Hollow Knight: Silksong Is Being Review Bombed

Hollow Knight: Silksong is off to a flying start for the majority of users, but not for Chinese-language fans, as the highly anticipated sequel is being review-bombed by players for its poor translation. The marketing director for Hollow Knight: Silksong has since responded to the controversy from players and confirmed that Team Cherry will work to improve the translation for Chinese users "in the coming weeks."

September’s Release Lineup May Be Stacked, But Hollow Knight: Silksong Just Played The Ace Up Its Sleeve

Although there have seemingly been some serious issues for Chinese speaking fans, Hollow Knight: Silksong has been a massive success for Team Cherry. In its first few hours on the market, Hollow Knight: Silksong managed to absolutely smash the concurrent player count record for its predecessor. According to SteamDB, Team Cherry's hit sequel reached a peak of more than 562,000 concurrent players on Steam. While the official numbers for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are unknown, this is a huge increase over the original Hollow Knight, which only peaked at just under 80,000 concurrent players on the platform.

How to Download Hollow Knight: Silksong

Due to an increased demand, game stores on PC and consoles are crashing, preventing players from downloading Hollow Knight: Silksong. Here's a fix.

Posts

By Ayyoun Ali

Hollow Knight: Silksong's Chinese Translation Sparks Controversy

Despite the fact that Silksong is receiving rave reviews from critics and the majority of players, Chinese-language users have resorted to review bombing Hollow Knight: Silksong due to its translation quality. As reported by Kotaku, only 44% of its 15,000+ reviews in Simplified Chinese are positive, which means the game has a "mixed" review score in Simplified Chinese. However, this hasn't affected the game's overall Steam rating, as Valve recently implemented a major change that separates reviews per language. "I don’t understand how Hollow Knight’s fantastic, quotable translation turned into this unsalvageable heap of garbage in Silksong," one user said in regards to Silksong's poor translation (via Kotaku).

A Spoiler-Free Refresher on Hollow Knight: Silksong's Kingdom of Pharloom

Thankfully, Team Cherry has responded to the issue. Matthew Griffin, the head of marketing and publishing for Team Cherry, took to Twitter and said that the studio will be "working to improve the translation over the coming weeks." The response from fans in the replies is as expected, with many praising the game itself, but noting that the Chinese language translation is "low quality."

Hollow Knight: Silksong is Finally Here, But I’m Almost Sad The Wait is Over

Despite the controversy, Team Cherry managed to achieve something rather phenomenal with the game's launch this week, as Hollow Knight: Silksong managed to take down Xbox, Nintendo, and Steam upon its release. While the outage was only temporary, Hollow Knight players have been waiting so long to jump into the title that fans rushing to the digital storefronts at once seemed to have overwhelmed the servers.

With Grand Theft Auto 6 delayed to 2026, Hollow Knight: Silksong is undoubtedly one of the biggest sequels of the year. While the likes of Death Stranding 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 were also major hits, neither managed to take down pretty much every major storefront upon their release. With that being said, Grand Theft Auto 6 is likely going to be a much bigger release, and if Hollow Knight: Silksong was enough to take down nearly ever major digital storefront, it raises the question: how on earth will they cope when Grand Theft Auto 6 is released?