The Triple-I Initiative's debut showcase had a lot of great games lined up. Personally, I'm psyched out of my gourd for Slay the Spire 2, but I'm also eyeing up Rogue Prince of Persia, an unexpected announcement that's wall-running right up my alley. Silksong fans, however, are none too pleased.
Some context: Silksong, the successor to indie metroidvania Hollow Knight, was announced way back in 2019. It's been five whole years of waiting for scraps from Team Cherry's table, and while hope shone on the horizon after Silksong was shown off at an event dedicated to games releasing in the next 12 months, it simply wasn't to be.
Silksong didn't make an appearance during the Triple-I Initiative—which isn't a problem. The problem, if you ask the community right now, is how the showcase 'teased' it via a tongue-in-cheek loading screen tip during its countdown timer: "What's the name of this highly-anticipated metroidvania with an insect again? It looks cool!"
- The cake was a lie, but Silksong 'is real, progressing and will release' say devs, after flurry of conspiracy theories revealed to be a 'nothingburger'
- The Silksong hive is buzzing over a dev tweet that sees a chocolate cake, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Imagine Dragons all pointing with red string to the April Switch 2 Nintendo Direct
Cue an understandable freak-out on the game's subreddit: "CODE RED I REPEAT CODE RED THIS IS NOT A DRILL." Unfortunately, yes, it was. The reaction was, uh, this:
Over on Twitter, meanwhile, the community has been flooding into the showcase's tweets with a rallying cry of "Skong", which is a portmanteau of 'Silk' and 'song', and also the noise I think you might make after being hit over the head with a large brick.
Listen, I get it. The wait has been painful, and it can be read as a cynical move to namedrop a game during your waiting screen and then not deliver on it. However, I do want to point out that almost every other loading screen message was delivered with Triple-I's tongue firmly lodged in its cheek—here's a grab-bag selection of 'em:
- "diiid yuou klnow? thuis lpoadfing tilp was grenerrated byy AI"
- "let's take a moment together to watch how hypnotic this triple-I logo animation is. so smoooooth. so satisfying."
- "did you know? the first traces of the 'what is and isn't indie?' debate were found carved on a granodiorite stele found in egypt near rosetta in 1799"
Either these loading screens are bits, or I'm about to learn something new about the history of ancient Egypt and videogames.
It's easy to look for any port in a storm when you're lost in the sea of waiting for your favourite videogame to get its sequel, but to gently offer some perspective: I think projecting five years of hopes onto a jokey "loading screen tip" during an indie showcase was probably a bad idea from the outset.
Silksong still doesn't have a concrete release date, alas—though considering it was meant to have one last year, the wait is probably close to being over. Probably.
