Hollow Knight: Silksong in 2026 - The Wait Finally Paid Off

For years, Hollow Knight: Silksong was less a video game than a running joke - the sequel that never seemed to arrive, forever teased and forever delayed. Now, in the middle of 2026, that joke has a punchline nobody quite expected: the game is not only real, it is one of the biggest indie success stories in recent memory. If you spent the late 2010s and early 2020s refreshing gaming forums for news that never came, this is the update you waited for.

It actually came out

Team Cherry, the tiny Australian studio behind the original Hollow Knight, released Silksong on September 4, 2025. It landed on a genuinely enormous spread of platforms all at once - Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and both the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 - and arrived on Xbox Game Pass on day one. The price raised eyebrows for the right reasons: just 19.99 US dollars, remarkably modest for a sequel this ambitious and this long-awaited.

The launch itself was chaos of the best kind. Demand was so intense that digital storefronts reportedly buckled under the load, and the game peaked at over half a million concurrent players on Steam on release day alone.

The numbers are staggering

Whatever fears the endless delay may have created, the sales figures put them to rest. Within the first three days, Silksong reached more than five million players. By mid-December 2025 - roughly three months after launch - it had sold over seven million copies, a figure that does not even count the millions playing through Game Pass. Estimates put revenue well past 100 million US dollars.

Critics were largely won over too, with review aggregates landing in the low-to-mid 90s and an overwhelming share of critics recommending it. The praise clustered around the art direction, the haunting soundtrack, and the sheer density of its interconnected world. Awards followed quickly, including a Best Action/Adventure win at The Game Awards 2025 and Game of the Year honors at the 2026 Steam Awards - where it also, fittingly, took home Best Game You Suck At.

Harder than you remember

That last award is a wink at Silksong's most divisive quality: its difficulty. Playing as Hornet rather than the original's silent Knight, the sequel is faster, more aggressive, and noticeably more punishing. Reactions split sharply - some players felt the challenge gave the game its character, while others found it exhausting. The community response was swift and very online: within days of launch, mods appeared to soften corpse-run penalties and dial back enemy damage for anyone who wanted a gentler ride.

Little-known facts about the long road

• It began as DLC. Silksong started life as a planned Hollow Knight expansion tied to a Kickstarter stretch goal for a second playable character. Hornet simply outgrew it - she was too tall to fit naturally into Hallownest, and the scope ballooned until Team Cherry announced a full standalone sequel in February 2019.
• Fans built an institution around the silence. A YouTube channel called Daily Silksong News posted updates almost every single day for years - roughly 1,700 videos - despite only a few dozen of them containing actual news.
• The community coped through comedy. An entire subculture of "Silkposting" emerged, with fake news posts, clown memes, and Hornet edited into everything from fast-food ads to scripture, all as a way to laugh off the endless wait.
• No early review copies. Team Cherry reportedly declined to send advance codes to critics, feeling it would be unfair for reviewers to finish the game before the Kickstarter backers who funded it.
• Backer creations made the cut. Some characters, bosses, and areas trace back to original Kickstarter backer contributions, folded into the finished game years later.

What comes next

The story is not over. On December 15, 2025, Team Cherry announced Sea of Sorrow, a free expansion due in 2026 that follows Hornet on a voyage across and beneath salt-stricken seas, promising new areas, bosses, and tools. For a game that took six years to appear, the idea of getting more of it for free feels almost surreal.

Silksong is a reminder of why patience with small studios can be worth it. Team Cherry never rushed, never over-promised, and let a wall of memes build up around them - then delivered something that vaulted straight to the top of the charts. The clown makeup, it turns out, was premature.