Now that the wait for Silksong is over, gamers can get back to their true calling: asking for Half-Life 3 in the chat

Even gaming's strongest warriors lose their way once in a while.

As skilled as we are at following checklists of things to collect and arrows that point us to our precise destination, sometimes a shiny object in the distance catches our eye and lures us away from our destiny as the one true savior of the realm. Sometimes, instead of staying devoted to our highest purpose as videogame enthusiasts—typing the words "Half-Life 3?" into the Twitch or YouTube chat box during any and every livestreamed event—we get distracted.

Hollow Knight: Silksong was very distracting. Announced, then vanished, then resurfaced and re-vanished in such a way as to inspire waves of hope, despair and development hell conspiracy theories. Half-Life 3 had to earn its place as the mystical ur-announcement, the unlikeliest of hoped-for "One last thing" bombshells to trot out at the end of a Game Awards or E3 keynote, by not existing for decades. Silksong took a mere five years to run the same cycle. And the whole time it was a real game!

That realness made the possibility of Silksong popping up in every single Nintendo Direct, Gamescom Opening Night Live, or Sony State of Play seem so tantalizingly possible. How could anyone under those conditions not type "Silksong?" into the chat of any and every Twitch stream?

How could that infection of the mind not spread into ever-more-desperate permutations?

Silksong when?

Silksong where?

????SKONG????

Silksong??? ????

????

????????????

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG????SKONG

Deep down, everyone who's typed Silksong into chat over the last five years has known that they'd diverged from the critical path. They were on a sidequest, and it was taking a lot longer than they expected it to.

Of course that fosters a nervous, even manic energy. We are masters of efficiency! We live to complete objectives! The sooner we could stop typing Silksong into chat, the sooner we could get back to our one true duty of typing "Half-Life 3?" and knowing we are answering our true calling.

Team Cherry has done gamers the world over a great service by releasing Silksong. That it is seemingly a pretty dang good game is ultimately superfluous. We're all now free to, undistracted, focus on what we can't and will probably never have, which is far more important than enjoying what we're fortunate enough to possess.

I know you may be rusty after half a decade, but it's time to get your mojo back. It's only a few months until The Game Awards, so you're going to have to start practicing now, so that the letters and that tricky hyphen flow out of you as instinctively as a Mario hop.

Go ahead and open a random Twitch chat. Refamiliarize yourself with the endless rush of messages. Don't let all those emotes and colored names distract you. Just start typing: Maybe a tentative "HL3?" to test that Silksong is fully out of your system. That you have the focus for the full name.

Keep typing it! Over and over again. I'm sure the streamer won't mind! They'll love it, actually. So will the other chatters, because even without a distraction as powerful as Silksong, there's always something else to momentarily snare our attention away. A rupee. A bad hair day. A streamer not knowing how to pronounce "Lichdragon Fortissax."

Once everyone sees your absolute commitment in typing it again and again I'm sure they'll thank you for your vision. Soon everyone will be typing it too, snapped back to the path of destiny by your guiding hand:

Half-Life 3?

Is this Half-Life 3?

Half-Life 3 when?

Half-Life 3 when?