Silksong Switch 2 Direct Footage Analysis (9 whole seconds of new footage!) Script

I know what you’re all thinking. When is mossbag finally going to talk about the news we got regarding Deltarune 3 and 4? I know, I know. But you’re gonna have to wait a little bit longer for that video. For now, let’s just talk about Silksong.

You remember that game, right? I honestly kinda forgot about it during the great Silksong drought of 2023 to 2024. But the drought has finally ended thanks to the most recent Nintendo Direct showcasing the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s so cool, I’ve honestly never seen a console like it before. During the 3rd party games sizzle reel section towards the end of the direct, we get 9 whole seconds of brand new SIlksong footage, as well as a release window for 2025. But that’s not all. After the direct, we got seven new screenshots and a brand new piece of key art. We truly eating good this fiscal quarter. In this video, we’ll be briefly looking over the new footage and discussing the new nuggets of information gleaned about Silksong.

First of all, I wanted to address this new key art we got from Nintendo. This goes so hard. This is the stance of a true hunter. Or someone about to poop. Either way, it’s super cool. I’ve never shown my face on this channel, but when you picture me in your head, just think of this image. I think it captures my animal-like instincts quite well. That or this image.

Moving on to the footage, the first clip we got is from the game’s first area, the Moss Grotto, a section of the game we’ve already seen quite a bit. It was even playable in the E3 2019 demo. But that was almost six years ago. Despite all that time, this area still looks pretty similar. If you sit and stare at it, you can see slight changes in the background, showing off that Team Cherry has been tweaking the environments since the demo.

But there’s a bigger change here too. In the E3 demo there was a ledge to the left of this platform. Continuing down that path would take you to a mysterious, locked door, seemingly connected to the Weavers. One theory is that there are multiple doors like this, each leading to a different Weaver that gives Hornet special skills such as the Silk Spear. So where is this door now? Is she safe?

The first possibility is that they placed a breakable wall here to hide the path. The second possibility is that they just removed the path entirely, possibly putting the door somewhere else. Considering the fact that this tiny platform is still here, there’s a chance the path is just blocked by a breakable wall. But that seems like a pretty devious spot to hide a potentially important power up. So I really wouldn’t be surprised if Team Cherry moved this Weaver door somewhere else and maybe put a less important goodie behind this wall.

Next up, we have a scene of Hornet sliding down a slope covered in what appears to be spores of some kind. There’s a few things to note with this shot. Let’s start with the big one: the slopes. 2017’s Hollow Knight has earned a bit of a reputation for not containing any sloped ground that the player can walk on.

Ari Gibson shared his thoughts on slopes in a NeoGaf post from back during Hollow Knight’s Kickstarter campaign in 2014.

We've avoided sloped surfaces for the most part (though we use them on a few special occasions). It was initially a stylistic choice for the gameplay, though there's an ongoing discussion about whether to re-introduce them. They can make the game world look more real, but they also introduce some randomness in combat and movement.

With the flat surfaces you get really consistent control of your character. But it's all still up in the air at any rate! [Source]

Given the game’s final layout, Team Cherry obviously stuck to this mentality. In an interview with Source Gaming from 2018, Team Cherry echoed similar sentiments, saying that flat ground removes fuzziness from gameplay over sloped ground, allowing the game to demand more from the player in terms of combat.

There’s also the technical concerns surrounding slopes. According to Graig, the lead playtester for Hollow Knight, due to Unity's implementation of 2D physics, slopes introduce a lot of edge cases that need to be considered and things get messy fast. That's why Graig is also avoiding slopes in his Unity game, Roc's Odyssey, which is now live on Kickstarter.

The game I’m working on, Titan Shell, which you can wishlist on Steam by the way, does have slopes. Our game runs on Game Maker, which has its own tile based collision system, but we wrote our own collision code instead, some of which is on screen right now. So yes, they do add complexity to the task of programming collisions and enemy behavior. And considering the blazing fast pace at which Hollow Knight was developed, dedicating the extra time to plan and program something they weren’t even sure they wanted in the first place probably didn’t sound too enticing.

That said, there are a few areas with sloped ground. Kinda. The giant elevators in the City of Tears that go up to the Forgotten Crossroads and Resting Grounds have sloped ground you actually can stand on. However, if we turn off the graphics, you can see that this “slope” is actually just a flat surface that changes its height depending on where the player character is. So even the ground that is sloped in Hollow Knight isn't sloped.

With all that said, seeing honest to god sloped ground in Silksong like this must be a huge deal, right? Well, if we consider Ari’s original concerns, it seemed to be much more combat related. This sloped section appears to be heavily confined to just a specific platforming challenge. Hornet isn’t even really walking on this slope, she’s being forced into a sliding state. This also reduces the complexity of the programming involved too.

In other words, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll start seeing slopes in sections of normal terrain in Silksong. Especially since Silksong seems even more focused on precise movement and combat than Hollow Knight was.

But enough about the slopes themselves, let’s talk about what’s on the slopes. I’ve seen some people speculate that these are dandelions, but if that were true, then you would expect to see seeds with this shape floating around, but that’s not the case at all. To me, they look more like fungal spores of some kind, similar to mold. In addition to the giant spores we see on the ground, there are also smaller spores falling down from above. These look somewhat similar to the particles seen floating around in the Fungal Wastes. It’s not an exact match, but at the moment I do think these are supposed to be fungal spores of some kind.

There’s also a random plant here, but I don’t think it’s really significant.

Another interesting aspect about this sequence is that we can see a vignette over the screen. It’s a little hard to spot, but if you zoom in on the bottom right corner of the screen, you can see it more clearly. It vaguely looks like mycelium or other certain types of mold. I’m guessing this vignette appears whenever Hornet is touching or is in close proximity to these spores. And it’s possible that prolonged exposure to these spores might do damage. I don’t know if you’ve ever slid through a huge mass of mold before. I’ve done it a few times, and I would NOT recommend it. 

On the other hand, it’s a pretty subtle effect. If touching this stuff did do damage, you’d think the vignette would be more obvious, like when you’re at one health in Hollow Knight. Maybe the vignette is only subtle like this because Hornet found some special item that keeps her safe from the spores effects, similar to how the Varia Suit keeps you safe from hot areas in Metroid.

Another possibility is that this is some sort of escape sequence, where Hornet is running from a giant avalanche of spores and this vignette is just there to help set the mood. We saw an escape sequence in the Xbox trailer, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more of these sequences in the rest of the game too.

But why are there even spores here in the first place? Well, we’ve talked about floor lore, we’ve talked about vore lore, I guess it’s time we talk about spore lore. These spores seem to be a more recent development in the region. We can see broken pillars in this cavern, implying that some sort of structure was built here before these spores took over. Perhaps whatever structure was built here inadvertently induced the proliferation of these spores. We know that the bugs of Greymoor are suffering from an infestation of dustroaches. This area might be similar to that, serving as another example of how Pharloom is slowly falling apart due to the silk and song haunting the kingdom.

To finish off discussing this clip, we need to look at the HUD in the top left corner of the screen. We have a new symbol here we haven’t seen before. But before we get into that, I want to very quickly explain the HUD and how it works, because it’s been a few years since we’ve all had to look at this, and honestly, I don’t think Silksong’s HUD is very intuitive to understand just by looking at it. Now this explanation is as I understand it from looking at various trailer footage and things Team Cherry has said over the years, so it might not be completely correct, but it’s the best I can do. If you know how the HUD works already, then you can just skip ahead, smarty pants.

So what makes the HUD so different from the HUD in Hollow Knight? The big change here is the introduction of crests. In Silksong, Hornet can swap between different crests that alter the appearance of the HUD, Hornet’s moveset when using her needle, what kind of tools Hornet can equip and even other properties as well. 

For example, in this clip Hornet’s HUD has three claws sticking out the left side. We’ve seen Hornet perform some kind of large slash attack while having this HUD, possibly some kind of charge attack, similar to the Knight’s Nail Arts. We’ve seen her use a similar, Nail Art style move when wearing a different crest as well. While wearing the claw crest, we’ve also seen Hornet use some buzzsaw type attack as well. This alters Hornet’s regular downward dive attack, which is much simpler.

Getting back to the HUD, there’s this front facing spool that is sometimes completely empty, and other times full of silk. This corresponds to the spool bar below which is used to indicate Hornet’s silk reserves. Whenever she hits a foe, one segment of silk gets added to the spool bar. This notch on the spool bar indicates how much silk Hornet needs to use her Bind ability, the move that heals her for three masks. Once Hornet collects enough silk to reach this notch, the silk on that portion of the spool bar lights up along with the front view of the spool. In other words, once this part of the HUD lights up, you can heal. It appears the spool bar has no notch when you first start the game, because the entire bar is exactly enough silk to use the bind ability. So it’s only once you upgrade your spool that the notch appears.

To the right of the spool bar is the region where Hornet’s tools are displayed. There are three categories of tools: red, blue and yellow. Red tools are used by pressing the tool button along with up or down on the d-pad. These red items appear on the HUD, showing how many uses it has left as well as which direction you need to press to use them. Uses can be replenished by spending Shell Shards at benches. 

We’ve seen a lot of red tools used in various trailers over the years: Straight Pin, Tri-Pins, Sting Shards, Cogflies, Pimpillos, Caltrops and, of course, the controversial Lifeblood Syringe. We’ve also seen images of other tools like the bone boomerang, this strange back of tricks, I don’t even know what these are, and this orange bottle, the same one we see in this new shot. Since we’ve never seen this item in action, we don’t know exactly what it does yet.

We also aren’t exactly sure how blue and yellow tools work. We’ve seen what a few of them look like in the menu, but we haven’t seen them augment the HUD all that much. There’s this clip where we can see a green blob on the end of the spool bar, which might be some kind of regenerating silk slime. In various screenshots, we’ve also seen the spool bar extended with what I assume is some kind of tool, as well as a reserve spool bar added onto the HUD.

In the Edge Magazine interview, it’s also been hinted that there are tools which will automatically shield you against projectiles, give you more rosaries when killing enemies, and pulling rosaries towards you, similar to Gathering Swarm. So the blue and yellow tools are generally more passive, but the distinction between them is vague.

With that all explained, we can finally talk about this new symbol. It appears to indicate what skill Hornet has equipped. We can see from a Edge Magazine screenshot that you can equip these skills to your crest as well. Skills have been shown off extensively in trailers, and you could even use them in the E3 demo. Pressing the “Skill” button would allow Hornet to use this move, presumably the Silk Spear move mentioned in the Edge Magazine interview. 

Other potential skills might be Hornet’s Gossamer Storm, this thrusting attack from the Xbox trailer, and this parry move from the reveal trailer. Since these skills seemingly must be equipped, and there’s only one equip slot, does this mean Hornet only has access to one of these skills at a time? That seems like a pretty big departure from the Knight having access to three separate spells at once with Vengeful Spirit, Desolate Dive and Howling Wraiths.

But keep in mind that Hornet also has access to both tools and unique movesets, so maybe Team Cherry wanted to limit Hornet from being able to use a bunch of different skills on top of all of that. This system also allows Team Cherry to design a bunch of different skills for players to choose from and swap out as needed, instead of just having the same three spells at all times.

In this shot, the white symbol is greyed out, but that is not the case in the next shot. Here, we see a different white symbol, but this time it is lit up. We also see Hornet using her Gossamer Storm attack, indicating that this white symbol represents the Gossamer Storm skill. The reason it’s lit up is because in this shot, Hornet has enough silk to perform the attack, whereas in the previous shot, Hornet doesn’t have any silk at all. We can also see in the last shot of the trailer that the Gossamer Storm symbol is not lit up, since the attack takes four silk to perform.

So this symbol both tells you what skill you currently have equipped as well as whether or not you have enough silk to cast it.

So if the symbol in shot 3 is Gossamer Storm, what is the symbol in shot 2? Out of the possible skills we’ve seen, I think this thrust move is the most likely candidate. But honestly, this symbol looks more like an anchor or a pendulum to me. So I’m not gonna say anything for certain on this one. But let me know in the comments below what you think about the current state of the trout population.

While we’re talking about skills, I do want to mention that the Gossamer Storm skill now works differently than how it did in the Xbox trailer. In that trailer, the attack cost three silk, but would gradually continue to drain your silk over time. But in the new clip, it seems to cost a flat four silk while also lasting longer. It seems like Team Cherry has been messing around with the costs of these abilities over the past few years. With how much variety there seems to be in playstyle, and how unbalanced things like charms could be in Hollow Knight, Team Cherry might be focusing extra hard on making sure the various tools and skills in this game are balanced properly.

Moving onto clip three proper, let's look at the two new enemies Hornet is fighting. There’s a five legged Citadel Caste member wearing a white pointy hood… And the other guy is wearing a golden mask modeled after the strange ball symbol we’ve seen all over Pharloom. We’ve seen white hooded enemies and enemies wearing gold before, but these two certainly stand out to me.

While both enemies can fly, it seems the hooded figure doesn’t have any wings. That, combined with its weird looking legs, makes me wonder if it’s some kind of robot. When it hits the ground after dying, we can see for a brief moment that it explodes into what might be bells and some kind of wheel mechanism.

Shortly before Hornet uses her Gossamer attack, we see the hooded enemy’s mask flash. We can tell from the footage that this enemy is parrying here. After Hornet hits the enemy in this state, it does a counter attack, but it attacks downwards, away from Hornet and it gets knocked out of its attack. Team Cherry mentioned in the Edge Magazine interview that they wanted enemies in Silksong to be more complex than Hollow Knight, so seeing this random enemy do a parry move makes sense. I think the only times we saw proper parries like this in Hollow Knight were the Hollow Knight fights. Oh yeah, and Hornet.

The last thing I wanted to note here is how these enemies die. In previous instances of enemies dying in Silksong, we could usually see white lines stretching up to the top of the screen. This lends to the idea that our enemies in Pharloom are being manipulated like puppets from above. But that effect appears to be lacking in this footage.

I don’t think they would have removed this effect since it seems pretty important to the game’s lore. Something that Team Cherry seems to care about. I don’t know. They’ve shared conflicting views in the past. That said, there are also moments in the Xbox trailer where the effect doesn’t appear when an enemy dies. So maybe the lines just don’t appear every time. Whether or not there’s a reason for when they do, I have no idea.

The room itself is very reactive to Hornet’s attack too. We can see this candelabra fall over, the hanging drapes here sway around, and so does this giant chandelier in the background. We’ve seen this more reactive environment in other trailers as well, like during the Last Judge battle, which is all really cool to see.

Alright let’s talk about the elephant in the room. As I’m sure all of you immediately noticed, we’ve actually seen this candelabra before. Who could possibly forget seeing this candelabra as it appeared in this room from the Xbox trailer? Not only that, but these two rooms look quite similar to one another, implying that they may appear in the same section of the Citadel.

This room from the Xbox trailer appears to be some kind of church hall, while this new room appears to be some kind of lecture hall or music hall, given the podium and the auditorium seating in the background. 

But there’s one other massive detail I’m sure you all remember. In the background of the room from the Xbox trailer, we can see a strange figure standing, watching over the room. It appears to be this character, which Team Cherry showed off back in 2019 in their last blog post.

This guy is one of three members of a scholarly suite, former tenders of a dusty vault full of ancient knowledge. So both of these rooms might be connected to this dusty vault. The fact that there are a bunch of corpses just lying around there in the background might lend to the idea of this place being kinda decrepit.

Unfortunately I still don’t think we have enough information to solve whatever is going on with these guys, but something tells me we’re closer to cracking this case than ever. Together, we might be able to solve this. Be sure to let me know in the comments below what you think about the current state of the trout population.

This new room also serves as the location of our next clip from the Direct. Unfortunately, it played as part of a giant mosaic at the end of the sizzle reel. So we’re gonna have to zoom and enhance on this bad boy. Alright, now where’s Silksong? Oh here it is. Not gonna lie, this looks kinda mid. Oh whoops, that’s Undertale. My bad.

I tried my best to isolate and stabilize the Silksong portion, but the quality is going to be a bit lower for this clip unfortunately.

Here, we can see two new enemies. This big chonker. And this dead guy. Some people speculated that this mace wielding guy is a boss, but I think it’s just a larger enemy. We see it walk over some caltrops that Hornet set down and take damage. Dumbass. The enemy attacks in a way similar to the False Knight, jumping up in the air and slamming the ground with their giant mace. But after performing this attack the first time, he then seems to cover his mace in silk before slamming down on the ground again, creating a damage zone that Hornet has to stay out of. Overall, it seems like a pretty fun fight, and I’m excited to see bigger enemy encounters like this throughout the game.

At the very end of this clip, we can see Hornet spend one silk to perform her Harpoon Dash move. It seems like this move might always be available to Hornet and doesn’t need to be equipped like her other silk costing skills.

And that’s it for the new footage. Let’s move on to those sweet, sweet screenshots. This first one is of the giant golem enemy. We saw this guy all the way back in the 2019 reveal trailer, as well as in screenshots uploaded to the PlayStation app. Everything looks pretty similar from the PlayStation image, although maybe some of the rocks have been tweaked a bit. Obviously, both of the new screenshots are way different from the original version. The new screenshots look much more readable and less muddy.

The tool Hornet has equipped here is a bone boomerang, the same tool we see in PlayStation screenshot. So it seems like the boomerang is unlocked at some point before this fight. This tool probably comes from the ant faction, whom we see in both this Forest of Bones portion of Pharloom and in this green area referred to as the Far Fields in an Xbox screenshot. Looking at this screenshot of the golem, it seems to be somewhere in that general area between the Forest of Bones and the Far Fields, so that all checks out.

As for the skill equipped here, I think it’s the Silk Spear skill we’ve seen before. Going off the Edge Magazine interview, and the fact that it’s the skill you have in the demo, it’s likely the first skill the player is expected to unlock. All of this, mixed with the fact that Hornet only has six masks here, makes me think this encounter will be fairly early on in the game.

In the next shot we see Hornet traverse what appears to be the Coral Forest area. We can see what appears to be some fatass fish. This is likely a reference to the film Shark Tale. I think this fish is the same as whatever these pinkish background creatures are. We’ve seen these other fish in previous clips so they aren’t particularly noteworthy. And when I say fish, I mean fish-like bugs.

Looking at the HUD, we can see a new skill is equipped. I think this skill is some kind of grappling hook move that allows you to move straight up through the air. We can see that Hornet is traveling up a thread of silk in the screenshot and she has used part of her silk reserves here too. Her needle is missing, so I assume she threw it upwards. So it’s like a vertical version of her Harpoon Dash technique. Of course, this could be completely unrelated to the silk move we see equipped, but for now, we can’t know for sure.

The first tool here is one we’ve seen before, but not in use. Just from looking at it, I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to do. The second tool is the Cogfly, which seems to operate similar to the Glowing Womb babies from Hollow Knight.

In the next screenshot we see Hornet in the Citadel, fighting off some bugs we’ve seen before. The only new thing here is this cog themed HUD, possibly found in this area, referred to as Cogworks in the metadata of the reveal trailer. I never mentioned it on this channel, but a user on Discord, known as TheShawarma, was able to mine metadata from the Silksong reveal trailer Team Cherry posted to Google Drive. This gave us the filenames used for the various clips used in the trailer such as “catacombs-creeper-chase”, “coral-king” and “lava-bigskullgoomba-cool-dash-combo”. This shot in the reveal trailer was likely called “cogworks-harpoon-dash”, finally giving us a name for the area. It might be only an internal dev name, but it’s much better than what I’ve called it in previous videos, C***works.

Getting back to the screenshot, given Hornet’s pose here, she’s probably about to use whatever dive attack is unique to this cog crest.

Another thing worth noting here is how this area is covered in webbing. When we first saw this Citadel area in the 2019 reveal trailer, there really wasn’t anything like this. But since the Xbox trailer, we’ve been getting more images of the Citadel covered in this silk. I think Team Cherry has opted to make the Citadel look more dilapidated. Finally, I wanted to point out this bell. It kinda looks like pac-man.

This next screenshot shows off Bellhart, a city we saw in the reveal trailer. And as you can see, Bellhart’s looking a little worse for wear these days. The bell buildings in the foreground look a lot more dilapidated. On top of that, this shop looks way less stocked than it was before. Also it looks like the turnover rate is pretty high too. So it seems like since the reveal trailer, Team Cherry has changed some of these areas to indicate how much Pharloom has been suffering from this curse of silk and song. 

Another odd change is the removal of the quest board. I don’t think Team Cherry would have cut the quest system from Silksong, so I’m a bit surprised to see it missing here.

The background here has also been blurred a lot since 2019, and the foreground has a much more golden look to it. And this silk ball statue has been made more of the focal point of the room. I know some people don’t like how Team Cherry hides environment details behind blur, but I think I do prefer how Bellhart looks in this new screenshot.

This tool here looks a lot like a Pimpillo, which we’ve seen used in other trailers. Perhaps this is an un-upgraded version of the Pimpillo, or a variant of some kind.

This next shot shows the Lace fight. It also looks quite different from the 2019 reveal trailer. But we’ve already seen this updated look from the PlayStation screenshots. Again, Team Cherry has cranked up the blur. They either did this to help keep the focus on the action, or so they can scale down the resolution of these background objects to help save on performance.

We’ve seen this tool used in the Xbox trailer. Using it turns Hornet’s cloak into a drill. God, she is so quirky. We’ve seen this bow crest in other screenshots before, but this portion was never lit up. So that’s a slight change. My guess is that performing the Bind ability while wearing this crest also fires a projectile of some kind, so kinda similar to the spore shroom charm, which lets the Knight deal damage while healing.

This next image is of the starting room in the Moss Grotto. This appears to be the very start of a playthrough, considering Hornet has four masks here, the same number we’ve seen people start with in the demo. For some reason, Hornet’s spool bar is already broken. I figured you would fix a broken spool bar by destroying the cocoon you leave after dying, similar to how you fix your Soul Vessel in Hollow Knight. But I don’t think we actually know that for sure, and that wouldn’t explain why it’s broken here. So maybe there’s more to fixing this spool bar than I realize.

And this last screenshot is from the Moss Grotto. There’s less lilypads now, and there’s some giant bone-like structures in the background. Other than that, there’s nothing new here. Thanks for nothing, screenshot. Away with you.

And that’s all the new stuff we got. 

But at this point, we might actually be able to use these trailers and screenshots to construct a rough progression for Silksong. Credit to my friend Mola for arranging the clips we have by mask count, spool bar size and equipped tools and crests. This doesn’t include anything from the reveal trailer, since that stuff is likely out of date, and the mask counts probably don’t reflect real progression. It looks like the game can progress something like this:

You start in the Moss Grotto, make your way to Bonebottom, then into the Forest of Bones and Deep Docks. After that comes the Far Fields and the city, Bellhart. After that seems to be the Citadel Base, Greymoor, and the Stepps, which is where Grindle and the Last Judge appear to be. These three areas all kinda fit somewhere in the middle, it seems. After that, it seems like you’ll be able to reach the Citadel. Finally, the clover area and the Coral Forest actually seem to be later sections of the game. Looking at this, I don’t think we quite have the full picture yet, but we can see some patterns start to emerge from the noise.

Now let’s talk about the 2025 release window. This is really exciting. But… It was also really exciting when we got the June 2023 release window back in 2022. And I just don’t really feel like getting my hopes up again like I did back then. The reality is Silksong will be released when Team Cherry feels like it’s ready. And if they decide by the end of 2025 that it still isn’t ready, then it won’t release.

To be clear, I’m not saying the game is definitely going to miss the 2025 release window, I just want to be the annoying voice on your shoulder reminding you that a vague release window of 2025 doesn’t guarantee anything.

So is 2025 finally the year of Silksong? There’s good reason to believe that, but I’m gonna hold off on calling it for certain until I actually have the game in my grubby little paws.

Songs:

Dung Defender - Hollow Knight OST

Lace - Hollow Knight: Silksong OST

Crossroads - Hollow Knight OST

City of Tears (Inside Loop) - Hollow Knight

Kingdom's Edge - Hollow Knight OST

Hive Knight - Hollow Knight OST

Fungal Wastes - Mantis Village (Bass) - Hollow Knight

Bonebottom - Hollow Knight: Silksong OST

Hornet - Hollow Knight

Haunted Foes (Flukemarm, Markoth, Troupe Master Grimm)

Soul Sanctum - Hollow Knight

White Defender - Hollow Knight OST

Green Path (Main) - Hollow Knight

Crystal Peak (Main) - Hollow Knight

Truth, Beauty and Hatred - Hollow Knight

Queen's Garden - Hollow Knight OST

Dirtmouth - Hollow Knight OST

Enter Hallownest - Hollow Knight OST