There won’t be any prizes for correctly guessing that Hollow Knight: Silksong’s first expansion, Sea of Sorrow, will involve a) a sea and b) some kind of adverse emotion. But there is mounting evidence that the watery DLC will restore, or at be inspired by, places and bugs that developers Team Cherry had previously left on Silksong’s cutting room floor – yet had been shown in in marketing for the main game as far back as 2019.
All credit for this goes to YouTube’s Hollow Knight loremaster Mossbag, along with the loveable sickos that maintain the (non-Fextralife) Hollow Knight wiki. Mossbag’s rain-lashed compass points towards Sea of Sorrows being at least partially based on Pharloom Bay, which according to early development materials, would have been plopped at the far east of Silksong’s map, next to (eurghh) Bilewater. Pharloom Bay never made it into the game that finally released in September this year, but there is a distinctly nautical-lookin’ region shown at 1:13 in Silksong’s original reveal trailer, covered in barnacles and housing at least one conch-dwelling NPC:
That area was never found in-game either, so it’s a pretty safe bet this was meant to be Pharloom Bay. And, as Mossbag notes, that old footage also shows the area being lit by distinct scythe-shaped bell lamps of an almost identical design to the lashed structures we see in the very first shot of Sea of Sorrow’s own teaser.
Pharloom Bay might not be the only resurrected concept, either. The mysterious, lightning-struck glass chamber shown halfway through the Sea of Sorrow trailer looks an awful lot like the Lifeblood Spire, another cut area that’s been documented since before Silksong’s release. Specifically, by helpful Australians, who snapped photos of a Hollow Knight exhibit at Melbourne’s ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) museum in Melbourne. That one never made it into a trailer so, y’know, cheers mates.
I absolutely don’t want to sound like I’m disdaining the practice of developers recycling ideas for DLC or expansions. If anything, it’s quite cool to see individual concepts float in and out of the gamesmaking process, and to wonder – aloud, sometimes – how they might’ve changed in the meantime. Silksong itself has another interesting example of this, which I’ll spell out if you don’t mind light spoilers. See the coral-coated, seemingly underwater environment at 0:23 in the reveal trailer? Seasoned skongers will know that colourful design only accounts for a tiny, optional segment of the game’s infamously tricky final act, but paying attention to lore snippets will reveal that Team Cherry reworked the wider region into the Sands of Karak: the same coral kingdom hinted at in the earlier trailer, but lost to time, dried out, and claimed by the desert.
Whether or not Pharloom Bay has been as drastically rejigged, Sea of Sorrow is currently aiming for release in 2026. Like the original Hollow Knight’s expansions, it’ll be free to owners of the base game.