is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Silksong resembles the original Hollow Knight in many ways, though right from the start, you can hear one key difference: Hornet. Hollow Knight’s protagonist was silent, but just as Hornet was voiced in that game, as the protagonist of Silksong, she has a voice, too, and actor Makoto Koji brings a lot of personality to the role.
“She’s confident, she’s sure of herself, she’s very stoic,” Koji says in an interview with The Verge. But Hornet has a goofiness as well, according to Koji, and she thinks Team Cherry did a good job showing how multifaceted Hornet is. This is particularly impressive because Hornet, and all of the characters in Silksong, talk in brief statements of gibberish. Even if you’re reading a long text passage, characters don’t speak those full sentences, instead saying a word or short phrase in a pretend language.
“I did a lot of making up my own gibberish,” Koji says. That meant she could only use one or two words to express something that’s happening in the narrative. Koji chose to make words that felt natural to her and that were “instinctual,” but she’s been surprised with how the Hollow Knight community has taken to some of the gibberish she made up.
Koji walked me through an example from the original Hollow Knight where (spoiler warning!) she created words for Hornet’s optional, heroic appearance during the final boss fight. “It’s a moment where Hornet is telling the character, ‘Now is the moment. Do it now.’ That was the only direction I got,” Koji says. So she scribbled down the words “gek tuu” — which the players have jokingly interpreted as Hornet telling the player to “git gud.”
Koji is an animator, not a trained voice actor, but she got the role of Hornet in part because she shared an office with Silksong developer Team Cherry, a very small team in Adelaide, Australia, while it was working on the first Hollow Knight. Originally, the role was supposed to go to a friend of hers, but after learning that that friend was going to move overseas, Koji offered to give it a go. “And I guess the rest is Hollow Knight history,” she says.
With Silksong, “I went in wanting to do the best for the character,” Koji says. Team Cherry — “the boys,” as she frequently called them during our interview — allowed her to express emotions that she doesn’t usually tap into in everyday life. “I had a lot of fun with it.”
Ultimately, she feels she’s just one part of all of the work that goes into creating Hornet who she is. “There is so much work involved to bring a character to life, from an initial sketch, to drawing each frame, to implementing the behaviours and weaving all the narrative strands,” she says. “The voice / sounds of the character, or lack of, is only the final icing on the cake.”
