Hollow Knight: Silksong is being review-bombed in China

82 per cent of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Steam reviews may be positive, but it seems the adoration hasn’t been universal, with hundreds of Chinese-speaking players slamming Team Cherry for issues with the sequel’s translations.

It’s been such a problem, in fact, that even though Silksong’s reviews are chiefly either Very or Overwhelming Positive when you isolate by language, Silksong’s simplified-Chinese Steam reviews are sitting on an anomalous Mixed rating.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Team Cherry’s Matthew Griffin directly addressed Chinese-speaking players on X/Twitter overnight, acknowledging the issue and confirming “we’ll be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks”.

“To our Chinese-speaking fans: We appreciate you letting us know about quality issues with the current Simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong,” he wrote (thanks, Kotaku). “We’ll be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks. Thanks for your feedback and support.”

Chinese-speaking players’ feedback suggests Hollow Knight: Silksong’s translation “reads like a Wuxia novel instead of conveying the game’s tone”, is “of rather low quality”, and “really ruins the game experience…”

Consequently, of the 16,000+ reviews left for Silksong by players categorised as playing in the ‘Simplified Chinese’ language, just 44 per cent have left a positive review.

For more on Silksong, Bertie spoke to several developers about the impact its low price will have on other indie games in his feature: Is Hollow Knight Silksong’s ‘cheap’ price a problem for other indie games? Devs and publishers weigh up its impact. And interestingly, the pirating community is actually urging others to buy the game, rather than pirate it.

And in news unlikely to surprise you as we go into the weekend, Hollow Knight: Silksong has already broken its own concurrent record, hitting 562,814 players on Steam.