Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally here, and while reviews are yet to properly drop, the consensus from the game's community is that it's very good. You don't rack up over half a million players and have people beating your game in less than a day if it isn't all that.

You can all see this reflected on Silksong's Steam store page, with reviews already sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive just days after launch. However, that rating doesn't paint the full picture, as, thanks to a recent update to Steam that hides reviews from foreign countries, Silksong's very angry Chinese fanbase is being slightly overlooked.

If you go into Hollow Knight: Silksong's page properly and check out reviews of the game in specific languages, you'll see that it's either Very or Overwhelmingly Positive across the board, except for those in Simplified Chinese. In fact, first spotted by Kotaku, there's quite a large drop in perception, as Silksong is currently sitting at a rating of Mixed if based on Simplified Chinese results alone.

Hollow Knight: Silksong Review Bombed Over Chinese Translation

If you take a few of the negative reviews from Chinese players and put them through a translator, you'll quickly see exactly what the issue is. It seems as though Hollow Knight: Silksong has launched with a pretty shoddy Chinese translation, with one review claiming it's "rubbish", and claiming that "the translation is bad and the font is ugly".

Another review asks if the translation is even readable for other Chinese fans, while another says that they "can't understand what [the characters] are talking about." It sounds like a translation issue with Silksong's more intricate sentence structuring, and is most likely down to the fact that Team Cherry is a studio of just a few people and may not have done its due diligence to check if its translations were accurate before release.

Thankfully, Team Cherry has already addressed the issue and say that they're working on improvements. On Twitter, Team Cherry's PR person, Matthew Griffin, has claimed that improvements will start coming "over the coming weeks", and thanks Chinese-speaking players for bringing these translation issues to the studio's attention.

Hopefully, some fixes come sooner rather than later, and they aren't too taxing to sort out. Even though most of the negative reviews criticize the translation, most of them also go on record saying that the game is really fun and they love it. I guess it's difficult to get fully immersed in a game like Silksong if characters are essentially speaking gibberish though.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong

Metroidvania Systems 9.0/10 OpenCritic Reviews Released September 4, 2025 Developer(s) Team Cherry Publisher(s) Team Cherry Engine Unity Franchise Hollow Knight Number of Players Single-player
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SUBSCRIPTION
DIGITAL
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