Hollow Knight: Silksong’s first big expansion, Sea of Sorrow, flows into our lives for free next year

What’s that I hear? Tinkly piano and the crashing of waves. Oh, it’s Hollow Knight: Silksong’s first major expansion, which devs Team Cherry have just announced will be coasting up to the shore some point next year. It’s called Sea of Sorrow, and as such looks to contain plenty of somber staring into the splashy swell.

Team Cherry announced this forthcoming addition to the metroidvania via the trailer above and a blog post, also noting that the nautically-themed Sea of Sorrow’ll be “free for all players”. It’ll include “new areas, bosses, tools, and more”.

The trailer itself’s made up of four shots. Two are just some fishing hooks and the shot of Hornet from the update’s key art, but in between are a couple that could have more intrigue to them. First’s a shot of some creature or object resting atop a wooden platform and tied under a sheet, somewhat resembling a tomb. Then, there’s a shot of an ornate, but damaged, glass and gold structure being struck by crackling lightning. It’s also littered with what look like discarded bug wings.

What the skong does any of that mean? Well, I’m nowhere near dialled enough into the Hollow Knightverse to speculate, with Team Cherry promising more will be revealed prior to release.

In the meantime, the studio have released a beta update for the Steam and GOG PC versions of the original Hollow Knight, to coincide with it being released on some device from an obscure company called Tin Nendo. Nah, I’ve never heard of them either. The PC update’s headlined by support for 16:10 and 21:9 aspect ratios and extra controller support. Team Cherry have also sought to reduce any colour banding and made the game pause automatically when you open up your inventory.

Aside from that, there are some general bug fixes, and one problem on Steam Deck you’ll still have to work around for now. “There is an issue with cutscenes showing a ‘test pattern’ when playing on Steam Deck, which is due to the system defaulting to an incompatible proton version,” Team Cherry wrote of the latter. “We are working on a fix for this, but for now it can be worked around by selecting a ‘Linux Runtime’ version in the compatibility settings, which forces the system to use the Linux-native version of the game.”

As usual, instructions as to how to opt into the beta can be found in Team Cherry’s post about it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and buy some Hornet-sized armbands and a rubber ring.