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.
