If Team Cherry does make another Hollow Knight game after Silksong, it would ideally sit right alongside its brother and sister as a companion piece, not a continuation that you'll need to play previous games to enjoy.
Studio leads Ari Gibson and William Pellen discussed the Hollow Knight series in an interview with the ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image), which was published in a paperback guide available on the ACMI store.
Asked by Jini Maxwell, co-curator of the ACMI's Game Worlds exhibition, about how they would define success for Hollow Knight: Silksong, Gibson and Pellen initially agree that "releasing it with no major bugs" would be nice. The game's done quite well on that front; progress-blocking bugs were scarce, and at launch the biggest problem was actually flawed Chinese localization that's since been updated.
Pellen says, "The 'goal' is already kind of done, I think. We had an idea for a game that we wanted to make, and we wanted to make the best version of that game, a version of the game that satisfies the theme, the best version we can make."
Gibson concurs, saying the goal for Silksong was to make "a game that can stand alongside Hollow Knight." He says Silksong "kind of branches off in a nice way; I think they really complement each other."
Gibson adds that, "It's nice developing something where there's no tech race." You might not arrive at this conclusion yourself given the immense scope and complexity of Silksong, to say nothing of its long development period, but he reckons, "We're not trying to push boundaries; we have a very set style, it's pretty simple."
In a real eyebrow-raiser, Gibson adds: "I don't think you'd feel like you lost anything, traveling back to the original game after playing Silksong. And if there were ever others, we would hope that they all follow that same pattern – that the series is all games that just exist alongside one another."
Team Cherry has already flirted with plans to add yet more content to Silksong, seemingly just as Hollow Knight received hefty DLCs post-launch, but the mention of a continued "series" of Hollow Knight games still perks my ears right up. It never seemed in doubt given the team's enthusiastic interest and the series' success, but it's interesting to hear speculative ambitions for potential future entries. If we're lucky, perhaps the Skong faithful will get their Quirrel-themed installment after all.
