After years of waiting, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally has a release date, and it’s just around the corner: September 4. The long-awaited follow-up to Hollow Knight has been the subject of discussion, controversy, and disappointment for years, plagued by delays and missed deadlines. But die-hard fans can finally breathe a sigh of relief and begin warming up their hands for the fast-paced, punishing Metroidvania they’ve dreamed of.
The news dropped today as part of a special Silksong presentation at Gamescom 2025. Originally announced in February 2019, Hollow Knight: Silksong saw updates through December 2020, but then Team Cherry maintained radio silence until a new trailer dropped in June 2022. Silksong was originally scheduled for release within the year, but a year later, fans were left pining.
Rather than playing as the titular character of the first game, Silksong puts players in control of Hornet, the princess of Hallownest. She has been kidnapped (bug-napped?) and taken to the land of Pharloom, where she must fight her way to freedom. The combat is different than the first game, and Silksong adds a quest system to its larger world.
Gamescom 2025 has had a playable demo of the game, and players report a few additional changes. In Hollow Knight, if you die, you have to fight a shadow of your character to retrieve all of the souls you collected. According to those who played the demo, Silksong takes a bit of mercy on the player by dropping a silk cocoon rather than forcing the player to fight a clone of themselves (something that made retrieving dropped souls particularly difficult in boss fights).
The gorgeous, hand-drawn art style returns for the sequel alongside more than 200 unique enemies, over 40 bosses, and so much more. If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on Silksong (and at this point, who hasn’t?), the wait for your next favorite Metroidvania is almost over.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.