Team Cherry just announced the first piece of free Silksong DLC content, Silksong: Sea of Sorrow, also known as SS: SoS, or as the cool kids have been calling it: sssos. This update is going to be nautical themed, featuring new areas, bosses, tools and more. According to the description on the YouTube page:
Voyage across and beneath the salt-stricken seas in this thrilling expansion, free for all players.
In addition to dropping a new trailer, Team Cherry also released a new blogpost announcing that Silksong has already sold over 7 million copies since launch. That’s a lot of Silksong players, and it’s not even counting how many people have played on GamePass. Now typically, I don’t like things that are popular or mainstream, because, you know, I’m cool like that, but with Silksong I’m willing to make an exception. At least it didn’t win Game of the Year. So it’s still kind of obscure.
The blogpost also announced that the original Hollow Knight will be getting a small update as well. And while I’m sure you’re all really excited to hear about that, I first wanted to go over this new Sea of Sorrow trailer to see if we can piece together what Team Cherry is cooking up here.
Let’s start with the obvious. “Sea of Sorrow” is going to feature a salt water sea, something we’ve never seen in Hollow Knight before. So that’s already a huge piece of worldbuilding right there. If you saw Silksong’s reveal trailer back in 2019, you might remember this bay area appearing in a few clips. The first shot of the new trailer shows these poles, which look identical to ones found in the cut bay area.
This area is referred to as Pharloom Bay in unused map data present in Silksong’s code when it first launched. We actually know quite a bit about Pharloom Bay thanks to the Game Worlds event at the Australian Centre for Moving Images. ACMI has been displaying a ton of Ari Gibson’s sketches and numerous development maps of Pharloom from various stages of Silksong’s development.
Members of the Hollow Knight Wiki have done an amazing job combing through all these old maps and sketches to piece together a lot of the information I’ll be sharing in this video. I highly recommend checking this page out in full if you want to learn more about Silksong’s scrapped areas and ideas. Also, if you live in Australia, and can go to ACMI yourself, you can help the wiki out a lot by getting more photographs of these maps. I’ve linked a document in the description explaining the process for taking pictures and what parts of the maps still need to be photographed. You, too, can help preserve Silksong development history for our children and grandchildren to enjoy.
Pharloom Bay first appeared on a map from February 2019, on the right side of Greymoor. However, at some point between late 2021 and early 2022, it was removed, and that part of the map eventually became the home for Verdania.
Despite being removed from the map, it seems Team Cherry still had a place in mind for Pharloom Bay. There’s still several hints of the region’s existence in the final game. A corpse resembling the hermit crab-like character shown off in the trailer can be found inside the Memorium. There was save profile art for the area in the game at launch. Alchemist Zylotol mentions that his master found Plasmium at the farthest edge of Pharloom, hidden deep in salt-stricken waters.
Not only that, but there’s evidence that Pharloom Bay was going to border Bilewater. This placement is what we see in the unused map data I mentioned earlier. There’s also a cut line from Zylotol referring to Bilewater as “swamps beside the sea”. The lore tablet in Weavenest Murglin refers to its resident weaver as “sat between salt and stone”, and this room’s clean water and abundance of kelp and vines further hint that the area is close to Pharloom Bay.
On development maps of Bilewater from 2023 and beyond, we can see two rooms that never appear in the final game. These rooms line up with two dead ends currently, but it seems possible that one of these dead ends will be turned into a passageway into Pharloom Bay in the upcoming update.
Alright, cool. But what exactly do we do once we make it to Pharloom Bay? Do we just hang out with this slimy fella all day? While that does sound nice, it seems like Hornet is going to be getting her grubby little hands on some kind of ship or submarine in this area.
Before the Pharloom Bay was removed from the old development maps, a strange object was added to the bottom left corner of the map in 2021. At the same time, a bunch of new isolated maps were added, each of which featured this same mysterious object. It appears to have a black body and a bright light on its right side. This is probably the object appearing behind Hornet in the new trailer. Since this update is going to allow Hornet to voyage beneath the sea, it seems like this object is some kind of submarine crafted from a giant shell that Hornet will use to reach new areas.
But what are these new areas Hornet can travel to? Let’s look at some of the regions displayed in the old development maps. There’s a collection of rooms that appear to be related but it’s hard to tell what they are supposed to be. One room has really tall pillars sticking out of the sea.
Another potential stop Hornet might make is at the Ocean Outpost. This area appeared in Ari’s sketchbook and on development maps. We can also see what might be a hidden underwater cave. But there’s not much to go on with these areas, since they are so small and underdeveloped. It’s worth mentioning that what we see in these old maps might be outdated, so don’t expect to see all this stuff in the final game.
Another room shown off in the development maps should look familiar. It appears to be the same area shown off in the new trailer. The contraption we see getting struck by lightning appears at the very top of this area, and we can see those same blue petals here as well. A similar looking structure appears in Ari’s sketchbook labeled “Lab”.
The leading theory right now is that this area is the Lifeblood Spire, a region of Pharloom that only ever appeared in the very first sketch of Silksong’s map shown to the public. The blue colors are reminiscent of Lifeblood, and when you combine that with the whole lab aesthetic and the fact that Alchemist mentions his master found Lifeblood deep within the sea, all signs point to this area being related to Lifeblood. That said, these petals don’t quite match the butterfly-like leaves we’re used to seeing and they don’t even move in the wind. Perhaps they are the result of some kind of experiment manipulating Lifeblood. Does the lightning we see striking this device have something to do with it?
One more thing about this clip. We’ve seen lightning in Hollow Knight before, specifically within the Land of Storms. So the storm here isn’t a new thing in Hollow Knight’s lore, in case you were wondering.
There’s only one clip left from the trailer I haven’t talked about yet. It reminds me of the various chapels Hornet could discover on her journey. You can even see what appears to be melted candles surrounding this plinth. So we might be getting a new crest with this update. These bumps might indicate that a creature similar to Zango or Alchemist Zylotol is underneath here, but I’m a bit skeptical about that.
So it seems this update will be pretty isolated from the rest of Silksong. That makes sense considering they are adding new areas here. It would be a bit more difficult to slot areas into the existing map with how big and interconnected it already is. The only thing I’m worried about is the name for this update: Sea of Sorrow. That’s a bit foreboding, isn’t it, although suffering and sorrow shouldn’t be anything new for us Silksong fans.
I also did want to briefly mention that Hollow Knight is getting a bug-fix update as well. They made a couple of changes to make gameplay in Hollow Knight align more with Silksong. One big change is that the game is actually going to pause when you open the inventory menu now. That’s pretty crazy, but makes sense I guess. But they did make one change in this new update that absolutely baffles me. Salubra’s Blessing now disappears once your Soul Vessels are full.
Unplayable.
Songs used: Far Fields (Silksong OST) Bilewater (Silksong OST) Mount Fay (Silksong OST)
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