2025 is turning into a good year for long-awaited games

2 weeks ago 6

It actually happened: Silksong, the standalone sequel to Hollow Knight, has a release date. After seven years in development, and almost as many shrouded in silence, the game is coming out on September 4th. It’s welcome news for the millions of Hollow Knight fans who have been impatiently waiting. But it’s also part of a welcome trend: 2025 is shaping up to be the year that several long-in-development games finally see the light of day.

Joining Silksong later this year will be Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. While it doesn’t have a specific release date, the shooter is part of Nintendo’s steady stream of releases for the first year of the Switch 2. The game has been in development so long it’s releasing on both versions of the Switch. It was first announced in 2017, but in 2019, Nintendo said that it was rebooting development of the game, with original Prime studio Retro taking over the project. Five years went by before the game appeared again, with the new subtitle Beyond, and earlier this year, it was confirmed as a Switch 2 title.

The development of Routine from Lunar Software has been similarly protracted. I originally wrote about this ’80s-style indie horror game in 2012, and at one point it had been planned for a 2016 launch. That obviously didn’t happen, and six years later the game was “re-revealed” with a new trailer and the news that Swedish label Raw Fury would be publishing it. Then, earlier this week, slightly hidden among all of the trailers and reveals during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live keynote, was confirmation that barring any more delays, Routine would be launching later in 2025.

While both Routine and Metroid Prime 4 seem to have suffered from the technical and design difficulties that can plague the development of big, complex games — at one point Nintendo’s senior managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi called Metroid’s development “very challenged” — that hasn’t been the case for Silksong. It’s just a game being built by a small team who were able to take a slow and steady approach. “It was never stuck or anything,” Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”

Of course, there’s another long-in-the-works game that was originally slated to launch in 2025 but has since been pushed back: Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar released the first trailer for the game at the end of 2023, a decade after the launch of GTAV, and initially planned to release VI in the fall of this year. It’s now supposed to come out on May 26th, 2026, so fans will have to continue to wait for that one.

But even without the blockbuster behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto, this year will be one that satiates many fans who have been eagerly awaiting a specific game. You could even throw the latest chapters of Deltarune onto that list. The real question is, with all of these games finally coming out, what’s next to obsess over? Is the sequel to Beyond Good & Evil really still alive? When will Stardew Valley’s creator launch his next game, Haunted Chocolatier? Will Knights of the Old Republic get its announced remake — or will Bloodborne get one at all? What’s up with the next Elder Scrolls and Half-Life 3? Let’s hope for more good news in 2026.