Team Cherry’s long-awaited Metroidvania, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is finally available on all platforms, and so far, it seems like it’s living up to the hype. While there aren’t a lot of professional reviews available for the game at the moment, Hollow Knight: Silksong currently has an astounding 95/100 Top Critic Average on OpenCritic, with 100% of critics recommending the game. The game’s Steam user ratings are largely positive, as well, and despite some recurring complaints about its immense difficulty, it has managed to earn a 91% positive score on the site. As great as all of this is, though, the path to the game’s launch has been anything but an easy one.
Hollow Knight: Silksong was originally announced with a brief trailer in 2019, but the game infamously went MIA for years. Aside from showing a few trailers off here and there, Team Cherry provided very few updates on the game’s development. This led many fans to make clown memes about Hollow Knight: Silksong, which they used to make fun of themselves and each other for falsely believing that the game would appear at a showcase, even though it almost never did. Now that Silksong is out, the clown memes for the game are pretty much dead, but there is still one other upcoming title that fans can meme about.
If there’s one game that rivals Hollow Knight: Silksong in terms of having a ridiculously long gap between its announcement and release, it’s probably Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. This Nintendo-exclusive title was actually revealed two years prior to Silksong, but to this day, it still hasn’t hit store shelves. When Metroid Prime 4 was first shown off at Nintendo’s E3 2017 press conference, the game was quite literally nothing but a logo at the time. Nintendo said that the title would be developed by some of Bandai Namco’s studios in Japan and Singapore, but it ultimately didn’t end up that way.
In 2019, Nintendo revealed that it had restarted Metroid Prime 4′s development, after the initial version of the game made by Bandai Namco failed to meet its internal expectations. The company said that it decided to hand the game off to Retro Studios, the original developers of the Metroid Prime franchise. At the time, Retro Studios was working on an all-new platformer for the Nintendo Switch called Harmony, but this unannounced project was canceled in order to prioritize Metroid Prime 4‘s development.
Retro Studios hasn’t released a new game since 2014’s Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, its only other release since then being Metroid Prime Remastered in 2023.
Nintendo didn’t release a single trailer for Metroid Prime 4 until June 2024, when it confirmed that the game would be released on the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2025. The company then announced earlier this year that the game would get a port for the Nintendo Switch 2, featuring enhanced visuals and smoother frame rates. Despite the fact that Nintendo has shown Metroid Prime 4 off multiple times in the last few months, it has remained oddly tight-lipped about the game’s release date.
While it’s unlikely that Metroid Prime 4 will get hit by a major delay, similar to the one that Hollow Knight: Silksong suffered from back in 2022, there’s still a chance that the game could get pushed back into early 2026. Regardless of how things play out, recent rumors have suggested that a Nintendo Direct is going to take place this September. Even though nothing has been officially confirmed yet, it seems likely that Metroid Prime 4 would appear at such an event in some capacity. If it doesn’t, however, then it wouldn’t be surprising if fans started to post tons of clown memes for the game on social media, just like they did with Hollow Knight: Silksong.
September 4, 2025
Team Cherry
Team Cherry
Unity
Hollow Knight
