Team Cherry says Sea of Sorrows is coming in 2026. There are four months left in 2026.
Do the math and you’ll understand why Hollow Knight: Silksong fans have started pacing. The DLC expansion was announced just a few months after Silksong launched, with a release window and not much else attached to it.
And there’s precedent for patience here. Silksong itself started life as DLC for Hollow Knight before it swelled into a standalone sequel, which took its own sweet time arriving. So the wait ahead of you might be a few months. It might be seven years.
Either way, you need something to play. Here are seven, across genres, that scratch the same itch.
The one everybody calls “Hollow Knight but 3D”
Blue Fire is a 3D metroidvania platformer that asks for the kind of precision Silksong trained into you. The nickname isn’t unearned. Even the silent protagonist, a tiny masked sword-wielder named Umbra, looks like a cousin of Hollow Knight’s player character.
You get fast platforming with dashes and wall climbs, plus a spirit system that works a lot like the crests and charms you already know. What separates it are the mechanics that only exist in three dimensions: Z-targeting and blocking, which will feel familiar if you spent any time with 3D Zelda.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
The Zelda that punished you before Team Cherry did
Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link sits alongside Metroid, Faxanandu and Mega Man as NES titles that fed into Hollow Knight. Out of 40 years of Zelda, this is the one that left fingerprints on Team Cherry, and it makes sense, because it’s unlike any other game in the series.
It’s a side-scroller with RPG elements, closer to certain Castlevania games than to anything with a top-down overworld. It’s also the hardest Zelda by a wide margin. Enemies move fast, lives are finite, and dying sends you back to the very beginning.
Talk about a runback.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch (via Nintendo Switch Online NES library)
Different genre, same bruises
On paper Cuphead and Silksong share nothing. One’s a run-and-gun boss rusher styled after 1920s rubber hose animation. The other’s a metroidvania built on open-world exploration and platforming.
What they have in common is that they’re both really, really hard. Reading attack patterns and dodging them is the whole job in each. Cuphead has you running, jumping and ducking through enemy projectiles with the occasional platform thrown in.
If Silksong’s tensest boss fights were your favorite part, long runbacks included, Cuphead’s multi-phase encounters will land.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
The one where you find the instruction manual
Tunic is an isometric action-adventure metroidvania with a storytelling trick: as you play, you collect pages of the game’s own instruction manual. Assembling it slowly reveals the story, though much of the manual is written in an invented script. (Fan translations exist. Plenty of them.)
You play a very cute fox in a green tunic with a sword and shield, waking up on a shoreline. Like Silksong, the game wants you poking at walls. Hidden passageways are stashed all over the overworld, and new abilities or items open up even more of it.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
A Game Boy Color tribute with teeth
If you liked Hollow Knight enough to enjoy its harder sequel, you’re a person who wants to be challenged. Mina the Hollower obliges.
The difficulty curve is front-loaded, so expect some patience while you adjust to rigid combat limitations and punishing enemies. Unlike Silksong, it offers optional modifiers to make things more manageable if you’d rather not suffer.
Where Silksong and Hollow Knight look back at the NES era, Mina points at the Game Boy Color, Link’s Awakening in particular. The story and the map are both packed with secrets.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
No upgrades, no mercy
Rain World drops a strange little creature with big dark eyes into an unfamiliar world and tells you almost nothing. Sound familiar?
You play a “slugcat,” which is exactly what it sounds like, surviving in a hostile post-apocalypse. Hostile is the operative word. If the pleasure of Silksong was making Hornet stronger through needle upgrades, mask shards and new equipment, this isn’t that.
Its focus is a believable ecosystem, which no other survival platformer really attempts. You scavenge for food and find shelter from intermittent rainstorms while predators hunt you.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
Metroidvania pinball
That’s it. That’s the description.
Fine, there’s more. In Yoku’s Island Express you’re a dung beetle postman saving Mokumana Island. If Hornet’s diagonal pogo gave you trouble, brace yourself for a platformer with no jump button at all.
Yoku is attached to a ball you launch with pinball paddles, firing him through chutes and tracks across the map. For a metroidvania that resembles nothing else, this is a safe bet.
Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One
Seven games deep, and Sea of Sorrows still has a 2026 release window and four months to hit it. Here we go again.
