Hyped for a reason.
Was this how people who didn’t care about Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring felt when I was losing my shit over those games? When a release date was finally announced for Hollow Knight: Silksong and the memetic hype surrounding the long-awaited sequel reached a fever pitch, I felt the mild excitement and interest I had for the game curdle. Everyone is being so goddamn annoying.
Last Thursday, with Steam buckling and Silksong on everybody’s lips, I was at the nadir of my excitement, predicting a sea of perfect 10s that would look embarrassing in a year’s time. It seemed like it could be one of those games where, once everything dies down, the consensus becomes „Yeah, it was pretty good, but we all got way too worked up about it.“ The Bioshock: Infinite special.
I didn’t always feel sour about the collective Silksanity or its quirky outflows—I still have to put some respect on the commitment of Daily Silksong News, a worthy successor to the Daily Elden Ring Update—but the final crescendo of excitement, memes, and (worst of all) discourse just chafed my hams: Silksong’s hype and anticipation had entered the realm of the absurd or parodical, a performance carried out on Reddit for the benefit of other Redditors
My distaste for the discourse had a wonderful side effect, though: It turned the much-anticipated sequel to a game I loved into a perfectly blank slate, one I went into with almost zero expectations.
