One of 2025’s most anticipated releases, Hollow Knight: Silksong, finally landed after a seven-year wait and instantly pulled in hundreds of thousands of players on Steam. But what makes Hornet’s new journey such a phenomenon? According to Team Cherry, part of the game’s magic is that it resists a widespread Metroidvania habit and refuses to let unlocked skills dictate where players are allowed to go next.

On the 2025 gaming calendar, few moments were as eagerly awaited as the arrival of Hollow Knight: Silksong. After seven years of silence, Team Cherry released the long-awaited game and quickly saw it peak at more than 587,000 concurrent users on Steam. That number alone shows how excited players were to dive into Hornet’s story and how fast the sequel took off. But why has Silksong become so popular? What makes exploring Telalejana feel different from other Metroidvania experiences? The developers believe one key factor is that the game lets you push into new zones even if you have not collected every traditional movement or combat upgrade yet.

Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen discussed this design choice in an interview with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, via GamesRadar+), where they also shared previously unknown details about their work on the Hollow Knight universe. As they explain it, many Metroidvanias are built around a fairly strict route: you start the adventure, explore the opening area, earn a new power, use that power to access a fresh section of the map, pick up another ability there, then move on to a third region, and so on.

“It is a very specific type of lock-and-key progression,” Gibson says. “We tried to push that element down in favor of a more natural world.” Silksong is still absolutely a Metroidvania and happily leans on several core traits of the genre, including paths that open when you gain certain abilities. “We definitely used that in some parts of the game, and it is still traditional in the sense that you are exploring and getting powers,” he continues, “but the world started to open up in a slightly more natural way.”

Pellen builds on this idea, pointing out that “your abilities do not dictate the player’s choice of where to go in Silksong; there can be three or four valid paths.” In practice, “you make your choice, and maybe two of those routes lead you to a new ability, but the other two take you into entirely new regions of the world, which themselves can end up giving you another power-up.” The result is a constant sense of discovery, where many branches lead to completely unexpected rewards. Often, unlocking those rewards means surviving tough, sweat-inducing battles that test any player’s skills.

Team Cherry wants future Hollow Knight games to “coexist” with the earlier ones

Team Cherry’s ACMI presentation also offered a glimpse into how the studio sees Silksong and the series going forward. We still do not know what the Australian team’s next project will be, but one guiding principle is already clear: any future Hollow Knight entries should be able to coexist with the adventures that are already out, rather than overwrite or replace them.

Fans are now hoping that the next game will not take another seven years to arrive and that Team Cherry will keep refining this philosophy to surprise the Metroidvania community in new ways.

Source: 3djuegos