Silksong Stumbles on Steam: Reviews Sink a Full Tier Below Hollow Knight—Too Brutal, or Was the First Just That Good?

Three weeks in, Hollow Knight: Silksong is pulling a mountain of user reviews across platforms, and the early verdict is a little spicy: players like it a lot, but they like Hollow Knight a little more. Critics, weirdly enough, have Silksong slightly higher on Metacritic. Fans are more mixed, and the numbers back that up.

Where the scores sit right now

Silksong launched bigger and faster than Hollow Knight, so the volume of impressions is already huge. Here is the snapshot as of today, including both all-language and English-only Steam data (more on why that matters in a second):

• Hollow Knight – Steam (all): 96% positive from 419,259 reviews
• Silksong – Steam (all): 83% positive from 224,008 reviews
• Hollow Knight – Steam (EN): 97% positive from 150,415 reviews
• Silksong – Steam (EN): 91% positive from 84,492 reviews
• Hollow Knight – PlayStation: 4.71 stars from 79k ratings
• Silksong – PlayStation: 4.61 stars from 27k ratings
• Hollow Knight – Xbox: 4.5 stars from 6.9k ratings
• Silksong – Xbox: 4 stars from 3.2k ratings

Yes, there are caveats (and they actually matter)

Hollow Knight has way more user reviews, many of them written or updated after patches and DLCs polished the edges, and it picked up a big cult over time that can boost late-in-the-game scores. Silksong, by contrast, has no DLC yet and we are looking at early impressions. Also, the sequel attracted a ton of people who never touched Hollow Knight, which muddies 1:1 comparisons of tastes.

Even with all that in mind, the aggregate is pretty decisive right now. There is room for Silksong to climb, but it would take a wild swing to catch or surpass Hollow Knight at this pace.

The Steam wrinkle: a translation backlash

I included both all-language and English-only Steam numbers because Silksong got hit hard by a bad Simplified Chinese translation at launch. That sparked a wave of Mixed Chinese-language reviews (63,224 of them), and the Chinese PC audience today is much larger than it was when Hollow Knight arrived. It is a real issue for that version and reportedly getting fixed, but it is separate from what many other players experienced, so it is helpful to look at English-only too.

Even when you filter out those Chinese reviews, Silksong still lands several points below Hollow Knight on Steam. In Valve terms, Silksong sits in the Very Positive band; Hollow Knight lives in Overwhelmingly Positive.

And before anyone asks: Nintendo is not on the list because the eShop does not show this kind of rating data. With PC as Silksong’s biggest platform in the US, Steam is the main scoreboard anyway.

So why is the fan score lower?

Short version: difficulty, pacing, and expectations. The sequel is beatable (and, yes, often cheese-able), but it is a noticeable step up from Hollow Knight and that has rubbed some folks the wrong way. Team Cherry already blinked a bit in the first patch, softening the early game by nerfing a few Act 1 bosses and smoothing the early progression curve. That is not something Hollow Knight really needed at launch.

What the most-helpful negative reviews are saying

Skimming the Steam reviews users voted 'most helpful' paints a consistent picture. A lot of players call out tedium layered on top of challenge: longer runbacks, 'gotcha' design in early zones, rough economy, and bosses that hit harder right out of the gate. Highlights, by vibe:

'The difficulty curve is a wall: it begins at the difficulty that Hollow Knight ended at.'

- tweedgeezer on Steam

Other high-voted comments echo similar pain points. Gorfir Gra flags unnecessary tedium even when the raw challenge feels fair. elpern complains about frequent 'gotcha' drops into blind jumps that punish small mistakes with big do-overs. 1 Panda sums it up as longer runbacks, a harsher economy, and more damage across the board. [S] Modus Pwnens calls the whole thing 'all tension all the time' with no valleys to catch your breath. And then there is my favorite ultra-minimalist review from Mr. Skill-issue: 'Savage Beastfly'.

The bottom line (for now)

Both games are massive hits, and most studios would happily trade their souls for these numbers. But right now, players as a group are cooler on Silksong than critics are, and cooler on the sequel than on Hollow Knight. Given the caveats, Silksong’s score can absolutely rise as patches land and the discourse chills out. Matching Hollow Knight, though? That is going to take more than a few balance tweaks.