The creative director of Hell is Us has opened up about how it felt to unexpectedly share a release date with Hollow Knight: Silksong, calling Team Cherry’s last-minute release “a little callous.”
The shadow-dropped announcement of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date of September 4, 2025, was a less-than-celebratory day for the developers of around 10 other video games with existing marketing plans to launch around that same time.
As we summarized at the time, it impacted the release of a number of games like Demonschool, Aeterna Lucis, Little Witch in the Woods, CloverPit, Megabonk, Baby Steps, Faeland, Starbirds, and Moros Protocol. Even Stomp and the Sword of Miracles, an indie game with no release date plans anywhere in sight, elected to delay its Kickstarter launch and demo release due to Silksong.
Now, in an episode of Friends Per Second, as spotted by This Week in Videogames, Hell is Us’ Jonathan Jacques-Belletête said of Team Cherry: “When you know you’re that big, I think a shadow drop is a bit like… wow.”
“As the ‘GTA 6 of indie’… to shadow drop something like this is a little callous,” Jacques-Belletête added, but while he admitted there was a flurry of “emails and texts and messages back and forth between a lot of people, between us and our publisher — it was a real thing — we decided to keep the date, and I’m happy that we did.”
“We’re still much bigger than some of the smaller ones who would have gotten a lot more affected and who decided to change their dates — changing the date of Hell Is Us would have been a pretty big endeavour,” he explained.
“The real pain in the ass is that you have to refund your pre-orders when you do that, right? That’s the real, ‘How you gonna do this?’ — now you need to rebuild them. We didn’t say, ‘Oh my god, we have to do it, but we can’t because of that.’ We were like, ‘No, I think we can get through the storm’.
“Honestly, it’s not just Silksong, there was Cronos [The New Dawn], it was a busy time. That’s the thing nowadays, honestly — getting a window where you’re pretty much alone is almost impossible. 15 years ago, the mid-end of the summer was always a dead period. But there’s no such thing anymore. It’s just constant madness.”
Interestingly, some developers who are also changing their release windows are going out of the way to say the change in their schedules isn’t anything to do with Silksong, too. For example, Slay the Spire 2 was recently delayed to March 2026, but the team proactively refuted any suggestion it was because of Silksong.
Hell is Us is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S. We awarded it 7/10, writing: “Hell is Us has a blend of exploration, puzzles, and combat that, while familiar, pushes you to really pay attention to the world around you in a way that’s both compelling and occasionally frustrating.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
