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J<\/span>ust one game has been dominating the gaming conversation over the past week: Hollow Knight Silksong, an eerie, atmospheric action game from a small developer in Australia called Team Cherry. It was finally released last Thursday after many years in development, and everybody is loving it. Hollow Knight was so popular that it crashed multiple gaming storefronts. With continual game cancellations, expensive failures and layoffs at bigger studios, this is the kind of indie triumph the industry loves to celebrate at the moment. But Silksong hasn\u2019t come out of nowhere, and its success would not be easily reproducible for any other game, indie or not.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re wondering what this game actually is<\/em>, then imagine a dark, mostly underground labyrinth of bug nests and abandoned caverns that gradually yields its secrets to a determined player. The art style and sound are minimalist and creepy (though not scary) in a Tim Burton kind of way, the enemy bugs are fierce and hard to defeat, your player character is another bug with a small, sharp needle-like blade. It blends elements of Metroid, Dark Souls and older challenging platform games, and the unique aesthetic and perfect <\/em>precision of the controls are what make it stand out from a swarm of similar games. I rinsed the first Hollow Knight and I\u2019m captivated by Silksong. I\u2019ve spent 15 hours on it in three days, and it has made my thumbs hurt.<\/p>\n The first Hollow Knight, released in 2017, was a slow-burn surprise hit. It was crowdfunded via Kickstarter in 2014, and Silksong was one of its stretch goals: originally it was supposed to be an expansion for the game, but as the studio\u2019s co-founders, Ari Gibson and William Pellen, told Bloomberg in a recent interview, they were simply having too much fun to stop adding to it. Eventually, over seven years, it became the full-blown 20-plus-hour game that everyone is now enjoying.<\/p>\n How could a small team afford to spend all this time on a single game? Well: the first Hollow Knight sold 15m copies. Any developer would dream of working with the resultant resources. Good games do take a long time to make, even when there\u2019s no mismanagement or other development drama getting in the way. Most smaller-scale game developers are constantly seeking funding from investors or publishers who then (understandably) impose timescales far less generous than what Team Cherry has been working with.<\/p>\n <\/span>Knight\u2019s tale \u2026 Hollow Knight: Silksong<\/span> Photograph: Team Cherry<\/p>\n The other unique thing about Silksong is the way in which hype has built to a fever pitch over the last several years. The game became so mysterious that it turned into a meme: people have been spamming the chat and the comments of every single game showcase or news event with the words \u201cWhere\u2019s Silksong?\u201d for years. Presumably millions of people who never played the first Hollow Knight have been exposed to it in this way. I\u2019ve never seen another indie game achieve this level of notoriety before it was even released. Such was Silksong\u2019s legend that when its release date was announced a few weeks ago several other games were sent scurrying from its wake, delayed by their developers to avoid getting lost in the noise. Pity those games that weren\u2019t<\/em> delayed: as VGC points out, Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam.<\/p>\n As proven years ago by Duke Nukem Forever, no amount of free publicity could have saved Silksong if it had turned out to be rubbish. Thankfully, it\u2019s excellent. It\u2019s the kind of game whose appeal perhaps isn\u2019t immediately evident; my partner, watching me spend a full hour trying to bounce my character off a series of punishingly placed balloons to ascend a horrible gauntlet of flying things, looked mildly concerned for my wellbeing. (Something in me just won\u2019t let me quit when I come up against sadistically challenging games.) But as millions of players are now simultaneously discovering, it\u2019s exactly the repeated failures that makes the rush of success so invigorating.<\/p>\n One more thing about Silksong: spare a thought for the people who, in these moments where it feels like the whole world has been swept up by a game, simply do not enjoy it. Our games correspondent Keith Stuart is one of those unfortunates. \u201cIt is rare for me to be completely bewildered by a game\u2019s success, and I know I\u2019m in a tiny minority here, but I don\u2019t get Hollow Knight or Silksong,\u201d he says. \u201cTo me, they\u2019re serviceable Metroidvania platformers with a very familiar alien organic aesthetic and tough boss battles. However, the games lack the glitchy, idiosyncratic charm of, say Cave Story or Animal Well, and the luscious visual confidence of, well, Castlevania or Super Metroid. I played Silksong for several hours over the weekend and, although it\u2019s fine \u2013 it\u2019s good<\/em> \u2013 I still felt as if I was being gaslit by the entire industry.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Catch \u2019em all \u2026 Pok\u00e9mon Legends Arceus.<\/span> Photograph: Nintendo<\/p>\n Given that every other game has run screaming from Silksong, there\u2019s not much else to recommend this week \u2013 so I\u2019m here with a belated recommendation for Pok\u00e9mon Legends Arceus<\/strong>, a game I slept on when it was released in 2022. This is largely because it was really ropey then, chugging along as you ran around its open fields searching for creatures; its rubbish performance undermined the freedom and possibility the designers clearly intended. But it runs so much better on the Switch 2.<\/p>\n Casting you as a Pok\u00e9mon field researcher rather than a trainer, it has you exploring whole regions full of free-roaming Pok\u00e9mon, sneaking up on them to throw Pok\u00e9balls or hiding in long grass to avoid doing battle with intimidating alpha creatures. The semi-historical setting is a welcome novelty, too \u2013 you\u2019re thrown back in time to an Edo-esque period where humans and Pok\u00e9mon are just learning how they might live together. I have been playing this every evening with my sons, both of them excitedly leafing through their Pok\u00e9mon encyclopedia books every time we spot a new creature. It satisfies my ageing-millennial draw towards bird-watching and my inner child\u2019s enduring love for Pok\u00e9mon.<\/p>\n Available on: <\/strong>Nintendo Switch\/Switch 2 <\/span>The name\u2019s \u2026 007 First Light.<\/span> Photograph: IO Interactive<\/p>\n The first gameplay footage of Hitman developer IO Interactive\u2019s Bond game, 007 First Light<\/strong>, debuted last week. There\u2019s a whole half-hour of action, spycraft and (naturally) driving, and it\u2019s looking great. Admittedly, my only connection to Bond is GoldenEye on the N64, but I am intrigued to play a Bond game that has you mingling at parties and digging for information as well as shooting at bad guys and getting into car chases.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Earlier this year, an electronics reseller came into possession of a trove of development consoles and cartridges<\/strong> from Sega\u2019s old Basingstoke offices, bought as part of a clearance. In July, he was raided by police, reports Time Extension. The seller was arrested and the collection of prototype games and consoles were seized. This has sparked a fascinating series of events, as the legal ownership of these pieces of gaming history remains unclear; the electronics reseller, who says he has received no clarification from Sega or the police, suspects that they may already have been destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Take-Two was in talks to rescue the recently cancelled Xbox reboot of spy game Perfect Dark<\/strong>, reports Bloomberg \u2013 but unfortunately Microsoft still cancelled the project and its developer, the Initiative, has been shuttered. Co-developer Crystal Dynamics also had layoffs. Crystal Dynamics has had some terrible luck. After two good Tomb Raider games in 2013 and 2015, it released a middling third one (Shadow of the Tomb Raider) in 2018 and an Avengers game that famously underperformed in 2020. It was then sold to the notorious Embracer Group in 2022, and has struggled to get an original game over the line ever since.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Pushing Buttons<\/span><\/p>\n Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/span>Fiendishly difficult \u2026 Dark Souls.<\/span> Photograph: Bandai Namco<\/p>\n Firstly, thank you to everyone who wrote in to wish me well after I mentioned that I\u2019ve been recovering from an injury in a previous newsletter; I\u2019m getting better, very slowly but surely. One of those people was reader Cordelia<\/strong>, who asks:<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you feel about using walkthroughs and hints when a game becomes a bit sticky? I\u2019ll be honest, I feel a bit guilty about it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n This is an apt question for this week\u2019s edition because Hollow Knight: Silksong<\/strong> is really, really<\/em> hard, and giving in and looking up a map or Googling for an answer could be the difference between persevering and giving up on the game. I\u2019m used to playing games without any help: because I\u2019m often playing games for review, there are <\/em>no walkthroughs. But I am most certainly not above reading a walkthrough, and I especially appreciate the guide writers out there who\u2019ll give you a nudge in the right direction before just straight-up showing you the answer.<\/p>\n Many modern games are communal and collaborative, and sharing experiences and hints is a natural part of that; few people could get through something like Dark Souls<\/strong> alone, and indeed the game is designed to facilitate cooperation, because it takes the edge off what would otherwise be extreme difficulty. I often look up walkthroughs and guides after I\u2019m done playing a game, too, to see what I might have missed, or whether there\u2019s some secret ending; I didn\u2019t touch a guide while I was playing Blue Prince<\/strong> because I knew it would spoil my fun, but the second I got to the end I was boning up on all the extra puzzles and content that I definitely wasn\u2019t going to have time to experience.<\/p>\n I also look up guides when a game is scary: I\u2019m not ashamed to admit that I played the first Last of Us<\/strong> with a text walkthrough so that I knew when fungal zombies were going to jump out at me, and when I could relax. And I also used to rely on guides back when I was a teenager, when I\u2019d import games from Japan but couldn\u2019t read what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Bless the tireless efforts of the GameFAQs authors of the past, who got me through several Japanese PS2 RPGs.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got a question for Question Block \u2013 or anything else to say about the newsletter \u2013 hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just one game has been dominating the gaming conversation over the past week: Hollow Knight Silksong, an eerie, atmospheric action game from a small developer in Australia called Team Cherry. It was finally released last Thursday after many years in development, and everybody is loving it. Hollow Knight was so popular that it crashed multiple<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4246,5669,378,6082,11611,7915,7349,11612,11613,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-20518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-bedlam","9":"tag-caused","10":"tag-games","11":"tag-gaming","12":"tag-hollow","13":"tag-hype","14":"tag-justified","15":"tag-knight","16":"tag-silksong","17":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What to play<\/h2>\n
Estimated playtime: <\/strong>30-plus hours<\/p>\nWhat to read<\/h2>\n
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Question Block<\/h2>\n