Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally ready for release, but should you be worried that Team Cherry has purposefully ensured there are no reviews?
For years now Hollow Knight: Silksong has seemed like nothing more than vapourware, after having been announced way back in February 2019. Originally intended to be merely DLC, its legend has grown across the years, in large part because fans kept expecting it to turn up at various showcases but it almost never did.
However, developer Team Cherry has finally confirmed that Silksong will be released today, September 4, at 3pm BST. What also seems to have been confirmed is that they won’t be sending out review copies ahead of time, which means no reviews from anyone for several days.
Supposedly, that’s because they feel it’d be unfair for reviewers to play the game before the Kickstarter backers, that helped pay to get the game made. They’re also a very small team, that are publishing the game themselves, and apparently they don’t have the time to organise sending out review copies.
There’s very probably true – Team Cherry is certainly a tiny studio, despite the popularity of its games – but the usual reason publishers don’t send out review copies is because they want to delay negative, or even just less than enthusiastic, reviews for as long as possible.
It’s not hard to see why, when the games in recent years that haven’t sent out review copies ahead of time have included such famous disappointments as MindsEye, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and Starfield.
But it also happened with the Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World and it’s still unclear whether that was a genuine logistical issue or if Nintendo feared Mario Kart wouldn’t review quite as well as usual for a major first party game. After all, its eventual Metacritic score of 86 does not place it in the upper echelons of their releases.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
Team Cherry hasn’t been immune to criticism recently though, not in regards to their review policy but because they announced the release date of Silksong so suddenly, after years of no updates, and that made things very difficult for other indie developers.
The annoucement not only came out of the blue but the release date was so soon after that other indie developers had to quickly move their own games out of its way, ruining marketing plans and costing them money.
The situation has been compared to the release of GTA 6 next year, when no other game will dare to release any time close to it. Although the difference there is that Rockstar Games gave other companies a year to prepare their plans, whereas Team Cherry only gave indie developers two weeks.
As ever, companies are under no obligation to send out review copies but on balance it’s likely that Team Cherry is not hiding anything… and that the game is really good.
Although we’ve always been a little bemused at how much more popular Hollow Knight has become, compared to other similar Metroidvania titles, as while it is very good we’d say they were plenty of other games that were as good or better.
What we played of Silksong at Gamescom didn’t do anything to change that opinion, but then we didn’t play it for very long and we certainly aren’t in any position to offer a final verdict at the moment.
Perhaps some larger American sites will have reviews today – Team Cherry themselves have never directly commented about the review situation – but at the moment there’s no indication of that and if you see a review in the next few days from any smaller site it’s almost certainly going to be a fake, based on little or no time with the game.
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
