Most Anticipated Game of 2025 Just Came Out

In gaming, there are a few titles that people have fantasized about for years, collectively feeding delusions about their existence and how their announcement is right around the corner. This year, this is the year, Jeff Keighley's Game Awards, he's going to come out in a banana hammock and finally reveal to the world Half-Life 3 is in development and launches today.

It's a shadow drop, actually. E3 is going to get revived and they're going to finally tell us Bloodborne 2 is right around the corner, that kind of thing. But deep down people know that these games aren't in development and they're probably never going to be. But the hopium around it is so strong and contagious people can't help but believe. These games include Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Bloodborne 2, and until today, Hollow Knight Silksong. Hollow Knight Silksong is a game that people have

been wanting for so long since it was announced many, many moons ago. And with radio silence and a lot of missed deadlines and unfulfilled promises like with Phil Spencer saying it's coming in a year that kind of thing people have just been hurt so much myself included to the point where a lot of us wrote it off as one of these you know white whales like Half-Life 3 that we're just never going to experience. But against all the odds

Hollow Knight Silksong just dropped today and on just Steam alone within the first couple hours it has already broken over 534,000 concurrent players. I can only imagine what it's like on console right now apparently Steam, Xbox, and the Nintendo eShop all went down right when this launched presumably because so many people were like immediately trying to buy it because there was no pre-orders or anything.

Hallelujah.

Everything about Hollow Knight Silksong's launch to me is an absolute fucking grand salami. This is a home run. First and foremost, it's price tag. It's $20. That's beautiful.

I love to see that in an era where every game seems to want to be like 50 60 70 80 bucks even like games that are only like two or three hours long or games you've never even heard of like Fart smoker massacre or something some fucking double-a horror experience being like 70 bucks It is so nice to see Hollow Knight Silksong come out here and just be like hey $20 enjoy it really feels like Silksong is just truly here to be like hey play us we're not really getting involved in all like the shadiness and greediness the rest of the

industry seems to be trying to normalize just fucking fork over 20 clams and just enjoy and it's refreshing but anyway let's cut into this peanut butter jelly sandwich and take a peek at the cross section. I want to give you my first impressions here. Does Hollow Knight Silksong live up to the hype? And the hype was at, you know, almost unheard of levels. Like I said, this is up there in like the category of the Half-Life 3s and the Bloodborne 2s and shit like that.

So it had big shoes to fill because Hollow Knight is a beloved title. I played Hollow Knight well after everyone else did. I played it like seriously for the first time like three years ago. I streamed all of it and fell in love. I absolutely adore Hollow Knight. So of course I was scratching at my neck to sink my teeth into Silksong. I like I said I really was starting to doubt if I'd ever play this game. I didn't know if it was ever going to release. I thought this was

gonna be like dunking on a 10-foot basketball hoop. An experience I'll never have. I really thought that this was just going to be, you know, always a fairy tale. And I am so happy that it's here. And I'm even happier to say that the game is amazing. I have put about 4 hours into it so far, I streamed it this afternoon. And of course when I finish my playthrough it'll go up on my gaming channel, Moist Critical Gaming, go subscribe, best fucking gaming channel on YouTube. I am already really enjoying my time with Silksong, I think it's off to a fucking banger

start. If you've played the first Hollow Knight, you know what you're in store for here That DNA is still very much intact, but it feels much smoother here Like I just got to the point where I get the dash and sprint and you can combo out of the dash attack Because it launches you up you can combo out of it into like a downward a down needle which comes at an angle and then You can combo out of that into just like a normal side needle attack. So there's like a lot of creativity with like the comboing you can do on enemies in this that feel really, really good.

It just seems like there's so much skill expression that when you really dive into the spaghetti and the meatballs of the mechanics to the gameplay, you will probably find some really fucking cool things to experiment with. So I'm already like getting into the nitty-gritty and loving that. I think pretty much everything that you liked in Hollow Knight you will find in Silksong but even more in depth and fleshed out. And for some people I actually saw that as a complaint in chat. Some people in chat

were upset that the game is so similar to the first Hollow Knight and I understand that complaint when it comes to things like fucking Call of Duty where it literally is copy and paste with no innovation it is just rip and ship don't even think about it fire and forget because people are just going to

buy it no matter what so what's the point in trying it's basically you're getting the same thing every single time just with other maps and other guns and that's really about it it's boring I get that complaint for that series. For Hollow Knight though, that just isn't the case. Like yes, it is clearly very much like the same DNA as

the first Hollow Knight. Like the map is the same, shopping, all of that is very similar, but it is all expanded and improved upon. Like everything is more in-depth and everything that Hollow Knight, the first one, did well is done, I would argue, better here except for one thing. My only complaint about Silksong, and it is kind of a sizable complaint because this is a big portion of what the game is asking you to do, I don't like that they changed down needle. So to Pogo in the first Hollow Knight,

you would do a down attack in the air and you'd bounce off of whatever you hit, whether it's an enemy or like a spike, you would bounce off it to give you some extra air which of course led to more skill ceiling. There was a lot more you could do with that. In this game, pogoing is still here, but instead of being just like a normal straight down attack with the needle, you instead come at an angle. You come at sharp angles every single time. You can't go straight down with it. You have to come at an angle. So what ends up

happening is when you're traversing some places that are requiring you to pogo, such as in Farfields, I think that's I think it's Farfields, the place with the red flowers that are spread out all over the place with vines under it so if you hit it you take damage and reset. The platforming challenge there is doing the pogo off of the flowers to reach the next section, the next platforms. And in the first Hollow Knight that's obviously there too but it felt much more intuitive to just do a normal down slash, a normal down needle, pogo off it, go to the next

one, rinse and repeat. Here, since you're coming at angles, and since you have to go from right to left pretty often, you have like these sharp angles that you're doing that sometimes just feel inconsistent, and oftentimes actually, at least in my playthrough, you'll actually hit the hitbox of the flower without pogoing. So you'll just like attack through it. It just doesn't feel as good as just the normal down needle pogo from the first one did. At least not yet.

Now, again, I'm only 4 hours in. It might get much better as I get more familiar with it, but as of right now I am missing the way pogoing felt in the first one. That's the only complaint I have. Pretty much all of my deaths in my playthrough right now are from pogoing. Like attempting to pogo either off an

enemy or off of like the flowers. It is taking me a lot of getting used to and maybe by the end of it I'll warm up to it and say I love it even more than the first Hollow Knight because I see the vision like it wants it to be even more demanding like and give you even more options for your movement like I can see the vision because sometimes I can string together like a really good set of pogos throughout the terrain and throughout the enemies and it is beautiful looking. The way that you'll pogo into like a

dash cancel or something and then go right into the next pogo while still in the air, like it looks really cool because you can like you can combo all of this together and I do see like there could be a lot of cool experimentation with it but right now like I just feel like more time more often than not it's become a headache because I want to just do like a normal down hit and pogo offs or something but instead I go off to the side miss and just go straight into the shithole and

take big damage or just die. Like I don't know it's not that big of an issue and again it is still fresh so maybe I just need to get more familiar with it That is the only complaint I have about the game everything else I think has just been smooth sailing and I absolutely love it every boss fight has been hype every Environment I visited has been nice the characters are charming the game sound design is a slapper Everything in this is exactly what I was hoping for for a new Hollow

Knight experience and I imagine most people that have picked it up are probably pretty satisfied would be my guess. Like it really feels like it knows exactly what people wanted and just gave you more of that and more options with it. So I'm excited to keep playing it, I'm excited to finish it, excited to finish it and I'm very happy to see that it is doing so well for Team Cherry. This has been a lot of years baking here in the oven, and it looks like everyone's really enjoying the dessert.

So I'm happy that it's doing so well, and just wanted to give you my first impressions and say that yes, it does live up to the hype so far. So I'm happy that it's doing so well, and just wanted to give you my first impressions and say that yes, it does live up to the hype so far. And I'm optimistic that it will only continue to get better as I get deeper into the game.