Silkposting and Rabbit Holes
Mark Honeychurch - 1st September 2025
Silksong
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, a newly-formed small games development company from Adelaide, Australia called Team Cherry released the computer game Hollow Knight back in 2017. Hollowknight is a game in the “Metroidvania” genre, meaning that the core gameplay mechanics are very similar to both the Metroid Prime and Castlevania games franchises - created by Nintendo and Konami respectively. It’s basically a 2D side-scrolling game with large levels, where the main character explores parts of the map, gathering special abilities on the way that allow for more exploration, collection of the resources needed to fight level bosses, etc. Here’s a screenshot from my playthrough of the game:
Several DLCs (Downloadable Content packs - extensions to the original game) were released over the year or more after release, as these had been stretch goals for the original Kickstarter campaign (extras that are included if certain levels of funding are reached). One of the promised stretch goals was the addition of a second playable character, Hornet. But, as development of the Hornet DLC progressed, the developers realised that there was going to be enough content to instead release it as a separate, standalone game. This game was given the name Silksong, and announced in early 2019.
Soon after, Team Cherry went quiet while they worked on the new game. And this silence has lasted for six years! There have been several third-party announcements that the game would be released within a certain timeframe (mainly through companies who make consoles that the game will be playable on), and each time those timeframes have come and gone with no release of the game.
This cycle of hype and disappointment, coupled with the radio silence from Team Cherry, has left an interesting vacuum that fans of the original game have been trying to fill with any information they can find. Some have raised concerns that Silksong might be another example of “vapourware”. Others have been happy to fill that vacuum with false information, including a variant of “shitposting” that has come to be known as Silkposting. If you’re unfamiliar with the two terms I’ve used here in quotes, here’s a quick primer courtesy of Wikipedia:
Vapourware
In the computer industry, vapourware is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled… Vapourware is often announced months or years before its purported release, with few details about its development being released.
Shitposting
In Internet culture, shitposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is of “aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality”. Shitposts are generally intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort.
Silkposting
Most of the conversation about Silksong happens in the r/Silksong subreddit, and this conversation includes a lot of jokes about the length of time that there’s been no news about Silksong. There are jokes about other lengthy events that have happened before Silksong’s release, like people going to university and graduating, or people being diagnosed with and treated for cancer. There are also self-deprecating jokes about Silksong fans being clowns because they’re grasping at straws in their hope for a timely release of the new game.
The pinnacle of these posts is a genre of post known as Silkposting, where posters attempt to make the most realistic fake evidence that, for some reason or another, the game is never going to be released, or that it’s not going to be very good. Maybe it’ll cost US$100, or even $120. It might contain adverts, loot boxes or worse. What if it’s been delayed, or might never be released? Has the Team Cherry office closed down? Are the developers even working on the game, or are they focused on other projects instead?
There have been so many of these posts (some of them quite convincing) that internet essayist Dan Olson recently gave an hour-long talk on the topic at a Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) event:
Rabbit Holes
But where’s the skeptical angle, you might be asking by now. Well, since the days of QAnon I’ve been interested in an idea that I read about in an article written by a puzzle designer whose job was to design in-person treasure hunts and puzzle events. He talked about how, early on in his career, he made the clues he left at a location very subtle, but he quickly realised that, unless the clues are obvious, people will tend to find their own anomalies and treat them as if they’re meaningful. He gave an example of a team trying to solve a treasure hunt who were sent into a basement. The real clue wasn’t obvious enough, and so the team noticed some staining on the concrete floor and started trying to make sense of it, as if that was the clue they were looking for. They were seeing meaning where there was no meaning.
I go to an event called Puzzled Pint every month - it’s like a pub quiz, and is similarly hosted in a bar or pub, but instead of answering trivia questions we have to solve logic puzzles. It’s an enjoyable evening, and new friends often join me and my team to see if it’s their cup of tea. It’s been interesting when these newbies join us to see them trying to solve the puzzles - and often they end up over-complicating potential solutions to a problem. One of my first pieces of advice is usually to not over-think your solution. If you find yourself going several levels deep into decoding something, you’ve probably gone down the wrong path. At that point it’s usually better to scrap all the work you’ve done and start again. It’s usually better to try solving each puzzle with a wide sweep of different ideas, before you start to solve down a single deep path.
The puzzle maker who wrote the QAnon article pointed out that, unlike with authored puzzles or treasure hunts, in the case of conspiracy theories like QAnon there is no real clue that people are overlooking - all possible paths they might end up following are false. When thousands of adherents look at meaningless noise, which in QAnon’s case was a set of made-up “Q Drops” - small pieces of text with names and codewords liberally sprinkled in them - they tend to make spurious connections between the pieces of data. And now that we have the luxury of being connected to each other via the internet, these conspiracy theorists can receive feedback from each other when they post their ideas online. And this is where natural selection kicks in, with the most plausible wrong answers being upvoted and commented on in subreddits, Facebook groups, etc and rising to the top.
Given all of this, it’s been interesting to watch the Silksong community fall down exactly the same kind of rabbit holes that QAnon believers and other conspiracy theorists are prone to find themselves in. Recently I’ve been watching YouTube videos and Reddit posts where people try to make sense out of random noise, to discern when Silksong’s release date may be. People had started looking at Steam metadata and noticing when items were added to the game’s Steam listing. Here are some screenshots from earlier this year, where innocent changes to Steam were taken as evidence that a release was imminent:
Here’s an image where someone thinks they’ve spotted an encoded date (10/04/2025) in the hands of the game’s creators when a picture was taken of them:
The pinnacle of this wishful thinking was when William Pellen, one of Team Cherry’s co-founders, changed the profile picture of his Twitter account to a slice of chocolate cake in the middle of January this year, and then posted a tweet saying “something big is coming. keep your eyes closed tomorrow”.
Sure enough, something big did happen in gaming news the next day - Nintendo let everybody know that they would be announcing the release date of the follow-up to their Switch console, the imaginatively named Switch 2, on April the 2nd 2025.
People then started digging deeper. A reverse image search of the cake image led people to its origin - this chocolate cake recipe on the website Bon Appétit. The recipe was posted on April the 2nd, 2024, further cementing people’s belief that April 2nd was significant. This made them think that the release of the Switch 2 would be connected to the release of Silksong - that maybe the game would be a launch title for the console, on June 5th 2025.
In the end this rumour became pernicious enough that Team Cherry’s PR person, Matthew (Leth) Griffin, asked Hollow Knight speed runner fireb0rn to let the community know that this was not an ARG (Alternate Reality Game), just a coincidental change of a profile image.
On top of all this misinformation, there have been a few YouTubers, such as Primacon, who seem to have made a career out of over-analysing every piece of information - real or fake - about Silksong.
Honestly, it’s been hard with some of these rabbit holes to figure out which of them have been honest but misguided attempts to figure out a release date, and which have been deliberate silkposts designed to wind people up. It’s certainly the case that it’s wise to not trust anything posted to the r/Silksong subreddit, and maybe an upside of this is that many of the people browsing the Silksong subreddit are likely to have learned the valuable skill of clicking on links to check the sources of all of the claims people are making.
Release Announcement
At 3:30am on August 22nd (1am South Australian time), an official Silksong release announcement video was posted on Team Cherry’s real YouTube channel (and not one of the many fake channels):
Now the fans finally have a release date - September 4th. So, has the silkposting stopped? Absolutely not. The newest form of silkpost, which started just hours after the announcement, is based around the idea that the “SEPTEMBER 4” message at the end of the video was actually for next year, 2026.
Here are just a few examples that have been posted to r/Silksong, including a doctored screenshot of the end of the announcement video, a blog post on Team Cherry’s website, a tweet from Team Cherry’s account, a Steam (PC gaming) screenshot, and a Nintendo Switch advert:
If we ignore these silkposts, we can be fairly confident that it’s now just a few days before one of the most anticipated games of recent years is released. I’m looking forward to playing it (if it doesn’t cost $200!), and if my article for the newsletter in two weeks seems a little short, it’ll probably be because I’m playing a lot of Silksong in my spare time. I guess I’m thankful that we’re finally seeing the release of the game, given that in a recent (paywalled) Bloomberg interview developer William Pellen said:
“It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going.”
And designer Ari Gibson followed up with:
“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching. Because I went… If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish”