Player reviews for Hollow Knight: Silksong have taken a dive in recent days, for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent to most players. It’s the long-awaited sequel to one of the most beloved indie Metroidvanias of all time. By all accounts – including Screen Rant‘s review – it’s an excellent follow-up to the original game, balancing that core Hollow Knight gameplay loop with fresh new ideas and innovations.
Besides that, the fan community is vibrant, as everyone appears to be taking joy in sharing their discoveries and celebrating their achievements. But despite it all, Silksong‘s Steam rating is surprisingly low for a game of its stature. So what went wrong?
Silksong Reviews Continue To Plummet
“Mixed” Worldwide
Steam ratings for Hollow Knight: Silksong continue to plummet, with the game briefly reaching a “Mixed” rating worldwide (per PC Gamer). According to SteamDB, Silksong sits at just over 76% positive ratings at the time of writing – compare that to the original Hollow Knight‘s 96%. These ratings haven’t affected the rating on its English-language Steam page, however, as Steam’s recent review changes cause ratings to be sorted by language.
Divisive or just-okay games come out every day, though – it’s just surprising that Silksong‘s rating is so low, given its stellar critic ratings (98 on Metacritic) and generally positive player response. This normally doesn’t happen unless a game gets a particularly bad update, which isn’t the case for Silksong – its first big update doesn’t come out until next week.
Silksong’s Bad Reviews Are Mainly Due To Poor Translation
“I Prefer To Play In English”
As it turns out, Silksong‘s negative reviews have nothing to do with anything inherent to its gameplay: many of them come from players dissatisfied with the quality of the Simplified Chinese translation. As one player, Pro_Cream on Reddit, put it, “As a native speaker of Chinese… the quality of Chinese is so bad to the degree I prefer to play the game in English.”
Another user, 9k99G, offered some additional context further down in the same Reddit thread, claiming that the dialogue reads like someone “[trying] to speak in fake Shakespeare vocabulary with a dialect of Yoda.” The result comes off as try-hard, faux-pretentious, and sometimes, just laughable – 9k99G gives the example of “I’ll kill you” being translated into “Death thee will become, brought upon by me.”
Reading the Steam reviews in Simplified Chinese reveals that this is a common complaint, and a justification for many of the negative reviews. One reviewer, KLPAZ, wrote (ironically machine translated by Google), “The writing is incoherent, the language is decadent, the behavior is pretentious.“
Hollow Knight‘s Simplified Chinese translation was apparently sufficient, and Silksong‘s translations into other languages seem to be fine. Still, there may be a simple explanation for the dip in translation quality. PC Gamer points out that, while the original Hollow Knight credited six people on its Simplified Chinese localization team; Silksong credits just two, with no members of the original translation team returning.
From there, it gets even weirder, as one of the translators, Hertzz Liu, is suspected of leaking details of Silksong earlier this year on the social media website Tieba. In a lengthy post, a user by the name of Hertzzzz shared several details about the game’s world, potential release date, and translation strategy.
I wouldn’t exactly call this review bombing. I think the poor reviews are totally justified, and the reviewers don’t seem to be coordinated – good localization is an important component of any game that contains text, and, if the Simplified Chinese dialogue is as bad as Steam reviewers say it is, I can imagine it’d be distracting from the more positive aspects of the game.
But, for what it’s worth, many of the negative Steam reviews for Silksong appeared to be related to difficulty, not the quality of translation. Scroll through the Not Recommended reviews in any language, and you’ll find more calling for boss damage to be reduced, more benches to be placed, or an easy mode to be added than those legitimately critiquing the Simplified Chinese dialogue.
Team Cherry Is Addressing Players’ Translation Concerns
News Expected Sometime “Over The Coming Weeks”
Team Cherry has made it clear that they’re aware of the translation issues, and recently issued an apology via X (formerly Twitter). Matthew Griffin, who works in marketing and publicity for Cherry, promised that the developers would “be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks.“
So, although Silksong‘s Simplified Chinese translation got off to a bad start, it’s not doomed to stay that way forever. Team Cherry appears to be actively looking into solutions. If all goes well, Silksong should see an improved translation within the next few months, at a generous estimate.
However, it’ll take some time for the game to recoup its poor worldwide rating, even if the improved translation comes out quickly. Hopefully, Hollow Knight: Silksong gets the better reviews it deserves on a worldwide basis once its Simplified Chinese translation is improved.
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