Hollow Knight

One of the more promising indie games on the horizon for the Switch is Hollow Knight, the Tim Burton-esque Metroidvania starring a whole bunch of bugs. It was initially planned to arrive on the Switch eShop sometime this year—complete with the DLC expansions—but the developer has been worryingly quiet on when we could expect to see it, and now we know why. Hollow Knight is being pushed back for a release in early 2018.

The developers—as first-timers—blame their inexperience in coding as the reason for the delay; the original game had some poorly optimized code that has been an obstacle in the porting process to the Switch. In order to ensure a high-quality port that runs well, the team decided to delay it to take the needed time to sort everything out. Here’s the full statement:

Amongst all our Holloween festivities, this one’s the tough news to deliver. Despite our best efforts we’ve recently made the difficult decision to push HK’s Switch release to early 2018.

Everyday, we hear the passion for the Switch version, on twitter and in our inboxes, and no-one’s keener to see Hollow Knight out on the Switch than us! We know we’ve been quiet on this front for a while, but we wanted to come to a more concrete decision before making an announcement. We’ve jumped the gun in the past with this stuff!

We’ve been working hard to get it all polished up and ready (while working on the new content in the meantime), but last week, we took a moment to do a proper assess and decided that we should give it a bit more time. We both (Ari & William) want to ensure this version isn’t just an okay port, but a great one, and our partners at Shark Jump agreed.

Why is it taking us longer than we thought to get the port fully polished? Honestly, it’s just that as first-time developers we built the game in some strange, unoptimised ways and to get things running smoothly and consistently we need to sweep back through and rewrite or fix bits and pieces. It’s an involved process, but we’ve learnt a lot for the next project and it’s a big relief to get everything cleaned up nicely! The good news is that it’s steadily coming together, and believe us when we say it looks fantastic on the Switch’s screen! That might be a bit of a tease, but hopefully it’s not too much longer before you all get to see it for yourself. Plus, a side-bonus to all this is that all of the optimisations happening for the Switch version will be making their way into versions for other platforms (PC/Mac/Linux).

With Grimm now out in the world for PC, Mac & Linux, our giant, singular target is Switch, and we’re fully-focused on getting this version all tied up and into your hands.

What do you think? Will you be picking up Hollow Knight for the Switch? Have you played it before? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[source teamcherry.com.au]