Hollow Knight Silksong is out, and it's broken the entire internet

Hollow Knight Silksong. That's it, that's the post. It's been six years since Team Cherry first revealed that it was planning a full-fledged sequel to its adored Metroidvania, and we've spent at least three of those wildly speculating on when we'd finally get to play it. Now it's here - but the launch has quickly (and perhaps predictably) sent the Valve store into trouble. Players trying to grab their copy and start exploring have found their progress blocked by Steam server issues.

With Hollow Knight Silksong now out, it's important to keep in mind a few blockers to its launch stats. There was no pre-ordering on Steam, meaning eager players will have to both buy and download it first (although with the Hollow Knight Silksong system requirements listing a relatively light 8GB install, that shouldn't take too long for anyone on decent internet). The long-awaited Metroidvania is also available via Game Pass, although it's cheap enough that some may pick up a standalone copy anyway.

Unfortunately, we'll be waiting a little longer to see just how popular it is - the launch has seemingly brought Steam to a grinding halt. I, like many, have encountered 'Steam error E502 L3' when trying to reach the homepage, which Valve says "indicates Steam's servers are under heavy load or experiencing technical issues, often related to the Steam store."

Update: Hollow Knight Silksong has been out for 30 minutes. I still can't get my Steam cart to load, and neither can many of the PCGamesN team, although our luckiest staffers are already playing. They're not alone; SteamDB already lists more than 100,000 players in game. I'm definitely not extremely envious of all of you.

If you don't want to sit in the queue, the game's also available via GOG, and the site appears to be working as normal so far, although some have reported server issues when trying to download the game via the GOG launcher. Other sites, such as Humble and SteamDB, are also running into issues. The Silksong saga may have just begun, but it's far from over.

Once you can actually get started, we're already hard at work to bring you the lowdown on all Hollow Knight Silksong bosses and strategies to get past them, along with everything we know about the Hollow Knight Silksong map so far.

Want to share stories about your time in the sequel? You can do so in the PCGamesN community Discord server - just be mindful of spoilers.