LET ME IN
Edit: It took 3 hours but Steam servers are stable now, I finally bought it. See you on the other side
Can someone explain the fervor over this game? I played the first one and bounced completely off of it. It was slick for sure, but obtuse and kinda janky.
There’s just…so much content out there about Hollow Knight if the answer to your question is of actual interest to you. No shade to you if it wasn’t up your alley, but the only kind of response you can get is someone else’s opinion. Like, I gave Bloodborne my best effort (30-40 hours of it) but eventually had to give it up, despite loving Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring. But I love hearing about others’ passion for it all the same and accept that there’s a something there that didn’t click for me.
FWIW, this is the video that convinced me to play Hollow Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm9Q4YLaWLk. It’s a long one but it makes a good case.
https://slrpnk.net/comment/17826233
Called it.
I’m currently waiting for them to release a patch for it; my controller is a little fucked: The controller vibration seems to have stopped working. Also, it bugs out for me if I disconnect the controller when the game is running and reconnect: some of the buttons stop working.
UPDATE (2025-09-05T06:54Z): It turns out that the lack of controller rumble is fixable by forcing the use of Proton instead of running the native build [1].
References
- Type: Post. Title: “PSA: If you are experiencing no controller rumble in Silksong, then try forcing Proton in the game’s properties on Steam.”. Author: “Kalcifer” (“@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works”). Publisher: [“Lemmy”. “sh.itjust.works”. “Linux Gaming” (“!linux_gaming@lemmy.world”).]. Published: 2025-09-05T06:43:42Z. Created: 2025-09-05T06:43:06Z. Accessed: 2025-09-05T06:58Z. URI: https://sh.itjust.works/post/45439004.
If you are playing on Steam, try the native version but force Steam Input to enabled.
IIRC, I did try that, but it caused my controller to cease functioning at all. Take that statement with a grain of salt though — I’d need to test again to verify.
Damn, I thought all the jokes about breaking Steam Servers were just being hyperbolic. I applaud them though, I couldn’t get into the game but this is a huge milestone
I wanted to love the original, I did love the style and the gameplay, but the hardcore mechanics were just too much for me, they need to give us a “I have a job and a family” mode lmao.
I’m about 3 hours in and the benches are far more generous than in the first game. Also corpse runs aren’t required; you just lose your money.
Sweet. The sparse benches were really annoying in the first game.
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I just couldn’t get into the gameplay. Which sucks since it’s such a pivotal mechanic. I think a easier mode though would definitely let me go through and appreciate the game a little more though
That’s how it always was. In fact, you can run away from a lot of boss battles this timeIf you want “I have a family” mode?
Grind though it a few minutes at a time and build your skills. Otherwise, this game just isn’t for you, watch a playthrough
Yeah, this was one of those games that I could see the craftsmanship but just wasn’t for me.
But strong follow up to a much beloved original IP for a very reasonable price? That borderline shadow dropped? Love it, yall enjoy your suprise Christmas and go nuts. Cool as hell.
Shadow dropped?? I’ve been looking forward to it since like… February?, when we got real confirmation. We’ve been tracking this for years
But I do appreciate you appreciating our day. It doesn’t have to be your thing, but it’s very cool of you to cheer us on. Today has been a big win for a lot of people, and I invite you to celebrate this as a win for gaming in general
Ah, I thought the date was announced like two weeks ago. My mistake.
But in any event hope you get some good time in with it this weekend. When the vibe is that unique there’s nothing like a second helping done right.
Ah yeah they finished up a couple weeks ago and gave a hard date, but it’s been listed as fall 2025 since around whenever Nintendo announced the switch 2
Activision would kill baby to have people want their game so much that it crash Steam server.
Also the regional pricing is super cheap here($11), this gonna sell 10 millions.
Edit: in the payment processing screen and it just fail to process. Whelp, it’s 10:30pm here, might as well get it tomorrow. Good luck everyone!
Edit: so apparently it break every major platform except GOG and Humble. That’s crazy!
Yeah, I bought it the day after its release (today September 5th). Played about 1,5H (so glad I “work” from home).
I bought it on humble because steam was broken. They ran out of keys shortly after I purchased it, had to wait a few hours until they restocked them. They temporarily took silksong off their store during this time.
So gog might be the only one that wasn’t broke
Hot damn, not bad
But yeah every major studio sees these games and thinks underpaying devs, union busting, and AI garbage are gonna get them there somehow.
Meanwhile Steam keeps making self-made millionaires who busted ass on a passion project people adore for years. Like the Balatro guy, it makes me happy to think about and I hope he’s doing well.
Because aaa developers are in the business of the business of making games. As in financing, shuffling money, stock appreciation, selling assets at opportune times, etc… They are no longer interested in making games, they’re trying to make infinite money through an established ecosystem.
I have no clue what Hollow Knight is other than than individual people being pumped for this silksong thing. No advertising. No “hype train”.
Here’s hoping success stories like this shake some sense into the AAA gaming industry.
Hollow Knight is amazing. If you’re into platformers or metroidvanias it’s a must play.
I wasn’t really into metroidvanias, but I still loved Hollow Knight and put hundreds of hours into it.
I certainly was when I was younger… Good ole Game Boy Color. Glad to see older genre’s are still going strong!
Wait… Older genres? Never thought of it that way but it is true that there are some new ones. When is a genre old? 20 years, 30 years?
The 2D sidescroller base that’s at the foundation of Metroidvanias is quite a bit older than that, though, so I think it’s fair to call it an older genre. Even though it is fairly evergreen.
Metroid (1986) and Castlevania (1986) comprise the portmanteau that is “Metroidvania”.
The Castlevania date is a little misleading, however.
Castlevania changed from a simple linear level-based side-scroller to the open world exploration, progression, and backtracking formula of the Metroidvania genre with Symphony of the Night in 1997.
Hm. I’d never considered that.
I mean “arcade” games are older than most internet users. FPS and MMORPGs older than half for sure.
Platformers are kind of arcade, but not just arcade. They defs hold a special place in the hearts of anyone who experienced the peak of online flash games.
I know VR is technical a platform not a sub-genre but there has to be something uniquely VR that is objectively a “younger genre”.
Would Pacman VR still be an arcade game? Not sure lol.
Dude, platformers like Hollow Knight were popular in arcades back in the 80s and d early 90s. Contra (87) and Metal Slug (96) are the first two that came to mind but there were tons of others.
They were literally arcade games and adapted to new mediums like home gaming systems and computers.
How long until it gets good? I spent about 90 minutes on it last week, because the Silksong hype was rolling hard and I didnt want to get left behind, but it just felt like fumbling around and nothing really happening.
Is it just not for me or did I not reach the good bits yet?
If you don’t like Hollow Knight by the time you get to the big tower in the center of the city, you aren’t going to like HK. Been a minute, but by then you should have one or two mobility skills and have fought 2 or 3 bosses.
The game REALLY opens up when you get even more mobility skills and has some of the best traversal in my opinion. And the bosses… I think a lot of the bosses are samey and meh (unless you fight the hard modes) but the “DLC” areas are REAL good.
But yeah. If you aren’t vibing by the time you are climbing the tower then you just don’t like it. And that is perfectly fine.
The biggest tip to newbies though: Listen for the sound of someone muttering and look for paper on the ground. That is how you find the map merchant. I think it is immensely stupid that you have to find the map merchant to get an area map but… that is the game.
I would say if you’re through Fungal Wastes and you’re not feeling it then it’s probably not for you. I usually don’t recommend the city as a decision point on the off chance someone stumbles into deepnest first. Once you go into Deepnest you can’t come back the same way, so you pretty much have to do a ring around the rosie and enter the city from the east. Which is a cool first time experience but definitely not for everyone.
It also doesn’t click for me at first but when it click it click. I have to spend i think about 1 or 2 hours playing it not enjoying it, and then the game just suck me in till i wander every corner of it, played it twice to get a good ending.
But if it doesn’t click, i think it just isn’t for you.
I’m enjoying following a walkthrough just to know where to go.
enjoying
For me, that point is when I’m frustrated enough by the game…
After the first boss fight. The game then removes your training wheels and you do whatever you want, in whatever order you want.
It tough at the beginning until you get the hang of it, like playing Doom on Nightmare mode.
Also, it’s punishingly difficult
The hype for silksong has been going so long that it’s become a meme🤡. Just because it’s not as obvious anymore doesn’t mean it no longer exists.
Unless someone brings it up during their next golf game, the executive class will literally never hear about this game.
I appreciate the class conscious sentiment… but this game has 500k players right now. So ~$10,000,000 in sales in 24 hours… for a game that probably had a budget under 200k.
It’s funny that Hollow Knight is also in top 20 on Steam right now with 50k players.
I doubt it was under $200k. Paying 3 devs for 7 years is likely $75-100k each per year, or around $700k on just one salary, which they paid with their sales from HK. Then they had to pay the composer, localizers, bug testers, etc etc. it’s definitely still low budget, but not as much as the first one.
Okay lets make it a 2 Million budget with 10Million sales in 24h. The point remains… greedy fucks are going to notice this.
There’s definitely a “hype train” and I’m not sure how you’re involved in the community at all and managed to miss it haha
Just trying to say nice things about the game you like eh
As I said I know nothing.
Hype trains by my definition are more like what you see with Call of Duty or AAA games… where it’s fucking everywhere.
The only thing I’m seeing is organic(afaict) hollow night posts from real fans.
I don’t even like the game…or really any of this style of games where you run back and forth over the same terrain over and over and over again for hours looking for a hole you haven’t been through yet.
But I do appreciate what is essentially a relic of the past: A game that is simple, beautiful (especially on OLED), inexpensive, can run on anything, runs completely offline, and doesn’t contain any ads or microtransactions or rootkits or accounts or spyware or invasive DRM. You literally just pay for the game and get the game, which is so insanely uncommon these days for games of this caliber.
.or really any of this style of games where you run back and forth over the same terrain over and over and over again for hours looking for a hole you haven’t been through yet.
HAAH me to.
I heard him, the DF brothers and Concerned Ape are all collaborating on a line of programmer desks.
Busted ass means farting lol, I think you meant busted their ass.
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Yes that’s what I said, did you read what I wrote?
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There’s a difference. See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bust+ass (ignore the first entry, it’s incorrect :))
I mean, yes, every studio wants to hit the jackpot and release a solid game that becomes a Movement that can fund about 8 years of development turning a stretch goal DLC into a full game.
Like, I get the intent. But all you did was say “devs should make good games”.
The difference is that devs arent the ones in control in most AAA studios.
Is it?
We have PLENTY of examples of why “made good video game” does not equate to “good at negotiating business contracts and having an HR team”. Blizzard being a “great” example of that.
Also: I know the meaning has long since died but Team Cherry are NOT a “AAA” studio. They are a small indie team with officially less than ten headcount (but that tends to not include contractors). They aren’t going to make a GTA or Call of Duty.
I dont understand what you’re trying to argue. The person you responded to made a point about Major studios trying to make a hit… but focusing on business principles over actual game production.
You responded by boiling it down to “Devs should make better games” which wasn’t close to approaching the point they were making.
My point was that devs are not always the ones in control, and trying to simplify a point about business majors running studios into the ground is somehow about the development team being bad is missing the point by a parser.
No one said Team Cherry was a AAA studio. At this point of the comment chain, no one had said anything about them at all until you brought it up. No one is trying to disparage your fanboyism.
…
This is a thread about Silksong. A game that is a sequel to Hollow Knight. Both were made by Team Cherry.
But sure. If every single major studio were actually a tiny indie studio that could be run indefinitely because of previous success AND required no corporate management at all and consisted entirely of Good People then we would live in a utopia.
Is this your first time on an internet forum? Or the internet in general? Topics often drift. Just because the post is about something doesn’t mean every single thing in the comments is going to be explicitly about that.
Steam (and PC in general) just lends itself to indie games more, which is good. It could do better, but overall there’s a lot of great games that get the recognition they deserve. Triple A finds most of it’s success on consoles, where they can easily market it on the front page of the console, rather than just on the store.
But PC is (unfortunately?) really getting mainstream now, so we are starting to see a lot morals thrown out the window by consumers just to play the latest AAA slop too.
The peak of my career also was definitely when we crashed Steam for a few hours during our EA launch - even though the Steam devs were prepared.
I’m also really happy that Silksong is getting so much love from players. The team behind it truly seems to deserve it.
I heard gog had issues too and apparently humble ran out of keys
Maybe they allocate a bit more resources before the obvious big games, and the surprise popularity of this one just caught them all off guard.
It was the most wish listed game on steam I don’t think it caught Steam off guard, Steam just doesn’t care. The servers break every summer sale as well and they’ve never tried to fix it.
Activision/Blizzard have frequently had game launches where their servers were unavailable due to demand.
But that’s probably more due to terrible network infrastructure, than overwhelming demand!
Ya, that’s where they crash their own server, people able to get the game but can never log in or find a match or something due to their own unprepareness. This one crash all the major storefront.
GoG has been having issues too but not as bad as Steam ironically
The majority of PC players must have bought it on Steam. I’d imagine something like 97%
11 dollars ? US dollars ? how does that cole to be ? It’s priced 18 euros in Mayotte, I imagine it’s the same price on mainland France but I haven’t checked
Regional pricing. Poor countries get lower prices so they could afford buying games and not just pirate them.
Ok this is great. I guess I don’t know where else the US dollar is used. For anyone else interested, TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_use_of_the_U.S._dollar?wprov=sfla1
I use USD to put it into perspective. Saying RM49 doesn’t have an immediate impact 😅
Activison: There is no such thing as too successful!
Every online retailer since this morning: Bet?
10 million copies is a huge understatement, it’ll surely sell a lot more than that.
What other platforms besides Steam, GOG, and Humble are there? Epic?
Edit: Oh, you mean for non-PC, I guess?
Yeah, PS, Xbox, and Nintendo all have server issue due to this.
“What other platforms are there?” “Oh, you mean for other platforms?”
Uuuh…
Originally I was assumeling only PC, I keep forgetting things like PlayStation even exist :)
Edit: oh, now I realize what I said that was so dumb. So that’s 2 dumbs. Go me!
Oh. So this might actually be a legit reason to do preorders, lol. I too got caught in payment progressing hell but I finally got it.
Not preordering is about waiting for reviews and bugfixes, isn’t it? If you’re gonna play on day one regardless, of course pre-order makes sense.
Even then it doesn’t make sense. There is no limited supply. Paying for nothing will never make sense
Paying your bills before the last due day is wasting money. Sure.
I said paying for nothing will never make sense. And it remains true. Don’t know who you meant to reply to, but what you said is very dumb
You said it does not make sense to pay for it before release. It does so you can play it immediately and are done with that task.
All it does is save 30s. You would still have issues downloading the game due to Steam servers being swamped
I see, you misread my or someone else’s comment. Please try again.
Also, I hope this exchange leads you to realize you get billed for services you use. You will end up in jail if you don’t
He has at least initial impressions. Some (Too many) AAA games will go mostly negative in less than an hour.
Yea, when i saw they weren’t doing pre-orders i 100% expected steam to have some kind of issues on launch day.
Yea, this has always been a legitimately good reason for digital pre-orders to exist, if people can buy games before release it really lessens the blow. I think the real issue with pre-orders is the dumb bonuses and such, really
I think preordering a game 2-3 days before release is fine. Preordering when the game is announced, isn’t releasing for 6+ months, gets delayed for months (probably a few times), and/or sits in beta for 2+ years is extremely damaging to the gaming industry for the players and the teams working on these games.
Curious to see what you think is the dangerous part for the business side. I see preorders as this holdover from a time when physical media was king and scarcity could (and sometimes did) prevent day one purchases. It certainly makes less sense now for consumers unless you must have the bonuses (if any).
Not so much the business but the employees
Yeah, I’m glad most indie games don’t do that. My wife was surprised I wanted to preorder a game with no bonuses, I think she has worked for corporate a little too long.
Played the first half hour of it and love it. Can’t wait for the weekend to really dig into it.
I got it into my cart!
I can’t open my cart, but it’s in there
Luckily it is not a finite resource.
New Team Cherry silkpost:
We’ve run out of Silksong stock!
Please check back in [seven years].
See you soon!
actually, I can’t buy it on humble bundle right now, I think they ran out of steam keys.
Just genuinely curious, why buy from humblebundle?
Seems they’re back now
But muh preorder!
Lucky you, Im getting an error when trying to add it to my cart right now
Edit: Steam servers are down again, I’m back to getting the “Something is wrong” page. Aaaaa!!!
Same, right back to it but now there’s a ghost item in my cart. Maybe this is worse than having it
“we’re going to need 4000 more pods”
According to fireb0rn, he had no problem buying it on GOG.
0 drm, and you can play entirely offline. Gog’s def the better choice here. How’re you going to play silksong after gestures broadly goes to shit?
Well gog doesn’t have a Linux client though, while steam really does a lot for Linux gaming. I used to prefer gog but I’m back to steam for now.
This happened to me as well. I used to buy anything I could from Gog, but after getting a Steam Deck and switching to Linux on my home PC I went back to Steam due to Gog’s refusal to support Linux.
I personally prefer using a browser, so it’s to my preference. Though I don’t like gog’s interface much.
Seamless steam deck support is my guess
You can still play Steam games without Steam. They only put basic protection on the files that can be very easily bypassed (and yes, it’s legal). See Steam Goldberg emu
And even that basic protection is optional. There are a few games on Steam that have no DRM at all, Witcher 3 (but for some reason not the remaster) and Baldurs Gate 3 for example.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Buying on GOG is always the play whenever the option is available.
Can you believe how compact the download is? They spent that long building in the age of incredibly bloated games, and it would fit on a game disc from back when my voice hadn’t cracked yet.
And despite being a mere handful of gigs, it still broke every major platform on release.
Fuck, what a great day.
Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.
Agree with this - I wanted to love Hollow Knight so much, and there was a lot I did love about it, but I really struggle with that specific type of 2d platformer.
It’s not just the platforming, either; the enemies are incredibly well-designed to slay you. I had gotten quite far and took a break for months and then when I returned to it when I was in the difficult, bottom-left region of the map, my skill had deteriorated so much from my pause that I died within 10 min. Then I died again when trying to reclaim my last corpse’s stash, which made me perma-rage-quit the game.
It is just so diabolically difficult that by that point I didn’t find it fun any more. There is just something about melee Metroidvanias that I can’t stand; I’ve tried many. I absolutely love the relentless treacherousness of Noita, which somehow feels so different when you can keep your distance when firing at foes.
Yep, I’ve never had major problems with platforming on HK. I do have some NES platformer background, but the bosses are beating me up countless times. Same happened with Metroid Dread, didn’t have big issues with previous Metroids but Dread bosses had become insanely difficult compared to the former games. I guess there’s nowadays some soulslike crossover trend happening on metroidvanias causing this melee difficulty ramp-up. I haven’t played souls games so it has came as a shock for me.
Anyway, I have found workarounds in HK. Whenever I get stuck on some boss I keep exploring the map further and find powerups which then make the fighting difficulty seem more balanced again. Luckily HK allows really versatile nonlinear progression.
The one man I know who loves video games the most - he loves the history, he knows the names in the industry, he reads critiques, he has an entire room where he keeps his game library (and will talk at length about preservation and physical media) - is not actually good at playing them. He is helplessly enamored with games as art, despite that he can’t really beat anyone at his favourite games. It might be plain distractibility or some form of dyspraxia, but it has not lessened his pleasure. I used to smirk when we were young, but I think he has sense on his side.
We all have our thing. I love From Soft games even though I suck at them. I do alright in platformers though.
Gog’s def the better choice here.
Depends on your region. GOG doesn’t have regional pricing.
I just got it a half hour ago (2025-09-04 ~3PM UTC) on GOG and can confirm – no issues at that time!
I was able to get it on gog without issue as well.
I spent 1 hour after release trying to fight Steam and then just bought it on GOG with no problem whatsoever.
Playing the linux build on Steam Deck and it runs great.
it’s still broken for me. i literally run the hollow knight community. i am gonna be so spoiled on literally everything. send help.
still broken for me too, it’s not just you
you’d think an hour and 20 would be enough time to let things be less broken
Once a server goes down they have to deal with the “thundering herd problem”. When you fail to get the game you keep retrying, which generates even more requests than the initial number that made the server go down in the first place.
What is Hollow Knight silksong?
The highly-anticipated sequel to 2017’s indie hit video game Hollow Knight. 2-time winner of “Most Anticipated Game” at the Unity Awards, and 3-time winner of “Most Wanted Game” at the Golden Joystick Awards. The most-wish-listed game on Steam, up until its release today.
Silksong is the highly anticipated sequel to the original game Hollow Knight. It’s a metroidvania game with a cult following. The sequel has been in development for years, and people are super hyped for its release, proven even more so by the fact that an industry giant like steam not being able to keep up with demand
Wait it’s a full sequel not another dlc?
in the very beginning it was planned to be just a dlc, but for many reasons they decided to go make it a full game
I just bought it. I have an almost complete hollow knight save on switch. I wanted to play silksong on ps5 so I started a new file to prepare, assuming it was a dlc. Looks like I didn’t need to do that
Yeah… It won’t help you. You’re Hornet, not the Hollow Knight. The controls might be the same, but the skills don’t transfer
I replayed the original too, it was enjoyable, but easy after completing the path of pain years ago.
I’m getting my ass kicked in Silksong, and it’s great
Well at least you got a refresher. Hollow knight had a few dlcs/updates all of which were free.
A mediocre sidescroller with a cult following for some reason
I’m gonna be real with you: I don’t like Dark Souls. It felt poorly designed and obtuse with no payoff. But, it took me a long time to learn it’s completely unconstructive to bash it in places where people are admiring it. Whether I like it or not, other people do.
If you must, give a word of caution so people know what to expect. “It’s a Metroidvania, I didn’t like it because it’s very black and white, and goes hard on difficulty.”
lol - who’s doing SRE?
Download failed 4 times in a row from GOG. I was able to get it like 20mns later. It’s beautiful.
Just torrent it after purchasing, haha.
(On my wishlist for years)
Well now I don’t feel like playing it.