Hollow Knight's creators didn't want to be constrained by the 'metroidvania' label, but they accidentally set a standard that every game since—even Silksong—has to reckon with

Hollow Knight Godmaster art.

In a 2017 interview about the making of Hollow Knight's map, designer William Pellen told me that Team Cherry "shied away completely" from describing the game as a metroidvania. Artist Ari Gibson added that they didn't want to "let a genre dictate" the decisions they made about Hollow Knight's design while they were making it.

And yet judging by its place on Steam, Hollow Knight is not just a metroidvania, a specific subgenre of adventure game defined by nonlinear exploration and gaining new abilities that gradually grant access to more and more of the game world. It is now the Metroidvania.