Team Cherry have confirmed release times and price points for Hollow Knight: Silksong. It'll cost $19.99, €19.99 and ¥2300 at launch on Thursday 4th September, with pricing for other regions such as the UK to follow. As an indication, the above pricepoints equate to around £17, but I wouldn't be surprised if they charged £19.99 for it, purely for the sake of symmetry.

It's traditional among games journalists to illustrate pricepoints in terms of high street chain cups of coffee. But this is Silksong, a game anticipated as fervently as the ancient Mayans once anticipated the coming of an eclipse, so I will resort to more ornate means of comparison: Silksong will cost you 4200000th as much as a B-52 Stratofortress. It will cost you three-sixteenths of your soul on a rainy Friday, or two-sixteenths if the sun is out. It will cost you considerably less than they could probably charge for it. I'm not saying we should be grateful, mind, but we can breathe a sigh of a relief that this isn't being published by EA, Take-Two or Microsoft.

The game will launch on 7am PT, 10am ET, 3pm BST, and 4pm CEST this Thursday. This means that North American players can take the whole day off so as to rise and shove their gloating faces into Hornet's adventure, very first thing. You won't even have to shower first, you bastards. Seething Brits and Europeans must twiddle their thumbs in apoplexy till mid-afternoon, while the poor, sleepless Japanese seemingly won't get access till 11pm Tokyo time, if I'm converting the timezones correctly.

James was recently able to actually play Silksong at Gamescom, finding it both enjoyable and familiar. "The upside of playing it safe is that absolutely nothing has compromised what made the first game's action a tactile pleasure: its abnormally fine-tuned controls and pin-sharp audio/visual feedback on hits and jumps," James wrote.

We had a bit of a ride with the original Hollow Knight. Back in 2017, John Walker (RPS in peace) recommended that people play Ori and the Blind Forest instead. This caused quite the hullabaloo over the subsequent eight years. My sage and considered verdict in hindsight is that they're both mid and you should play Animal Well. Here's to another eight years!