After waking up early and standing in line with dozens of people to buy a Switch 2, the first game I downloaded and played wasn’t Mario Kart World. I didn’t bother with any other Nintendo games that got boosted for the new console, either. You see, rumors had been floating around that perhaps we’d finally get a glimpse at Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to the 2017 indie Metroidvania where you explore a dilapidated kingdom of insects. Whispers of this sort happened every so often, as long-suffering fans of the franchise know. But this time felt different.

Sure enough, a couple of days later, hope was renewed during the Xbox Game Showcase as Microsoft displayed a few seconds of Silksong gameplay footage to promote their hunker of a portable, the ROG Xbox Ally. The game, which is slated to release sometime in 2025, will bless all major platforms and be available from day one on Xbox Game Pass. That’s all well and good, except I never finished the original Hollow Knight to begin with.

I’ve tried. I’ve bought the melancholy exploration game multiple times. There’s at least one save file with over a dozen hours out there, lost amid multiple generations of upgrades, data transfers, and redownloads. But while I was immediately captivated when I first tried the game out in 2017, the reality was that I couldn’t a handle a game like that just yet.

By 2017, we’d gotten three major Dark Souls games and a variety of other brutal “Soulslike” experiences, many of which I would try only to end........

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