How Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s Sequel Would Benefit by Releasing After Hollow Knight: Silksong

Highlights

• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor draws influences from Hollow Knight with similarities in meditation points and perks/charms customization.
• Hollow Knight: Silksong’s success could impact future Star Wars Jedi games, but Cal Kestis’ role will likely persist in the sequel.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor can be as tough or as easy as players like thanks to available difficulty settings with Grandmaster surely testing players’ resolve. The golden path has moments that are tremendously grueling on Grandmaster, to be sure, but nothing in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is as tedious as its Force Tear challenges on the hardest difficulty. Fallen Order arguably balanced its own hardest difficulty option better than Survivor did, and there is a lot Respawn can learn before it launches the third Star Wars Jedi game, especially if it’s fortunate enough to come out after Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Apart from clear Soulslike influences—like the number of times players are caught in gank ambushes as if it’s Dark Souls 2’s Scholar of the First Sin—Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is practically a 3D Hollow Knight in many ways, chiefly with regard to how Survivor’s meditation points mirror Hollow Knight’s benches and how perks/charms can be equipped while resting at them. Survivor has clear areas where it’ll need to improve or refine established features, such as customization, lightsaber stances, and Force ability skill trees, but waiting to see what Silksong has in store could be its greatest boon.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is Poised to Be a Massive Metroidvania

Hollow Knight is incredibly content-rich and its indie Metroidvania sequel looks to be eclipsing it since Silksong was announced five years ago with no clearer picture now of when it might launch. Of course, as long as nothing troubling is going on internally at Team Cherry, waiting however long for Silksong simply means that even more content, quality, and polish will likely be the reward for players’ patience.

Anyone whose favorite game is Hollow Knight would probably argue that Silksong doesn’t have anything it needs to improve or iterate on from the original, and with Hornet as Silksong’s protagonist it’ll be neat to see how gameplay has transitioned to a new protagonist with her own abilities and equipment. Not everything will be the same as it was in Hollow Knight and the extent to which it’ll go to be distinguishable may make it feel more like a fully fledged sequel than anything else.

Meanwhile, Hollow Knight’s beloved art style and subterranean bug aesthetic will be present regardless. Whatever features Silksong introduces will almost assuredly be lifted by other developers if they’re popular and emergent, and seeing them in Respawn’s next Star Wars Jedi game wouldn’t be surprising at all since Survivor drew heavily from Hollow Knight among other Soulslikes, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s Sequel Should Take from Hollow Knight: Silksong as Much as It Can

Unlike Hollow Knight: Silksong, it’d be fairly drastic and unexpected for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s sequel not to reprise Cal Kestis as its playable protagonist. Survivor establishes a firm throughline that is intimately tied to Cal, and suddenly upending that to feature someone else would be alarming.

Still, there’s an equal chance that Bode Akuna’s daughter Kata could be playable since Cal might end up teaching her how to wield the Force and Survivor already experimented with a newly playable protagonist in Cere Junda’s epic swan song sequence. Nonetheless, whichever path Survivor’s sequel takes will most likely have an opportunity to closely examine what Silksong is able to achieve and maybe adapt or iterate on that.

This all depends on Silksong actually releasing before the next Star Wars Jedi game, which in itself is a tall order due to how long Silksong has been in development and how little has been shared about it lately. It’d be absurd to assume Survivor will have a sequel launch before Silksong since it’s likely a few years away at least, but anything is possible given how enigmatic, fleeting, and unprecedented the development of Hollow Knight’s sequel has been.