Why is Hollow Knight Silksong being review bombed?

Despite its massive popularity and a record-breaking launch, Hollow Knight Silksong is currently facing a wave of review bombs on Steam. The game started off with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on the first day, which has now gone down to Mostly Positive, with over 20% negative reviews.

For those wondering, here's why many players are review bombing the game.

Why is Hollow Knight Silksong rating going down on Steam?

There are two main reasons behind the negative reviews on Hollow Knight Silksong: the game’s extremely high difficulty and issues with Chinese translation. Interestingly, players don't seem to complain about bugs, performance problems, or the core gameplay.

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Game's difficulty

The original Hollow Knight was known for being punishing, so fans expected the sequel to be hard as well. However, some sections of the game seem to be overwhelming even for veterans.

One example that you will often find in the Steam reviews is the red flowers, where players must perform perfect air dive attacks to pogo jump upwards. Many areas place these flowers in long sequences, so even a single mistake could result in doing everything from scratch.

Another point of frustration is how you can save your progress. Taking rest requires Rosary, an in-game currency dropped only by specific enemies. On top of that, even the smallest bugs deal two points of damage, which is significant as Hornet only has five health in early levels.

Lack of Chinese language support

The second major reason seems to be the Simplified Chinese translation of the game. If you filter the reviews by language on Steam, the rating of Silksong drops to Mostly Negative among Chinese players, showing how widespread the problem is.

Negative reviews regarding Chinese translation (Image via Valve)

In response, Team Cherry’s head of marketing and publishing even released a statement on X acknowledging the problem and promising that the translation would be improved in the coming weeks.

That’s everything you need to know about why Hollow Knight Silksong is being review-bombed. While the game is still loved by many, the difficulty level and translation issues seem to take away all the fun for some players.

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About the author

Harshit Singh is a gaming journalist at Sportskeeda, with Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, and Marvel Rivals being his areas of specialization. A final-year B.Des (Visual Communication) student at Delhi Technological University, he is always eager to pursue creative endeavors. Harshit aims to deliver news and up-to-date content promptly to players around the globe. To that end, he acquires information from reliable forums and social media pages and religiously tracks the latest coverage of Fortnite — a game he has been playing since 2018. He is often found testing the new meta in-game or spectating competitive tournaments.

Harshit holds a deep love for video games, which stemmed from the hours he spent playing GTA Vice City, NFS Most Wanted 2005, FlatOut 2, and Total Overdose in his school days. Currently, he is veering towards story-driven, single-player games, with Red Dead Redemption 2 being one of his favorites.

Harshit is an ardent fan of esports titles like CS, Rocket League, and Valorant, with Fnatic, EDG, G2, and Astralis being a few of his favorite orgs. Counter-Strike pro Xantares and Benjifishy, an esports athlete who has mastered both Fortnite and Valorant, are inspirational figures for him.

Harshit works as a music producer under the alias Hysaze. He is extremely passionate about EDM and has garnered over 40 million streams across all platforms. He is also a regular contributor to Fandom’s EDM Wiki.

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Edited by Harshit "Hysaze" Singh