Silksong devs say “it’s very difficult to preserve mystery these days,” and Zelda 2-era inspirations pushed them toward a world you can explore “divorced from the internet”

Hollow Knight’s developers grew up playing games before online forums and social media took some of the mystique out of their worlds, but Team Cherry tried to design Silksong in a way where players could make discoveries without picking up their phones.

When asked about those Zelda 2-era adventures in an interview with the ACMI museum in Australia, Melbourne – also available as a paperback guide – Ari Gibson explained that he and fellow studio head William Pellen “were playing those games in an era before the internet [where] all the information you could gleam would come from friends at school, through whispers and rumors – so the sense was that there could be all this other stuff hiding in the game that you hadn’t yet uncovered.”