Silksong wins over everyone, except for Chinese players criticizing the translation
Silkong came with a bang, yet apparently not all of us are impressed. Simplified Chinese localization is a mess, but Team Cherry is already working on it.
It finally happened, and what a launch it was. Hollow Knight: Silksong came out yesterday and practically broke the internet. Steam went down for a while, and even PS Store, Xbox Store, and Nintendo eShop couldn’t handle the flood of people trying to buy it. Once people actually got in, glowing reviews started pouring in. But not everyone’s on board, Chinese players have been leaving some negative feedback.
It feels off, it doesn’t capture Silksong’s tone, and it’s been this way since the demo
On launch day, Silksong’s player count skyrocketed within hours. Steam Charts showed over 500,000 concurrent players, just a few hours after release. It didn’t quite top the launch numbers of Path of Exile 2 (nearly 600k) or Baldur’s Gate 3 (an incredible 875,343), Still, unlike Silksong, those games didn’t manage to cause chaos.
Silksong is getting overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam across nearly every region (Steam now shows ratings by language). But if you check the Chinese reviews, the score drops to just “Mixed,” all because of poor translation quality. Matthew Griffin from Team Cherry posted an apology on X.
Source: X
On Steam forums, players slammed the Simplified Chinese translation as “terrible,” saying the issues were already obvious back in the demo. The wording feels clunky, awkward, and sometimes just plain confusing. But according to Matthew Griffin, the devs are already working on fixing the localization and plan to roll out improvements in the coming weeks.
But it’s not just Chinese players leaving negative feedback on Steam. From English-speaking players, there are over 3,700 bad reviews, and the main complaint is the same: the difficulty feels frustrating rather than fun. This isn’t just from newcomers, veteran Hollow Knight fans are saying it too.
Downward Jumping vs Pogo:
In Hollow Knight, down jump is a down jump. In this, its like a 45 degree angle which means you have to absolutely pin point a correct position to land on whatever you need to platform on.
The balancing of the game is out of whack. After the tutorial section almost every enemy you encounter deals 2 masks of damage, and your healing in this game is far weaker than in the original.
According to these reviews, enemies hit too hard, have way too much health, and fights often turn into tedious “hit-and-run” slogging. Low invincibility frames make runbacks exhausting, the crest system limits player freedom compared to Hollow Knight, and movement quirks like the diagonal pogo can feel awkward. The healing system is restrictive, locking players into long animations with little flexibility. Overall, many feel the difficulty is artificial and annoying, making it hard to enjoy the game even if they wanted a tougher challenge.
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Author: Olga Racinowska
Been with gamepressure.com since 2019, mostly writing game guides but you can also find me geeking out about LEGO (huge collection, btw). Love RPGs and classic RTSs, also adore quirky indie games. Even with a ton of games, sometimes I just gotta fire up Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, KOTOR, or Baldur's Gate 2 (Shadows of Amn, the OG, not that Throne of Bhaal stuff). When I'm not gaming, I'm probably painting miniatures or admiring my collection of retro consoles.
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