Right now, Team Cherry’s future is pretty unclear. There is some kind of Hollow Knight: Silksong DLC that’ll be coming somewhere along the line, but understandably the developer is keeping their cards close to their chest in terms of what’s actually next. They certainly do have some ideas on how they would expand Hollow Knight, i.e. by not making any direct sequels, much like how Silksong isn’t one. But in a recent interview, Team Cherry spoke (ever so slightly) more openly about their own future and how the thing that might get in their way most is, well, death.
Lead dev’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen were asked about, unsurprisingly, all things Hollow Knight in an interview with Bloomberg, notably how they’re planning to allocate their time post Silksong. “We do have other games that we plan to make. The only time concern really is – and we’ve talked about this before – death,” Gibson explained. “It’s not that far off if you spend seven years per project, and potentially add another two. So it’d be nice to do a few more games. Apparently our timeframe still allows us to fit a few more in. Short of an unexpected tragedy.”
Obviously quite a morbid sentiment, one a number of devs seem to be thinking about as they get older, although it’s what Gibson says about future, hypothetical, non-Hollow Knight games that interests me: “We have said we’ll go elsewhere as well. Although we’ve also said those experiences will still be about exploring big worlds full of weird characters and giant bosses and whatnot. So there would be a through line there that people will be familiar with.”
I find that particular thought process about Team Cherry’s work curious, as it’s very much the framework of an auteur. You can see this kind of thing in Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games at FromSoftware, there are obvious, thematic connections between his games, even if staff may change between them, and it’s those thematic connections that I’d be more curious to see in a future, non-Hollow Knight Team Cherry game.
When asked if they’re sick of working on Hollow Knight, Gibson said that wasn’t the case “at all,” and they’d be happy to work on another one if forced to. On the other side, they’d also be interested in exploring their usual tastes but in a “slightly different genre, slightly different theme, and how that affects the stories we come up with.”
I’m always quite a fan of new attempts at relaying the same message but in different ways, it’s something Guillermo del Toro does in his work, often looking at “the other,” through different lenses. To me, the Hollow Knight games are very much about systems of power, and how power is distributed or withheld, so I hope if we do get something different from Team Cherry, it’s at least as interesting as that.
