fans have been loving the sequel to the beloved metroidvania Hollow Knight, many have noted its intense difficulty, especially in the early game. In response to the early-game difficulty, developer Team Cherry has revealed that the game’s first patch is on the way, and it’s set to make the game easier for new players.
Protagonist Hornet faces off against multiple enemies in a promotional screenshot for Hollow Knight: Silksong. Protagonist Hornet faces off against multiple enemies in a promotional screenshot for Hollow Knight: Silksong. Team Cherry
The first post-release patch for Hollow Knight: Silksong is currently available on Steam in the public beta branch of the game, and is expected to roll out to other platforms mid next week. The update brings a host of bug fixes, including some soft locks in the early and late game, and Team Cherry says all fixes will apply retroactively, so if you’re stuck or something is broken, you can just wait for the update to fix it.
The more exciting part for some fans is the tweaks to difficulty in the early game. Among the fixes includes a reduction in difficulty for two early game bosses, Moorwing and Sister Splinter, as well as a reduction in damage from Sandcarvers. There’s also a reduction in the cost of a few mid-game benches, and an increase in rosary rewards from a couple of in-game activities.
Below are the full patch notes for Silksong’s first patch, courtesy of the Silksong Steam blog.
Hollow Knight: Silksong First Update Patch Notes
Fixed situation where players could remain cloakless after Slab escape sequence.
Fixed wish Infestation Operation often not being completable during the late game.
Fixed wish Beast in the Bells not being completable when Bell Beast is summoned at the Bilewater Bellway during the late game.
Fixed getting stuck floating after down-bouncing on certain projectiles.
Fixed courier deliveries sometimes being inaccessible in the late game.
Fixed craft bind behaving incorrectly when in memories.
Fixed Lace tool deflect soft-lock at start of battle in Deep Docks.
Fixed Silk Snippers in Chapel of the Reaper sometimes getting stuck out of bounds.
Fixed Claw Mirrors leaving Hornet inverted if taking damage during a specific moment while binding.
Fixed Snitch Pick not giving rosaries and shell shards as intended.
Removed float override input (down + jump, after player has Faydown Cloak).
Slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter.
Reduction in damage from Sandcarvers.
Slight increase in pea pod collider scale.
Slight reduction in mid-game Bellway and Bell Bench prices.
Slight increase in rosary rewards from relics and psalm cylinders.
Increase in rosary rewards for courier deliveries.
Various additional fixes and tweaks.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
For most Hollow Knight: Silksong players, the combat is challenging and the boss fights are punishing. However, there’s another layer of complexity for anyone playing the sequel in Simplified Chinese: the bizarre translations. On its Steam store page, Silksong currently sits at a “Mostly Positive” rating across reviews in all languages. Once you filter for the Simplified Chinese reviews, the Metroidvania-style game plummets to “Mostly Negative.”
There are plenty of complaints about Silksong being too hard and not rewarding enough, but the translation issues are a common theme across the reviews for Simplified Chinese. In the reviews and comments, players compared the translations to a jarring mix of ancient and modern Chinese. Tiger Tang, who worked on the Simplified Chinese translation of an indie RPG called OMORI, posted on X that the “translation reads like a Wuxia novel instead of conveying the game’s tone,” referencing the literary genre that features martial arts and is often set in ancient China.
The good news is that the team behind Silksong is aware of the translation issues, as indicated by Matthew Griffin, who handles the game’s marketing and publishing. Griffin posted on X that the team is aware of “quality issues with the current Simplified Chinese translation” and that they are “working to improve the translation over the coming weeks.” When looking at the original Hollow Knight, the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, even when looking at the Simplified Chinese reviews. However, Silksong credits a team of two for its Chinese localization, while the original featured six.
Welcome to our latest recap of what’s going on in the indie game space. Folks, it’s here. You know it’s here. So, we’ll touch on it, but briefly. Some developers and publishers opted not to delay their games out of this week (others have done that to get some breathing space from you-know-what), so there are several other newcomers to highlight.
Before we get there, there’s a sale worth mentioning on a PC storefront that does not offer Hollow Knight: Silksong. The Epic Games Store’s End of Summer Sale is running until September 18 and there are some pretty solid deals. Cyberpunk 2077is 65 percent off for the base game and 50 percent off for the ultimate edition, which includes the Phantom Liberty DLC (which is also 30 percent off for those who have the base game already).
The Epic Games Store offers totally free games every week (no need to have a subscription for those!), and the freebies tend to be for well-known games whenever there’s a major sale on the store. Right now, you can pick up an all-timer in Monument Valley for exactly zero dollars. You have until 11AM ET on September 11 to claim the classic puzzle game. When that game cycles out, Epic Games will rotate three more titles into its lineup: Monument Valley 2, Ghostrunner 2 (which I enjoy very much but am terrible at) and a strategy game called The Battle of Polytopia. Again, you’ll have a week to claim those.
Meanwhile, if you have an Amazon Prime subscription, there’s usually a solid selection in the Prime Gaming library. Games you claim here are yours to keep forever, even if you don’t maintain your Prime membership. Amazon offered up a particularly tasty one this week in the shape of Into The Breach, a hugely acclaimed strategy game, but there are plenty of others to check out. And speaking of games you can play right now…
New releases
Yes, Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally here. It’s out on consoles and PC for $20 and it’s included with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. It’s broken storefronts and probably some controllers that players have hurled at the wall after dying to a tough boss.
After a seven-year wait, Silksong is by some distance the highest-profile indie game to arrive in 2025 so far. Perhaps if we start mentioning another long-awaited game — say, Kingdom Hearts 4? Beyond Good and Evil 2? — it may arrive sooner rather than later. Or in, like, another five years.
I made a few attempts to play Hollow Knight, but bounced off quickly each time. I’ll be sure to give Silksong a proper go, though.
It might be the case that Silksong isn’t quite your thing. Never fear, there’s lots of other new stuff from this week for you to dive into.
If a game pops up that reminds me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (aka the best game of all time) in terms of looks, I’m duty bound to mention it. Fortunately, Rogue Labyrinth seems like it could be fun to play too. This action-narrative roguelite from Tea Witch Games and publisher indie.io hit Steam this week. It usually costs $15, but it’s 20 percent off with a limited-time launch discount.
Another thing that’s very much in Rogue Labyrinth‘s favor is that your weapon is a smacking stick, which you can use to turn objects (including vanquished enemies) into projectiles. The combat is a blend of bullet-hell dodging and hack-and-slash action. Being a roguelike, there’s randomization when it comes to things like the arenas, enemies and powers you’ll encounter on each run. The game is also said to feature dynamic narrative systems and you’ll forge alliances with other characters as you try to survive a lethal reality show.
Although so many other indie games scrambled to get out of the way of Silksong, Hirogami stuck to its September 3 release date. I had to chuckle when a press release with a title of “3D origami platformer Hirogami refuses to fold” hit my inbox last week. An easy pun, but I appreciated it.
Anyway, this is indeed a 3D platformer with an origami focus. You can flatten out your character into a sheet of paper so that a gust of wind can send you soaring to an elevated platform. You can transform into an armadillo to roll through enemies, an ape to explore treetops and a frog to jump higher. That seems like a real bananza of animal transformation options. Hirogami is available now on Steam, Epic Games Store and PS5.
Fling to the Finish has been out on PC for some time, and now this co-op platform racing game from SplitSide Games and publisher Daedalic Entertainment has swung over to consoles. You and a friend are tethered by an elastic rope that will inevitably snag on parts of the environment. But you can actually use this to your advantage to swing your teammate onto a ledge or send you both hurling through the air.
The obstacle-filled courses bring to mind Fall Guys, while the items that players can deploy to slow down race leaders remind me a bit of the Mario Kart games. Fling to the Finish does support solo play, as well as local and online multiplayer, where communication will be key (cross-play is available too). As was the case with Overcooked, you and your pal can play the game by sharing a single controller, which may make it easier to play the game in splitscreen if you’re with a bunch of friends.
Jetrunner is an action platformer in the vein of Ghostrunner and Neon White from Riddlebit Software and publisher Curveball Games. The folks behind it say it has “a gameplay loop that can be best described as Trackmania meets Titanfall.” So, there are lots of comparisons to make here. Ultimately, you’ll be parkouring your way through various courses while shooting targets, hooking onto grapple points and looking for shortcuts.
Finding the optimal route — and, of course, actually completing it with as few errors as possible — is the path to climbing the global leaderboards. You can race against ghost replays of your previous runs for a clear visual comparison. In addition, there’s a story mode that sees your character Nina (voiced by Sara Secora) trying to become a legendary jetrunner, with commentator Mick Acaster (Matthew Mercer) charting her progress. I’m digging the visuals here too.
Jetrunner is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $20 (there’s a 10 percent launch discount on Steam). There’s a speedrun contest that’s taking place until September 11 with a $2,000 prize pool. You can snag a share if you can complete all of the campaign levels in a row quickly enough in the marathon mode and stick to the rules. It also seems that the exodus of other games this week due to Silksong helped Jetrunner gain extra visibility on Steam.
Upcoming
A rhythm RPG in which you can use your own music and manually adjust the BPM is interesting enough. But add giant, repurposed mechs to the mix, and now we’re really cookin’. In Steel Century Groove, you’ll compete in robot dance battles as you try to claim a championship. These mechanical beasts were used in warfare long, long ago. Now they’re just literal groove machines.
Steel Century Groove, which is from Sloth Gloss Games, is coming to Steam on January 28. A demo is available now, and your progress will carry over to the full game.
When I was assembling the list of games to include in this week’s roundup, I left myself a single, two-word note about The Legend of Baboo: “big floof.” The floof in question is the large, titular dog that accompanies human hero Sepehr in this third-person action adventure from Permanent Way and publisher Midwest Games.
You’ll play as both characters as you take on enemies, solve puzzles and navigate treacherous lands. When you conquer bosses, you’ll learn powerful magical attacks. Most importantly, you can zhush up Baboo with outfits and ornaments that you discover on your journey. He’s the best boy and he deserves to look and feel good. It’s also crucial to note that, as Sepehr, you can pet, ride and high-five Baboo.
A release date (or even a release window) has yet to be announced for The Legend of Baboo. It’s coming to Steam, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
Dreams of Another looks quite unlike any game I’ve seen before. It uses point cloud rendering tech for its remarkably pretty visuals. This fantasy exploration game from Q-Games (under the leadership of Baiyon, the director of PixelJunk Eden) is set in a dream-like world where you create the world by shooting at it.
Dreams of Another is coming to PS5, PS VR2 and Steam on October 9, and it might just prompt me to set up my VR headset again. A demo dropped this week on Steam, but it’s only available until September 16.
Tombwater looks kinda rad. It’s a 2D pixel-art Soulslike Western from Moth Atlas and publisher Midwest Games. The developers took (another?) leaf out of FromSoftware’s playbook by pitting you against creepy eldritch horrors. This one is coming to Steam on November 12.
I always appreciate when a labor of love comes to fruition. Former Uber, MapQuest and Microsoft engineer John Lansing said that, nine years ago, “I built a Final Fantasy Tactics inspired football prototype, and 691 commits later I am proud to present the Fantasy Football Tactics Demo!” This is a turn-based RPG in which the aim is to outscore your opponents rather than taking them out in combat.
The demo hit Steam this week. There’s no release date as yet for the full game.
Hollow Knight: Silksong doesn’t need Xbox to capture our hearts. The sequel to the indie darling Hollow Knight blazes with a subtle intensity—the result of every squeak and bark from the hand-drawn enemies to the sweeping and foreboding music running like a river through the two abridged demo levels I played. Like the original Metroidvania-style side-scroller, Silksong is a game that could likely run on every system more powerful than a Tamagotchi without much fine-tuning. Even without playing the short demo players first had access to at Gamescom last month, the game sells itself. Xbox needs Silksong to help convince players they need its new handheld, the Asus ROG Xbox Ally.
Xbox brought the game to Gizmodo’s offices to give us hands-on experience with the game I already suspected I’d adore—and test out its first true novel hardware release of the past several years. The game is self-evident. It feels reminiscent of the first Hollow Knight yet distinct, with new protagonist Hornet focusing on swift dives and strikes with her needle and thread. As for Xbox, we still don’t know how much the handheld will cost, even though we’re edging closer to Microsoft and Asus’s shrinking October release window. The Xbox Ally X is running on the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, the long-anticipated APU—or accelerated processing unit—built for handheld gaming. It’s been closing in on a year since AMD announced that chip. It’s only now that we’ll get to see what it’s capable of. Silksong is the wrong game to test that.
In every way that matters, the higher-end Asus ROG Xbox Ally X is a sequel to the Asus ROG Ally X. I can see you’re confused. There are too damn many Xs in that name. It’s simpler to call the new device the ROG Xbox handheld. But that belies just how much of an iteration the handheld is. The Xbox Ally X is thicker by more than a few millimeters. It’s slightly heavier, and in my short experience with it, its fans were louder than the original device even when playing Silksong. When you lay both on the table, the difference is more stark. This is not a slim and low-profile Nintendo Switch 2. This is not an Xbox—a simple and straightforward console. The ROG Xbox Ally is a handheld PC in every way that matters.
The grips are meant to resemble an Xbox controller, and for that, it may be the most comfortable to use long-term compared to every other Steam Deck-like device available. The Xbox Ally X weighs 1.58 pounds, but in my 1.5 hours of play, I never felt my arms growing fatigued holding it up. Just like the Ally X from 2024, the face buttons and sticks had the kind of presence on my fingers that helps me sink into the games running on its 7-inch 1080p IPS display. Silksong seemed bright and vibrant on the glossy display. The surprise improvement was from its triggers. They’re larger, and it meant that one of my colleagues with much smaller hands than me could still hit each bumper without having to slide their hand up the grips.
Handheld Windows 11 mode with Xbox UI is unfinished
The hardware is self-evident. The Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are meant to both run an all-new version of Windows 11 built specifically for the small screen. There’s an all-new Xbox button on the left-hand side of the handheld, which brings up the main menu that’s built as an extension of the existing Xbox Game Bar on PC. Xbox stressed that the software was unfinished. Hitting the ROG button still brought up the Asus Armoury Crate software to adjust brightness, volume, and performance settings. The UI could change by release in October.
I didn’t get to experience any of that. The new version of Windows 11 is supposed to dual-boot with the operating system as the regular desktop environment and a new version that limits several background tasks. This new version is meant to enhance performance when gaming. These background processes are sapping performance in all versions of Windows 11, and it’s only now that Microsoft is modifying its operating system to enhance gaming. Xbox knows it now needs to compete with SteamOS. Valve’s handheld-centric operating system is Linux-based with the addition of a compatibility layer for all those games that won’t work on the open-source platform. Recent tests have proved handhelds run better on SteamOS than Windows. Microsoft needs to show that players can stick with Windows without losing out on all their favorite apps.
The Xbox handheld could be great for people who don’t mind dragging around a larger handheld. Hollow Knight: Silksong is already shaping up to be great, but it’s not a game built to help us test what the device is capable of. Xbox needs to sell their handheld for prices console gamers expect to spend. Otherwise, most players will be playing Team Cherry’s Metroidvania somewhere—anywhere—else.
After years of waiting, there’s only three days left until Hollow Knight: Silksong is out in this world. We only got the September 4 release date a few weeks ago and now we have the final piece of the puzzle: price.
Team Cherry, the indie studio behind the Hollow Knight series, has announced on X (formerly Twitter) that Hollow Knight: Silksong will cost $20. That’s a $5 increase from 2017’s original mega hit Hollow Knight game. Which, after almost a decade, isn’t very surprising.
We also have the exact release times for Hollow Knight: Silksong on September 4. The game will be available to purchase at 7AM PT/10AM ET. After being delayed past its original 2023 release date, it doesn’t feel too far away now.
If you’re dying with anticipation for the sequel to finally arrive, may we recommend rewatching the above trailer? It gives away just enough of the game to satiate us until Thursday.
Hello! Here we are at the end of yet another week, and that means we’re taking a look at our gaming shelves, physical or digital, with an eye for something appealing to spend some hours with on our time off–something which may inspire you as well, should you be at a loss for what to play.
This week I finally got to share what I’ve been working on behind the scenes: Kotaku’s review of the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, as well as a deep dive into what makes this reimagining tick. Long story short: I think the game rocks and it’s been the most fun I’ve had with an MGS title in many years. But it’s not out yet, so it won’t be mentioned in this week’s rundown. Expect me to have some more to say about it next week.
We also had Gamescom kick off this week with Opening Night Live, and what a packed show it was, especially if you’re like me and enjoy torturing yourself with horror games–seriously, I’m avoiding RE9 trailers and gameplay footage because it’s going to spark too much excitement in me and might throw the universe out of balance or something.
Anyway, let’s get on to our picks for the weekend–and please let us know what games you’re rocking because, in case you didn’t know, comments are back! So be nice, but also please let us know what’s got you glued to your controllers and keyboards.
Void/Breaker
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Unknown”) Current goal: Finish more runs and get out of the simulation
When I saw a trailer for VoidBreaker during Gamescom Opening Night Live, I was intrigued. So I hopped over to Steam to play it for a bit and accidentally put, like, three hours in, despite having dinner plans that night. We weren’t late for dinner, but any game that can hook me that fast has my attention.
I’m not a big roguelike guy, but VoidBreaker’s gunplay is so satisfying and the combat so hectic that upom dying, I’m instantly starting a new run through the game’s twisted cybernightmare. And I keep finding new power-ups, mods, and other features as I do so. I need to put more time into VoidBreaker before I can say it’s on my Game of the Year list, but I like its odds.
Shadow Labyrinth
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Switch 2, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Verified”) Current goal: Venture deeper
It’s just all so strange and mysterious. The “memories” I find are cryptic and bizarre, the backgrounds otherworldly, the Metroidvania-style labyrinth itself full of things I can’t make heads or tails of. Well, I can. I know a Pac-Man maze when I see one. But my in-game character can’t, not yet.
What captivates me so far about Shadow Labyrinth is its willingness to be so dauntingly strange. I mean, video games don’t get any more mainstream than Pac-Man. Pac-Man was a game for everyone, and that broad appeal was crucial to it becoming a colossal arcade smash that fleetingly invaded every aspect of American culture in the early 1980s. And yet here is a game that is deliberately inscrutable, and sometimes even offputting. Pac-Man, or this game’s equivalent of him, sometimes devours foes in a display that’s genuinely unnerving, and the story, thus far at least, is a jumble of strange names, awkward, rambling notes, and vague gestures at lore you don’t know enough about to process. And I love it. Each night this week, I’ve been determined to make at least one good little chunk of progress, find another save point, see what strange new landscapes await me, and hopefully start finding the keys to understanding just who I am, where I am, and what it is I’m really doing.
Shadow Labyrinth has integrity. It’s committed to doing its thing, and it doesn’t go to great lengths to make you feel welcome. “Stay, or bounce off,” it seems to say. “It makes no difference to me.” I find that confidence intriguing, and hard to resist. For now, at least, I’m staying. I’m venturing deeper. – Carolyn Petit
Play it on: PS3 via PSN store, original disc, or emulation Current goal: Get the hang of these darn controls!
Last weekend I dove into the lovingly retro horror experience that is Silent Hill. This weekend I’m doing it again as I anticipate talking a whole lot more about this exquisitely disturbing PSX title in the near future, and, after all, it was one of the classics of the era that got away from me.
I didn’t get terribly far in my first playthrough as I was short on time (I was neck-deep in the digital swamps of Snake Eater’s remake) and also because this game is hard! I mean, it’s me, so I naturally jumped into it on the game’s hard difficulty.
That might’ve been a mistake. The game is already pretty lethal as is and, oof,these controls are of a sort we’ve long since left behind–and maybe for good reason? I’m not sure yet. I’m usually okay with tank controls, but I’m finding these particularly difficult to contend with for some reason. Maybe I’m just out of practice? In any case, they’ve made me rethink my choice to do my run on hard mode.
I’m gonna knock the difficulty down. That should help me focus on the atmosphere of this game which, if you know anything about SilentHill, I probably don’t need to tell you about. But still, if it’s been some time since you’ve played this 1999 release and you tend to play modern games more often, know that elements we might consider graphical limitations or poor design decisions today– the gloomy fog, the non-player-controlled camera– really sell the bizarre and haunting experience that is this game. Even just walking down one of the game’s opening alleyways, I was reminded that it wasn’t just creepy monsters that terrified me as a child; it was the whole framing of this gorgeously dreadful horror experience. And I’m so ready to strap in for more this weekend. – Claire Jackson
Hollow Knight
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Switch 2, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Verified”) Current goal: See what the fuss is about
I wrote about Hollow Knight: Silksongquite a few times this week, but I’ve never played Team Cherry’s original Metroidvania. I hear it’s one of the best, most challenging action platformers out there. It must be if the internet has been losing its mind about the sequel for all this time, right? I’ve always been curious about Hollow Knight, but it had become such a meme in my head that it almost made me forget that it was something I could actually download and play at any point in the past eight years. Now, we’re two weeks out from Silksong, and I guess it really is on me for waiting so long after observing the fervor from afar all this time. But there’s no time like the present to jump in, lest I fall even further behind on what is supposedly one of indie gaming’s crown jewels. — Kenneth Shepard
And that wraps our picks for the weekend! What are you playing?
Unity, the cross-platform game engine that powers games like Rust, Hollow Knight, and Pokémon Go, has introduced a new, controversial fee for developers, set to take effect next year. Indie developers quickly responded to the announcement, with many suggesting the costs of this policy would kill smaller games, while confusion spread as devs wondered how it would affect their bottom line. Unity’s attempts to provide clarity have only fueled devs’ frustration and spawned more questions from those with both currently active and in-development games using the engine.
This Action Game Asks What If Ninja Gaiden Let Its Hair Down
The new Runtime Fee, announced in a September 12 Unity blog, is based on the number of installations a game built with the Unity engine receives, as well as the revenue it generates. Though it won’t start until January 1, 2024, the Runtime Fee will apply to any game that has reached both a previously established annual revenue threshold and a lifetime install count. Games developed with the lower-cost Unity Personal and Unity Plus plans reach that threshold at $200,000 of revenue in one year and 200,000 lifetime installs, while Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise accounts must reach $1 million in revenue and 1 million lifetime installs for the fee to kick in.
Unity Personal and Unity Plus devs will have to pay $.20 for every game installed past their subscription-specific thresholds, Unity Pro devs will have to fork over between $.02 and $.15 for every install past theirs, and Unity Enterprise devs’ costs range from $.01 to $.125. Developers in emerging markets will have lower costs per install past their threshold. The announcement was met with widespread confusion, as devs of free-to-play games scrambled to figure out if they’d end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars, charity bundle creators became concerned about potentially being punished for supporting a good cause, and more.
Developers react to Unity Runtime Fee
Shortly after the policy was announced, Rust developer Garry Newman wondered if “Unity [wants] us to start paying them $200k a month” before doing the math and realizing that Facepunch Studios would owe the game engine company about $410,000 total.
“While this isn’t much, here’s some stuff I don’t like,” Newman shared to X (formerly Twitter). “Unity can just start charging us a tax per install? They can do this unilaterally? They can charge whatever they want? They can add install tracking to our game? We have to trust their tracking?”
Though many devs initially thought this new fee would apply to all games made in Unity (including free ones), and reacted accordingly, it soon became clear that the fee will only apply to monetized titles. Axios’ Stephen Totilo shared some clarification he’d received from Unity a few hours after the initial announcement, including that charity games and bundles are excluded from fees. But some of Unity’s clarifications only served to further suggest the notion that it didn’t really think this initiative through.
“If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges,” Totilo posted. “Same if they install on 2 devices.” This means that developers could be “vulnerable to abuse” from bad actors who repeatedly uninstall and reinstall their games. “Unity says it would use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team.” So, if you get a massive bill from Unity, you’ll just have to wait on their customer support line. Shouldn’t be an issue, right?
Xalavier Nelson Jr., head of Strange Scaffold, the indie studio behind games like El Paso, Elsewhere and An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, expressed concerns about the entire situation. “This is the danger of modern games and game development cycles becoming exponentially more complicated, lengthy, and prone to immense dependency,” he told Kotaku via DM. “When a decision like this gets announced, and you’re three years into a five-year journey, you have little to no choice. You’re stuck with a partner who may be actively working against your interest, and who you increasingly cannot trust.”
Tiani Pixel, indie developer and co-founder of Studio Pixel Punk, the studio behind the 2021 Metroidvania Unsighted, told Kotaku via DM that “there’s a lot of things in Unity’s statement that aren’t clear and are very worrying.” She brought up not only how complicated it is to measure actual installs, but the privacy issues inherent with such a policy.
“There are some certifications you need for having such service in your game and releasing it on consoles and other platforms. You need an end-user license agreement (EULA), because you’ll be sending info from the player’s device to an external server. So, will indies be forced to add such DRMs on their games so they can track the installs? Again, Unity does not make it clear. Forcing DRM on games has a long (and bad) history in gaming. Many tools used for this are literally indistinguishable from malwares…There’s no benefit to the devs or the user here.”
She also pointed out how these new fees could affect indie developers. “Small indie games, like our game Unsighted, which had the chance to appear on services like Xbox Game Pass, (in which the game isn’t sold directly to the consumer), might be penalized for becoming popular there, because we will be charged for every install,” she said.
Brandon Sheffield, creative director at Necrosoft Games, warned game developers off the engine in a scathing op-ed for Insert Credit. “But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity,” he wrote. “If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.”
The op-ed ends by stating that Unity is “digging its own grave in search for gold.”
Unity continues to court controversy
Shortly after Unity’s blog post went live, game developer John Draisey posted that Unity had “eliminated Unity Plus subscriptions” and that the company was automatically switching members to its Pro subscription next month. Draisey shared an image showing the price difference between the two subs, which are billed annually, and it was nearly $3,300. “Be careful not to have auto-renew on your account if you can’t afford the price. And this is with just 2 people on my team with project access,” he warned.
It’s unclear how the potential change in subscription options will translate to the newly minted Runtime Fee, as the thresholds are different for each sub. Kotaku reached out for clarification, and a Unity spokesperson pointed us to their FAQ page. When asked for further clarification, the spokesperson sent this statement: “Unity Plus is being retired for new subscribers effective today, September 12, 2023, to simplify the number of plans we offer. Existing subscribers do not need to take immediate action and will receive an email mid-October with an offer to upgrade to Unity Pro, for one year, at the current Unity Plus price.”
The bigwigs at Unity have been making some, uh, interesting decisions as of late. In June, the company announced two new machine-learning platforms that would be integrated into its engine: Unity Muse (essentially ChatGPT for using Unity, a service that would allow devs to ask questions about coding and get answers from a bot) and Unity Sentis, which “enables you to embed an AI model in the Unity Runtime for your game or application, enhancing gameplay and other functionality directly on end-user platforms.” As former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett pointed out at the time of the announcement, AI technology heavily relies on “work stolen from artists without consent or compensation,” so Unity Sentis raised a ton of eyebrows.
And as Rust’s Newman shared shortly after the latest Unity announcement, it seems these changes are having a negative impact on the company at large: their market shares tanked as of 11:17 a.m. EST. Let’s see if Unity sticks with these changes, or makes adjustments based on feedback from developers.
Image: Facepunch Studios
Unity responds to negative feedback
At 6:38 p.m. EST, the official Unity X account shared a post on the game engine’s official forums titled “Unity plan pricing and packaging updates.” The post contains a series of frequently asked questions that cropped up shortly after the announcement of the Runtime Fee, many of which were focused on game installations.
As many devs worried on social media before these FAQs were released, under Unity’s new policy, multiple reinstalls or redownloads of games will have to be paid for by creators—and the definition of “install” also includes a user making changes to their hardware. Further, any “early access, beta, or a demo of the full game” will induce install charges, according to the FAQs, as can even streamed or web-based games. And Unity won’t reveal how it’s counting these installs, posting that “We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won’t go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.”
The FAQ does not clarify how Unity will ensure it does not count installations of charity games or bundled games with its “proprietary software.”
The Verge’s Ash Parrish was quick to point out that the multiple install charges could give right-wing reactionaries a new way to damage a game and/or studio: revenue bombing. If certain groups are angered by, say, a queer character in a game or a Black woman lead (both of which have whipped gamers into a frenzy before), then they could repeatedly install said game over and over again, racking up Unity’s Runtime Fee for the studio.
“I can tell you right now that the folks at risk of this are women devs, queer devs, trans devs, devs of color, devs pushing for accessibility, devs pushing for inclusion—we’ve seen countless malicious actors work together to tank their game scores or ratings,” developer Rami Ismail wrote on X.
Nelson confirmed to Kotaku via DM on the evening of September 12that “concrete talks are happening among some of the most significant developers in the space” regarding a class-action lawsuit against Unity.
Update 09/12/2023 7:35 p.m. ET: Updated to include information from an official Unity forum post, more reactions from devs, and the confirmation of a potential class-action lawsuit.
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