Nintendo’s Hollow Knight: Silksong Silence Is Reviving Ori Runs

The Wait That Sends Players Elsewhere

Hollow Knight: Silksong has become gaming’s most famous ghost. Announced in February 2019 as a follow-up to Team Cherry’s critically celebrated Hollow Knight, the game has spent years cycling through hype spikes and radio silence, appearing briefly in Nintendo Directs only to vanish again without a release date. The pattern has repeated enough times that the Silksong community has developed its own dark humor around it – fan-made memes treat each Nintendo showcase as a potential trap, and subreddits dedicated to the game have filled with equal parts genuine anticipation and exhausted jokes about waiting forever.

What that prolonged silence has done, almost as a side effect, is push a meaningful number of players back toward other precision platformers from the same generation. Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, are quietly logging stronger engagement numbers on Steam and Xbox platforms right now. Players hunting for something with similar atmospheric weight, tight movement mechanics, and emotionally loaded world-building are finding that the Ori series checks every one of those boxes – and unlike Silksong, it actually exists and is complete.

Why Ori Fits the Silksong-Shaped Hole

The surface comparison between Silksong and the Ori games is obvious: both live in the Metroidvania-adjacent space where exploration, movement upgrades, and environmental storytelling do most of the heavy lifting. But the deeper reason Ori runs are spiking right now is about mood. Hollow Knight built its reputation partly on atmosphere – the melancholy of Hallownest, the weight of its lore, the feeling that the world existed long before the player arrived. Ori delivers something tonally different but emotionally comparable. Moon Studios’ games feel sorrowful and beautiful in equal measure, and players who have been primed by years of Silksong anticipation are emotionally ready for exactly that register.

Will of the Wisps in particular is drawing attention. Released in 2020, it refined almost everything the first game established – movement became more expressive, combat gained a sharpness the original lacked, and the visual design pushed into territory that still holds up against anything releasing today. Speedrunning communities have noticed the uptick too, with Ori categories seeing renewed activity on Speedrun.com and fresh tutorial content appearing on YouTube targeting players who are new to the series. That kind of community re-engagement does not happen accidentally. It happens when a game fills a specific need at a specific moment.

The Silksong wait has also reinforced something about how players now think about Metroidvanias as a genre. A few years ago, the conversation centered almost entirely on what was coming next – Hollow Knight’s success had generated enormous appetite for spiritual successors and follow-ups. Now, with Silksong still absent and other anticipated entries in adjacent genres similarly delayed, there is a growing tendency to look backward rather than forward. Players are cataloguing what they missed or half-finished rather than holding out for something new. The Ori games, being polished and relatively short by modern RPG standards, fit perfectly into that revisit mentality.

Microsoft’s Game Pass availability has helped significantly. Both Ori titles have been on Game Pass for years, meaning the barrier to entry for anyone on Xbox or PC is essentially zero. A player who bounces off a Silksong thread, feels the familiar deflation of no news, and opens their Game Pass library can be inside Ori and the Blind Forest within minutes. That frictionless access is doing real work here, turning ambient Silksong frustration into active Ori playtime without requiring any financial commitment from the player.

Team Cherry’s Communication Problem

Team Cherry has said very little about Silksong’s development status, and that silence has consequences beyond just fan impatience. When a studio goes quiet for extended stretches after a high-profile announcement, the discourse around their game does not go quiet with it. Instead it accelerates into speculation, rumor cycles, and eventually a kind of ambient grief where players begin treating the game as vaporware while still secretly hoping. That emotional pattern is exhausting, and exhausted fans look for relief – which is precisely what a completed, polished game like Ori and the Will of the Wisps provides.

There is also the question of what prolonged silence does to a game’s eventual launch window. Silksong, whenever it does release, will face a community that has spent years processing the wait. Some players will arrive overloaded with expectations that no game could realistically meet. Others will have moved on entirely, their appetite satisfied by the alternatives they found during the silence. The Ori revival is one visible symptom of that second group forming.

The Speedrun Angle Nobody Saw Coming

One of the more specific places where Ori’s renewed popularity is showing up is in speedrunning. Both games have established categories with active leaderboards, but the Silksong conversation has been driving fresh runners into the Ori community who might otherwise have waited for a new game to learn. Speedrunning a Metroidvania requires deep mechanical investment – understanding movement quirks, routing logic, and the invisible architecture of a game’s physics. Players who intended to pour that energy into Silksong are redirecting it somewhere with actual content to engage with.

Will of the Wisps has a movement system that rewards exactly the kind of obsessive mastery speedrunners crave. The bash ability, the launch mechanic, and the way aerial momentum chains together create a skill ceiling high enough to justify months of dedicated practice. Runners who discover this after arriving from the Silksong community tend to stay, because the game keeps offering new layers of complexity the deeper you go. Several Ori content creators have explicitly mentioned Silksong discourse in their recent videos as context for why they are covering the game again now.

This pattern – sequel silence reviving interest in a previous entry or spiritual predecessor – has become recognizable enough that it almost functions as a marketing strategy, even when unintentional. The Ori games are benefiting from zero effort on Microsoft or Moon Studios’ part. The traffic is arriving organically, pushed there by a competitor’s absence.

What This Means for Silksong’s Window

The longer Silksong remains unannounced, the more permanently some of its potential audience relocates to other games. This is not catastrophic for Team Cherry – Hollow Knight has a devoted enough following that Silksong will launch to enormous attention whenever it arrives. But the shape of that attention is changing. A portion of the players who would have arrived at launch with fresh eyes and unburdened expectations have now spent years inside other games’ communities, building loyalty elsewhere.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps, specifically, benefits from being a complete creative statement. It does not need Silksong to be late. It does not need any external condition. It just needs players to find it, and right now those players are finding it in volume precisely because they went looking for something to fill a gap.

The real question hanging over all of this is whether Silksong, if and when it releases, will need to compete with the reputation Ori has rebuilt during the wait – not just the memory of it, but a freshly activated fanbase that has spent 2025 running sub-hour Will of the Wisps categories and arguing about whether the bash or launch is the more expressive movement tool.