Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, the next 'Hollow Knight' from the creators of Palworld

The start of 2024 saw a revolution in the industry with the launch of Pocketpair's Palworld on 19 January. From last Friday until today, the game has grown in number of players at a rate of more than one million per day. Scandalous figures that many AAAs with much bigger budgets would like to see.

However, the controversy surrounding the game has little to do with things like microtransactions, but rather a grey area between inspiration and outright plagiarism of the game from Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo is already investigating the matter thoroughly, while the studio is already looking ahead to its next release later this quarter: a metroidvania called Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse.

As you can see from its Steam page, the game will be a metroidvania with fast-paced action elements and a dark world populated by fantasy enemies and starring a little sword-wielding witch. Beyond that first layer, it's easy to see that the design, animations and lighting resonate in your head with another name: Hollow Knight.

At the moment, Team Cherry hasn't made a statement in the same way that The Pokémon Company has with Palworld, but there's no doubt that an IP expert would have work to do here. The Australian studio continues to make progress on the development of Hollow Knight's sequel, Silksong, with little new to report. A void that gamers will presumably fill with this Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse.

If you want to see the "inspiration" for yourself, check out the announcement trailer below.