Square Enix’s Hollow Knight Silksong Silence Is Reviving Ori Runs

The Wait That Won’t End

Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced in February 2019. Six years later, Square Enix and Team Cherry have offered almost nothing concrete – no release window, no gameplay deep dives, no reassuring developer blog posts. What started as anticipation has curdled into something stranger: a fandom that has turned silence itself into a running joke, a coping mechanism, and, increasingly, a reason to revisit other games in the same genre.

The metroidvania genre is tight-knit. Players who love one entry tend to orbit the same handful of titles, and when a highly anticipated release goes quiet for long enough, those players start looking sideways at the shelf. Right now, they are landing on the Ori series – Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel Ori and the Will of the Wisps – and the numbers on both games are climbing.

Silksong’s Silence Is Doing the Marketing for Other Games

There is a specific kind of community behavior that kicks in when a sequel disappears into development limbo. Forums start threads titled “what to play while waiting.” Subreddits dedicated to Silksong fill with recommendations. YouTube algorithm channels pump out “games like Hollow Knight” videos with view counts that spike every time Team Cherry goes quiet for another few months. The Ori games sit near the top of every one of those lists.

This is not accidental. Ori and the Blind Forest launched in 2015 and Ori and the Will of the Wisps followed in 2020, both developed by Moon Studios and published by Microsoft. They share Hollow Knight’s obsessive attention to movement feel, tight platforming, and emotional visual storytelling. A Hollow Knight fan dropping into either Ori title is not settling for something lesser – they are playing a game that scratches almost exactly the same itch. When Silksong hype has nowhere to go, it flows directly into Moon Studios’ back catalog.

Steam activity data tells the story plainly. Both Ori titles see recurring spikes in concurrent players and new reviews that correlate directly with Silksong news cycles – or, more precisely, with the absence of them. Every non-announcement at a major showcase, every Developer Direct that skips Team Cherry, sends a fresh wave of players toward alternatives. The Will of the Wisps in particular benefits because its 2020 release kept it fresher in the algorithmic memory of storefronts.

The pattern mirrors what happened to other beloved sequels stuck in silence. Sony’s Bloodborne PC port silence has been reigniting PS5 runs of the original in much the same way – anticipation with nowhere to land loops back and amplifies interest in what already exists. The psychology is consistent: when a sequel cannot be played, the predecessor and its genre neighbors benefit.

Why Ori Specifically

The metroidvania genre has plenty of strong options – Hollow Knight itself, Axiom Verge, Metroid Dread, Blasphemous. So why are the Ori games pulling the largest share of the displaced Silksong audience? The answer comes down to tone and feel. Hollow Knight is cold, melancholy, and deliberately obtuse. Ori matches it on movement quality but wraps everything in warmth and emotional clarity. For a player who has already completed Hollow Knight and is waiting on Silksong, Ori functions as the gentler companion piece – familiar in structure, different enough emotionally to feel fresh.

Moon Studios also built both Ori titles around a movement system that rewards mastery in ways that feel adjacent to Hornet’s expected moveset in Silksong. Players speculating about Silksong’s acrobatic combat naturally gravitate toward games that already deliver on that promise. Ori and the Will of the Wisps in particular – with its fluid combat additions over the original – feels like the closest available approximation of what Silksong footage suggested the game would be.

Team Cherry’s Communication Problem

Team Cherry is a tiny studio. Three core developers built Hollow Knight, and Silksong has grown into something significantly larger in scope. The silence likely reflects genuine development complexity rather than indifference to the audience. That context is understandable. It does not, however, change how the silence functions in the market.

Every month without a Silksong update is a month where the genre conversation happens without Team Cherry’s voice in it. Other studios fill that space. Moon Studios announced an entirely new game, No Rest for the Wicked, moved it through early access, and built its own audience during the window Silksong has been absent. The Ori games have been discounted, featured in bundles, and surfaced by recommendation algorithms repeatedly in that same window. Team Cherry is not losing fans – Silksong still generates enormous online engagement – but the gap is actively building other studios’ momentum.

The practical consequence is that whenever Silksong does release, it will launch into a market where a segment of its most natural audience has already deepened its relationship with competing titles. Some of those players may have completed both Ori games, discovered Moon Studios’ broader work, and formed loyalties that did not exist six years ago. Silksong will still sell. The question is whether Team Cherry recognizes how much ground the silence has quietly handed to others.

Where the Fandom Is Right Now

Hollow Knight Silksong communities have developed a gallows humor around the wait that is almost impressive in its creativity. Memes about Silksong releasing “when Half-Life 3 comes out” circulate alongside genuine frustration. The joke runs so deep that any mention of Silksong in an unrelated context – a background detail in a developer stream, a category name in an awards show – triggers elaborate community speculation within minutes. The fandom has not gone cold. It has simply redirected its energy.

That redirected energy lands somewhere, and right now it keeps landing in Ori. Review pages for both games are filling with comments that reference the wait. Players are finishing Will of the Wisps and posting that they started it “to cope with no Silksong news.” Moon Studios, whether deliberately or not, has positioned its back catalog as the official waiting room for Team Cherry’s most anticipated release. At some point, Team Cherry will ship Silksong. Until then, Ori keeps collecting the players who cannot wait any longer to play something.