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Title: Video Games Weekly: Silksong and Gamescom

Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2025 22:16:35 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-w...

Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or
Tuesday (or Wednesday, whatever), broken into two parts. The first is a space
for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics
from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who's covered the industry for more than 13
years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you
need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy ΓÇö and I'll see you next week.

On a planet shrouded in myth, in a land surrounded by lore, on a mountain
draped in mystery, in a cave suffocated by secrets, the legend sleeps. For
six years, the legend has slumbered while wild stories spiral around it,
twisting and expanding and entwining. New words have been born and old words
infused with evolved meanings: Believer. Doubter. Silkpost. The lies have
grown so thick theyΓÇÖve become corporeal, spreading trickery with a name and
a dead smile.

For six years, the legend has slept while the masses roiled, all of them
waiting for the signal to awaken and know truth. All of them waiting for a
bell that will ring, finally and clearly, on Thursday, August 21, 2025.

Skong. Skong. Skong.

ItΓÇÖs a special time in the Silksong subreddit. After years of silence
around its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry has scheduled a
livestream with a ΓÇ£special announcementΓÇ¥ about the game for August 21 at
10:30AM ET. Not only is this exciting for Metroidvania fans everywhere, but
itΓÇÖs also possible that this announcement marks the final moments of the
Silksong subreddit as we know it. A strange cocktail of game delays,
inconsistent updates and hyper-focused cult fandom has cultivated a
fascinating little universe in r/Silksong, complete with its own rules,
villains and heroes. ItΓÇÖs a place where clown wigs are commonplace and
contributors have turned trolling into a role-playing artform. A LARPform, if
you will. ItΓÇÖs a place thatΓÇÖs consistently made me laugh every time
itΓÇÖs appeared in my feed over the past year or so.

Ahead of ThursdayΓÇÖs special announcement, this sub is experiencing the last
gasps of desperate myth-making and hopeless anticipation before it transforms
into something else entirely, armed with actual information about the sequel,
gameplay videos and maybe even a firm release date. Or, dare I say it, a
surprise launch. For just a moment longer in r/Silksong, anything is
possible.

And then itΓÇÖll be over. No matter what happens during ThursdayΓÇÖs
livestream, the day will come when Silksong comes out and the drip-feed of
silkposts dries up completely. But for now, our face paint is ready.
Sometimes itΓÇÖs just nice to recognize the madness and the beauty of the
moment, before it slips away for good.

The news News from ONL 2025

Gamescom 2025 kicked off on Tuesday with Opening Night Live, a showcase
hosted by Geoff Keighley and the folks behind The Game Awards, and there were
plenty of delightful morsels on display. Engadget UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith
is on the ground at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to play upcoming titles and
talk to developers, but for now, here are our headlines straight out of ONL
2025:

Denshattack! is a blend of Tony Hawk, trains and shonen anime

Battlestar Galactica might finally get the video game adaption it deserves

Absolum is awesome and I can't wait to play it on October 9

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 arrives on November 14

FromSoft's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is becoming an anime

Fallout season two has a teaser trailer and a December 17 release date

Black Myth: Zhong Kui is the next title from Game Science Studio

Cult of the Lamb's next DLC is Woolhaven, out in early 2026

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to the Switch 2

And our headlines from Gamescom 2025 so far:

Onimusha: Way of the Sword might be a more forgiving kind of samurai epic

Resident Evil Requiem feels very familiar, but it's so well made that I
respect the hell out of it

Engadget's Gamescom Opening Night Live 2025 liveblog

How to watch Gamescom 2025 and what to expect

Gamescom 2025 runs through August 24.

ROG Xbox Ally lands in October

Microsoft is slowly establishing its handheld era with news that the ROG Xbox
Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will be available on October 16. ThereΓÇÖs still no
official word on how much theyΓÇÖll cost, but there are hints: As spotted by
Wario64, Best Buy recently listed the Xbox Ally at $550 and the Xbox Ally X
at $900, and these fall in line with our predictions, which were based on the
prices of existing ROG Ally handhelds. Alongside the release date, Microsoft
announced the Handheld Compatibility Program, an initiative aimed at
optimizing games for portable devices and informing players about how well
they perform. ItΓÇÖs essentially Steam Deck Verified, but for Xbox handhelds,
and itΓÇÖs yet another sign that MicrosoftΓÇÖs portable gaming ambitions
stretch beyond just one hardware manufacturer.

The PS5 will cost more tomorrow than it does today

First Nintendo and Microsoft raised the prices of their latest consoles, and
now itΓÇÖs SonyΓÇÖs turn. Sony on Wednesday announced the following price
increases for the PS5 family:

Standard PS5 with a disc drive: $550, up from $500

PS5 digital edition: $500, up from $450

PS5 Pro: $750, up from $700

Sony blames the increases on a ΓÇ£challenging economic environment,ΓÇ¥
echoing sentiments from its contemporaries. The price hikes come at a time in
the hardware generation when weΓÇÖre used to seeing consoles get cheaper,
which just makes this whole thing more frustrating.

Rod Fergusson is in charge of BioShock again and already making big changes

There have been signs of turmoil at BioShock 4 studio Cloud Chamber for a
while now, including news earlier this month that the game failed a review
with 2K executives and was due for a complete narrative revamp. Now, weΓÇÖre
seeing even more fallout. Former Gears of War and Diablo head Rod Fergusson
has left Blizzard to lead development of BioShock 4 at Cloud Chamber, and his
appointment comes alongside news that 80 people at the studio are being laid
off. This is actually the second time Fergusson has joined the development of
a BioShock game at the last second ΓÇö he similarly swooped in and cut
aspects of BioShock: Infinite at Irrational Games in 2012.

The race through development hell between Judas and BioShock 4 continues.

BlizzardΓÇÖs cinematic and narrative team is unionizing

Microsoft is the home of another video game union. Workers with Blizzard
EntertainmentΓÇÖs Story and Franchise Development team, which handles in-game
cinematics and lore for titles including Overwatch and World of Warcraft,
voted this week to unionize under the Communications Workers of America. This
covers about 169 developers and it marks the fourth unionization effort from
MicrosoftΓÇÖs gaming teams, joining QA workers at Activision, ZeniMax and
Raven Software.

Steam censorship is breaking PayPal

PayPal isnΓÇÖt a valid way to buy games on Steam in certain countries any
longer. Steam in July removed hundreds of games with adult and NSFW themes
from its storefront, and updated its policies to ban "content that may
violate the rules and standardsΓÇ¥ of its payment processors. This was
incredibly vague and raised immediate concerns around financial censorship,
especially when combined with a related culling of thousands of games from
Itch.io. Now, itΓÇÖs confirmed that PayPal has terminated its partnership
with Steam in multiple countries, affecting any denomination ΓÇ£other than
EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.ΓÇ¥

Valve says itΓÇÖs being pressured by payment processors including Visa,
MasterCard and PayPal to remove certain games and implement puritanical
censorship policies, and this has already resulted in at least one game being
unjustly removed from the platform. That game, VILE: Exhumed, is now
available as shareware.

Roblox is changing its rules after so, so many child-safety lawsuits

Roblox is locking down its system for sharing and viewing user-generated
games following a wave of lawsuits accusing developers of failing to protect
their young userbase. All unrated experiences, or user-created games, will be
restricted to the developer and anyone actively working on them, rather than
being available to anyone over the age of 13, as is currently the case. This
change and others, including a new system that automatically detects and
tracks "violative scenes" on individual servers, will roll out over the
coming months.

Analogue delayed its N64 remake again

ItΓÇÖs now due out in Q4 2025. 

Additional reading

Kris HoltΓÇÖs indie game roundup

More action than RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 struggles to
convince after a few hours' play by Robert Purchese at Eurogamer

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-w...
221635822.html?src=rss

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