Hell is Us Director Slams Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Surprise Release as ‘Callous’!

The lead creative behind Hell is Us recently expressed his feelings about their coincidental release timing with Hollow Knight: Silksong, describing Team Cherry’s surprise announcement as somewhat insensitive.

The unexpected declaration that Hollow Knight: Silksong would launch on September 4, 2025, cast a shadow over the promotional strategies of nearly a dozen other games slated for release around the same period.

As previously reported, this affected several titles including Demonschool, Aeterna Lucis, Little Witch in the Woods, CloverPit, Megabonk, Baby Steps, Faeland, Starbirds, and Moros Protocol. Furthermore, Stomp and the Sword of Miracles, an indie project without a fixed launch date, postponed its Kickstarter campaign and demo release due to the Silksong announcement.

In a recent episode of Friends Per Second, spotted by This Week in Videogames, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête from Hell is Us commented on Team Cherry’s strategy: “Knowing the magnitude of your influence, I think a surprise release is quite shocking.”

“Labelled as the ‘GTA 6 of indie games,’ to just drop a release like that seems a bit harsh,” Jacques-Belletête continued. He acknowledged the flurry of “emails, texts, and messages between many of us and our publisher—it was a significant event—but we chose to stick with our original date, and I’m glad we did.”

“We’re larger than some of the smaller games that were more significantly impacted and who had to shift their release dates. For Hell Is Us, rescheduling would have been a major challenge,” he added.

“The real hassle is having to refund all the pre-orders if you change the release date, right? That’s the major headache—then you have to rebuild your pre-order base. We didn’t just throw our hands up and say we had to delay; we believed we could weather the storm,” he explained.

“To be honest, it wasn’t only Silksong; Cronos [The New Dawn] was also releasing, making it a crowded period. Today, finding a clear release window is nearly impossible. Fifteen years ago, late summer used to be a quieter time, but those days are long gone. Now, it’s just non-stop chaos,” he remarked.

Interestingly, other developers adjusting their release schedules are also making it clear that their decisions aren’t influenced by Silksong. For instance, Slay the Spire 2 was pushed back to March 2026, and the team explicitly denied any connection to the Silksong release.

Hell is Us is now available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S. It received a score of 7/10, with the review highlighting: “Hell is Us combines exploration, puzzles, and combat in a way that demands you engage closely with the game world, providing an experience that’s both intriguing and at times, challenging.”