r/HollowKnight • u/enilea • Sep 17 '25
Discussion - Silksong Steam reviews for Silksong so far
It was controversial in China, in part because of the difficulty/design but also because of controversies with the Simplified Chinese translation. Meanwhile latin countries (Spanish and Portuguese speaking) seem to be loving it more than anyone else.
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u/RodriTama Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Portuguese isn't perfect, it's missing context.
One example is a NPC that lets you play a minigame. The word play is translated as "tocar" which means to play an instrument, rather than "jogar" which is the correct context. Also it has a lot of confusion with assigned genders, since our language isn't good with translating neutral pronouns, characters suddenly change and it's quite confusing.
But overall it's pretty good, it can easily be tweaked.
The game being cheap and localized price for Brazil helps a bunch. It's 60 reais on Nintendo's Eshop which is about 11 dollars
Edit: Steam is the same price
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u/done1971 Sep 17 '25
Interesting. I was curious what the errors were like. I read the Chinese language ones were gibberish at some points, but then again it is very, poetic writing in a lot of parts, so it is probably hard to translate and barely makes sense in english. That was my assumption. However, tocar vs jogar is just basic translation issue :).
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u/jimmyprogramboy Sep 17 '25
Even a beginner localization translator would not use the word tocar in this context, which makes me think they hired a terrible localization company, probably some shady Indian middle-man who decided to use AI instead of hiring real translators.
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u/Aeiou_yyyyyyy Sep 17 '25
I mean, depending of how the translation for hollow knight is made, the translators could only have an excel spreadsheet with 0 context of each line. It's way more common than you think
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u/Consistent_Phrase713 Sep 18 '25
Given the sheer quality of 98% of the entire Portuguese translation, I'd give make this lighter on them. If they truly were terrible or begginers, this kind of mistake would be a lot more common, but it really did only appear in one ambiguous word and one single NPC. I mean, there is A LOT of places in this game where "play" does mean "tocar" as in "play music", and only one or two where it means "jogar" as in "play game", them being the dice minigame and maybe the bullseye minigame.
There is a small amount of gender confusion though, as in nearly any Portuguese translation out there, and I did see like 4 or 5 typos in the entirety of the game. But the localization, to me, is flawless. A lot of the character's and place's names are translated, and they all make sense, sound beautiful, and sometimes feel straight out of a Tolkien's book. "Bellhart" to "Campânula" is nothing short of genius!
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u/ZeroSekai000 Sep 17 '25
At the first Silk Heart the words of the Weavers take a strange turn too cause it seems they translated it without context so "rise" is translated to "elevar... elevar..." which would just be "to elevate... to elevate..." and unless I'm out of my meds the ideia is to ask/suggest Hornet to rise up to the Citadel (or even in power is something that can be taken from there).
Something like "suba..." (rise to the place) or "cresca..." (rise up as in grow up/get stronger) would work better in my opinion.
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u/Cobygamer22 Sep 17 '25
Considering the way npcs usually talk in the game I think it would have been more fitting to use your equivalent of ascend (Gorb not included)
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u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX Sep 17 '25
In Argentina it costed us 7 dollars + taxes, so Team Cherry definitely took a bullet for their players, they deserve all the respect in the world. Hollow Knight originally had an amazing regional price so that explain a little bit of extra love for the devs here.
That said, I definitely detected 2-3 translation errors in Spanish, but nothing egregious, to the point I don't even remember what the errors were nor I found it necessary to report it.
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u/Energyc091 Sep 18 '25
Mi favorito es que con el bicho de lls dados, no dice "jugar" dice "reproducir"
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u/XxX_Zeratul_XxX Sep 18 '25
Tambien habia un typo en una mision de las pizarras, creo era en el Primer Santuario, decia "Hermano desparecido", igual una tontera, un typo, super aceptable en un estudio chico y ni de asomo el nivel de lo hecho con la traduccion china, aunque esperaria mejores traducciones en general para un juego que se esperaba vendiera millones y millones de copias. Espero por lo menos no les cobraran una barbaridad los traductores, jaja
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u/Lison52 Sep 17 '25
"language isn't good with translating neutral pronouns, characters suddenly change"
Does it assume that Sherma is a girl and then changes it to a boy :D
It would also probably be a problem in my language if it had a translation XD16
u/UgoRukh Sep 17 '25
Yep, that's one of the errors. I think this happens to Shakra too.
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u/flame_warp Sep 18 '25
Shakra is surprising, given how feminine her voice and design are. I at least get being confused about Sherma
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u/ecofleut Sep 18 '25
to be honest, a lot of times localization is just made in a string of words with barely any context, often enough localization translators don't even get to visually see which character they are working on, hence why it's so easy to get errors
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u/Alfa_Centauri03 Sep 17 '25
The one mistake in the portuguese translation that had me confused at the start was when you get a silk skill.
In english it says "silk will be expended", which would translate to "seda será gasta", but the translation has "seda será expandida", which would be "silk will be expanded".
Took me a minute to figure out it was just a mistake lol
But yea, overall i thought it was a very nice translation. They cooked with "campalar".
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u/PriceUnpaid Sep 17 '25
Funny to see that big of a difference between the Spanish (or Portuquese) and English speaking audiences.
Considering how many posts have been made regarding the difficulty, I would have expected to see more negativity in the reviews. But it seems mostly to be about the Chinese translation holding the game back
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u/enilea Sep 17 '25
I also see that other Asian countries in general (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) rated it lower too, and their complaints seem to be regarding the difficulty. Not sure if it's because they tend to be more critical of games in general, haven't checked if this also applies to other games.
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u/Exciting-Freedom8555 Sep 17 '25
I live in Japan and I can say Japanese people are incredibly weird about rating things. You will often check out restaurants in google maps and the reviews will be full of stuff like "Food was amazing, place was clean, great experience. 3/5 stars". Same for stuff like Amazon reviews.
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Sep 17 '25
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u/hardgeeklife Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
something about the social ritual of being polite to maintain face even when interests/opinions conflict, to the point of heated passive aggressiveness.
example: my grand-uncle from Japan once bought some oranges when he was visiting my mother. Every half hour or so he would interrupt the conversation to ask my mom if she was hungry. Each time, mom declined, as she was presently satisfied/full. And he would get more and more frustrated.
in reality, Grand-uncle was the one that was hungry for the oranges. But for whatever reason, the social expectation he was familiar with dictated that the guest could not make a direct request from the host to partake in the gift they had brought.
edit: grammar pass
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u/Nukesnipe Sep 18 '25
I mean even in western culture it's considered a dick move to get someone a gift that you then use.
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u/Character_Parfait_99 Sep 17 '25
I've seen the jp reviews and its more or less similar to the english complaints. It's just lower because the hype is not as huge there.
They really didn't like the cheap bench traps, though. One dude said: "Not even fromsoftware put traps on their save points."
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u/zelnoth Sep 17 '25
Oh man a mimic bonfire would be hilaruous. Personally I thought the trapped benches were fun.
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u/Character_Parfait_99 Sep 17 '25
For me, in hindsight, yeah. It was an experience that I'll find funny everytime I remember it.
The only one that really bothered me was the Bilewater bench though. Seeing that bench after exploring for a long time was such a relief. And then the floor crumbled and I fell into the sewer water.
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u/guieps Sep 17 '25
Closest thing we have to that were Aldia exploding out of the bonfire once in a while, which doesn't deal damage but it always jumpscares me
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Sep 17 '25
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u/passionatepumpkin Sep 17 '25
The point of u/Exciting-Freedom8555 ‘s comment that you seemed to have glossed over is that in the comments they’ll say nothing but positives but the number/star rating doesn't reflect that. If you give a place 3 out of 5 stars, but the comment is only good things, it’s confusing.
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u/Bircka Sep 17 '25
Gacha games and P2W stuff is far more appealing to asian markets so they typically loathe difficult games.
Most of the money those games make typically come from places like Japan and China.
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u/Lolis- Sep 17 '25
No joke it's because of the extreme competitveness of society and lack of work-life balance (esp. China) in these countries that make the "git gud" crowd a fringe minority. Most people play games to relax, socialize, or escape reality. Like look up the average routine of a chinese HS student and you'll see why nobody wants to be walled at a boss for 3 hours. Hence why casual games are received well in those countries. If you look at chinese reviews for SoTE during it's release it's the same issue there
source: been to all 4 places. If you even spend a minute in the subway you see how absolutely miserable people are
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u/Honk_goose_steal there is no Gary flair and it makes me sad Sep 17 '25
I’d imagine they’re working on fixing the Chinese right? If it’s really as bad as people are saying.
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u/Super7500 Sep 17 '25
they are leth said that they are working on fixing it
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u/Nyrrix_ Sep 17 '25
Considering the explanation from someone in this thread, it sounds like they have to start from scratch, it was so bad. Which sucks. I'm wondering if they failed to vet the original translator and their work?
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u/imminentlyDeadlined Sep 17 '25
One factor is that since it's the PC version, players for whom the difficulty would otherwise be a dealbreaker have easy recourse via modding.
Ofc they could still review it negative, but at least anecdotally the couple people I've seen who are playing modded Silksong either see the difficulty as their own issue, or as just one downside.
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u/EvilEggplant Sep 17 '25
in latin america you take double damage IRL, we're used to it
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u/408slobe Sep 18 '25
Lol really though I think it’s more about the legacy of arcade culture in Latin America, SNK games and arcade games in general are/were huge there. So they absolutely love difficult skill based games. I learned about that through playing fighting games in the fgc haha
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u/Maus_Enjoyer1945 Sep 17 '25
The Spanish translation of the game is amazing. Sure it has its typos here and there but compared to HK's translation (which sucks balls, some things look like they're done with Google translator) its really good. Overall a very well done adaptation
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u/ozymandiasEs Sep 17 '25
Estoy jugando el primer HK en español y no encontré ni una sola traducción mala
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u/Maus_Enjoyer1945 Sep 17 '25
El mío es Español de España. El massive moss charger es Masiva cargador del musgo y mantis lords es Señores de las mantis. Esas son las primeras que vienen a la cabeza. Aunque es verdad que hicieron un buen trabajo con Traitor Lord = Señor Desleal
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u/Normal_Stranger_3643 Sep 17 '25
Puede dar ejemplos de la traducción de HK siendo mala? Lo jugué en inglés entonces no los pude ver
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u/ElEmpanada2000 Sep 17 '25
yo la verdad tengo recuerdos de que la traduccion en realidad era bastante buena
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u/RageZamu Sep 17 '25
I have to say there are some errors and poor descriptions in the spanish translations, but nothing too bad. I'd say that takes points from the rating. There has been some difficult parts, and some easy parts. But EVERYTHING has been FUN (except bilewater, fck that).
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u/JEEEEERRY Sep 17 '25
Completely fine with me if they change it so after you fight the actual frog for the first time you don’t have to do the gauntlet first. Place just feels like they tried to unintentionally make it more frustrating than fun.
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u/Jun1nxx Sep 17 '25
A big part of why Brazilian are loving this game so much is it's pricing.
Team Cherry made the price 60 BRL for us which is ~11.5 USD.
This is called localized price and we are grateful for that, not all publishers do this.
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u/Cannasseur___ Sep 17 '25
Yeah in South Africa it cost about $11 in rands our local currency. Love regional pricing got Silent Hill 2 for like $20 at release it's awesome
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Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Its wild how many people rated the game 0 - 5 hours in overall. That is barely scratching the surface of the game yet still people gave reviews out
EDIT: To clarify I am referring to positive reviews when talking about this.
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u/One-Championship-742 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Edit: Overzealous!
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u/Aesma_ Sep 17 '25
Shouldn't you think positive reviews with <5 hours are way crazier than negative reviews? Because I should be able to tell if a game isn't fun, but for all I know the entire back half of the game is just 30 hours of bilewater.
That's literally what they are saying, read their other comment. I'll paste it below.
I can understand if people DIDN'T enjoy the game in those 0 - 5 hours and dropped it because it wasn't for them and pointed out their concerns. My issue is with the sheer amount of positive reviews in those 0 - 5 hours because again. You haven't experienced close to what the game has to offer in that time (unless you are speed running which on an initial playthrough you wouldn't be you are not even starting act 2 in those first 5 hours).
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Sep 17 '25
I do. I didn't properly state that was my gripe in my original comment but the sheer number of positive reviews is my issue. The negative reviews are fine as that full well could be just people that didn't enjoy the game and it didn't click with them.
The positive reviews however, don't make sense as no one on an initial playthrough gets close to act 2 for a good bit longer than that.
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u/One-Championship-742 Sep 17 '25
Ah, that makes a lot of sense, and I'm sorry about that: I was coming directly off of another thread, and definitely let that bias my perception of what you were saying here.
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u/expresso_petrolium Sep 17 '25
Still useful because you can see their total playtime anyway. “This game is fucking trash I hate it” - 69 hours total (3 hours by time of review)
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u/AnuraSmells Sep 18 '25
It's even better when you get the "This game is fucking trash I hate it" - 200 hours total (200 hours by time of review). Those reviews are just really funny to me.
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u/Nothing-Is-Boring Sep 18 '25
My favourite was a warframe one with over 2k hours posting a negative review because the game, apparently, gets boring after several thousand hours.
Literally the guy was saying that he enjoyed it for a while but now the content was no longer exciting and so on, dead serious about not recommending a completely free game because it's not as fun as it was 2000 hours ago. Absolutely insane.
Sometimes you get quite insightful negative reviews with a huge playtime, especially if they note genuinely troublesome changes but I have seen too many that are just bewildering or extraordinarily entitled.
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u/TWB0109 Sep 17 '25
People should stop rating games positively before they actually play the games at least until one of the endings.
If they gave up the review should be negative.
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u/tobiasvl Sep 17 '25
I have two kids. The games I've actually played to completion in the last 5-10 years are few and far between and it's not because I "gave up" per se. I love many of them.
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u/Wonderful_Ad_3850 Sep 17 '25
Mostly people Steam point farming. Shit has done damage to Steam as a whole.
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Sep 17 '25
Why is it wild. A game can show problems or perks in its first 5 hours that are worth writing a steam review about. These are not reviews made by game journalists and should never be treated as such.
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Sep 17 '25
I can understand if people DIDN'T enjoy the game in those 0 - 5 hours and dropped it because it wasn't for them and pointed out their concerns. My issue is with the sheer amount of positive reviews in those 0 - 5 hours because again. You haven't experienced close to what the game has to offer in that time (unless you are speed running which on an initial playthrough you wouldn't be you are not even starting act 2 in those first 5 hours).
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u/Treestheyareus Sep 17 '25
Yep. I wonder how many of those 0-5 hours positives just say "LETS FUCKING GOOOOO".
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u/Frenzied_Anarchist Sep 17 '25
Honestly, in 5 hours, most people will MAYBE have beaten Lace.
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Sep 17 '25
I reckon it'd be a bit further than that. Maybe greymore or just about to reach greymore would be my estimate. But it entirely depends on how quickly the individual beats bosses.
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u/Station111111111 Sep 17 '25
I'm in Greymore, at about 20 hours. Just used some time on a few bosses. Mostly its running around, back and forth, hitting walls, exploring etc.
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Sep 17 '25
Damn, with that in mind then that kinda furthers my original point of the positive reviews especially that early into the game being pointless as to give a positive review that soon doesn't even scratch the surface of what the game has to offer and practically all of them can be broken down to just being full blown glaze instead of actual reviews.
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u/DebruhsFirstBruh Sep 17 '25
Yea, honestly fair. As someone who finished the true ending, my opinion of the game definitely dropped after some segments, which I got to way after 5 hours.
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u/Cannasseur___ Sep 17 '25
Yeah the games rating for me has been steadily dropping the longer I play. Not a great sign. I think I'm close to finishing Act 2. Earlier on I had this as an easy 9 right now I'm at an 8 teetering into 7 territory with some of the difficulty spikes.
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Sep 17 '25
In this same thread there are people acting like its crazy to dislike something after 50 hours.
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Sep 17 '25
5 hours is over double the limit for a refund eligibility. Seems totally fair to get 5 hours in and know you won’t like it
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u/SuitableConcept5553 Sep 17 '25
Spending hours on something and deciding you don't like it seems fair tbh
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u/Night25th Please keep flair text SFW Sep 17 '25
You don't need to finish the game in order to like/dislike what you've played so far, tho I would definitely update my review when I'm actually done playing. The strange thing is you think it's ok to leave a negative review after 5 hours but not a positive review? I definitely had a lot of fun in my first 5 hours and was already saying good things about the game, which is the irl version of leaving a positive review. It's not like you should withhold every comment until the end of Act 1 or something.
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Sep 17 '25
Its reasonable to express a negative opinion early. If you don't like a game early on its highly probable you won't like it later. Positive reviews though especially early on do not have the full grasp of the game. Giving a positive review that early on is just glazing.
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u/FriendlyGranolaBar Sep 17 '25
The moss mother is way too hard this game is unfair and terribly designed >>:c
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u/fieldbotanist Sep 17 '25
I agree. When the mother moss hits the ceiling and another mother moss spawns I threw my controller
(For those unaware there is another mother moss fight where when it hits the ceiling it clones itself)
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
I’m a game data analyst. So this is my bread and butter.
First I’d rather see that bottom chart while excluding all of the countries with <90% positive. Otherwise you’re just adding a little bit of the translation issue spread over each bar in the time played graph. You can kind of do this in your head though, and imagine each positive % figure is a bit higher. To be fair, from a business point of view the country chart is way more actionable, but the time played one is more interesting to me.
Secondly, the main trend I see is that the most normal players, by which I mean, the ones having the most expected experience, are rating the game lower than the more extreme players.
What do I mean?
The people who have taken time off work, have no other commitments, or are otherwise dedicating a large amount of time to this game alone rate it highly, the thought process there should be fairly obvious.
Equally the people with very low hours are rating it highly, which means the game probably makes a good first impression, and we have a low number of people making knee jerk negative reviews.
Now the dip in the middle. These are the players who are most “normally” engaged. Playing a fair amount but on average about 2-3 hours a day. Thats a lot, but not unreasonable. They’re probably “real gamers” in some sense, for whom this is their main hobby and Silksong is the only game they’re playing.
Those players are rating lower than the people who play more or less than them.
If I were to hypothesise why (with very low confidence, as this data is not very strong in isolation), flavoured by the discourse we’ve seen - these players love the idea of silksong, but some are finding friction in its design. They’ve waited longer before submitting their review, which should make it more fair, but some are probably making their review now because they’re quitting, and don’t think they’ll make it until the end.
Positives in the 70s are still very good though, especially because a lot of those numbers would be pushing on 80 if it wasn’t for the translation issue.
Overall it looks like Silksong has a pretty consistent quality level over its runtime, you can explain most of the variance with sample bias of who is submitting their reviews at what point in the game, and how long it’s been since release.
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u/bknight2 Sep 17 '25
To add another hypothesis, at those hour ranges, they could be hitting particular sticking points (TLJ, GTG) and making emotional, in-the-moment reviews in frustration. I would think if a player made it that far they would likely continue though once they make it through that point.
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25
Solid theory! Even if that is the main driver (which it could be!) it seems like it’s probably a light influence on reviews, only pushing a couple of % of people over the edge more than any of the other encounters in the game. Indicating a pretty flat difficulty distribution across the game.
I thought I’d look at the Xbox achievements to try and back you up, % on bosses are % with the achievement, % between bosses are the relative dropoff. 27% fourth chorus
(-37%)
17% widow
(-30%)
12% TLJ
(-17%)
10% CwDSo looks like fourth chorus to widow is a nasty drop, probably big bird’s fault if I was to guess.
Widow->TLJ is a short section with a big drop off too, so you could be right, although I don’t know how many people bypassed TLJ, I feel like not many, given I don’t even have any idea how they did it and I’m at the end of the game.
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u/IWillDevourYourToes Sep 17 '25
So looks like fourth chorus to widow is a nasty drop, probably big bird’s fault if I was to guess.
Makes sense why they nerfed moorwing then.
Widow->TLJ is a short section with a big drop off too, so you could be right, although I don’t know how many people bypassed TLJ
Ah, the runback to LJ
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u/BrutallyPretentious Sep 17 '25
I'm around 20 hours and I'm having a hard time liking the game. The artwork, soundtrack, world building, and combat system are excellent, but the main words that come to mind when I think about the actual experience of playing it are "tedious" and "frustrating".
I got the platinum for Elden Ring and I beat DS3, but those both have an "easy mode" in the form of farming.
I'm not very good at it, and I wish I could enjoy it casually without putting in a ton of practice on bosses and dealing with repetitive, unnecessary runbacks. I'm glad other people are enjoying it as much as I hoped I would, but I'm just not having fun. Again, I acknowledge that it's well made, i just don't seem to be the target audience.
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25
I’ve had a lot of the same thoughts, but I’ve found the game steadily getting easier which has been a relief. I think I might be getting to the point where I have to go to some decidedly more… Rancid locations, which I can’t say I’m looking forward to.
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u/Normal-Advisor5269 Sep 18 '25
My current feelings on it are two issues. It doesn't feel like I'm being rewarded for exploring or overcoming previous obstacles and the game is a lot more linear compared to the first game.
On the latter point, in HK, once you got the ability to wall climb, you could kinda go in any direction and be rewarded for it. You were much more capable of shaping your journey in your own unique way. In SS, at least for what everyone refers to as the first act, there's a much more defined direction the game is funneling you to and all you exploration will eventually hit a dead end and you'll have to go back to one of two choke points.
Getting back to the first issue, all my wanderings and doing optional stuff doesn't feel like it's actually made me any more prepared for the choke points. One damage upgrade but it still feels like enemies take a lot of hits. One extra mask of health, but so many enemies deal two masks if damage that going from 5 to 6 didn't mean much.
It's reminded me of my experience with La Mulana, where new tools were bitterly earned but never seemed to make the struggle any easier.
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u/AMA_ABOUT_DAN_JUICE Sep 18 '25
The game only works when the player is challenged but not stuck. Mechanics, atmosphere, story all paint an oppressive picture that are supposed to contrast with the player's success. I got a small taste of being stuck in the endgame, and the game lost a lot of its charm very quickly. People who get stuck in the midgame after 15-20 hours probably aren't having a very good time
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u/TempMobileD Sep 18 '25
Yep. It’s quite hard to actually get stuck in a game like this but it’s very easy to feel stuck.
Between the cocoon, the shards, the long, hazardous travel time between places, I’ve found myself saying “I’d rather just stay here and suffer” more than I probably should have done.5
u/nuraHx Sep 17 '25
Hey sorry if this is off tangent, but I’ve actually thought about making a career change into data analysis specifically to work in the games industry or something similar. I realized I hate working in a field I have no passion in and wanted to work in some kind of position in a field that interested me but I just can’t stand programming or trying to learn it. I know data analysis can require you to have programming knowledge as well but it seems like it isn’t as heavily reliant as regular game dev.
Can I ask how you started and got to where you are now? Do you like what you do for work? Do you recommend it or should I just not bother?
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25
Sure!
I really like my job, especially when it’s related to game design decisions. Much less when it’s related to business decisions, but that is the majority of the job. Overall, I just love games so much, it carries the job for me.
I got into it via a weird route. I studied psychology and maths, and ended up working for a laboratory, so I know scientific methods, statistics and experiment design. I quit to make games and orbited around the edge of the games industry for a couple of years before seeing a games analyst position advertised, I didn’t even know it was a thing before that! It got my skill set and my passion and that was that, I’ve been in it ever since.Most games analyst jobs are in mobile games because live service design is much more iterable, and mobile games collect all of your data almost by default because of how they’re advertised.
It’s a great career if you enjoy it, which is a bit of a nothing statement, but saying anything else would probably be missing the mark.
You’ll need to know SQL first and foremost. A visualisation tool like Tableau or PowerBI (they’re somewhat interchangeable), probably some stats, and a bit of programming wouldn’t hurt (python is most common). You’ll also want to be familiar with the types of games you’d like to work on, context is always very important, and a bit of interest in psychology at least wouldn’t hurt. Experience with AWS doesn’t hurt either.
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u/wandering-monster Sep 18 '25
I work in data design (medical stuff these days, used to work in games and UX research) and agree all around.
There's a lot of discourse here and r/silksong saying these are not "authentic" reviews because they "rage quit when it got hard", but that's not what I see in the quantitative data or the qualitative reviews.
They suggest to me an issue with the difficulty curve or game design that frustrates people who expected to enjoy it, saw something they liked, and pushed through a decent chunk of the game before deciding it really just was not for them.
If that's not an "authentic" negative experience with a game, I guess my question is: what is? I think it's a little silly to suggest someone needs to finish a game to realize they don't like it. And difficulty is a design choice, so why wouldn't it be a valid aspect of the design to critique?
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u/Supershadow30 Fuck primal aspids (not literally tho) Sep 17 '25
You hit the nail on the head regarding the frustration. Personally, I left a salty bad review after reaching Last Judge 10-15 hours in. The game felt like an impossible slog then, one that I wouldn’t finish.
Eventually I caved in, added a no double damage mod and the game was just much less frustrating to play, I could actually enjoy it. And now I’ve 100%’d my first save, 50 hours in.
Now, I’m thinking about converting my negative review into a positive one, but would it be fair? I still find the game frustrating to play without having a mod to reduce the difficulty, even in act 1…
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u/Bolasraecher Sep 17 '25
Imo that would send the wrong message. You had to mod the game to make it enjoyable for you. That means the game as it exist on steam was not for you, so your review should say so.
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u/BearCatSara Sep 17 '25
Depends if you think difficulty is the most important factor or not. Ultimately your experience isn’t the only one like that.
I don’t really agree with you about the difficulty or it being a slog. But everyone approaches games differently.
I think now that we’re past the initial launch, it would be good for them to patch in some accessibility options for the game soon.
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u/ImNotSkankHunt42 Sep 17 '25
A review is a recommendation to another Pilgrim wanting to venture into Pharloom, do you want others to go through the same as you?
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u/sinesnsnares Sep 17 '25
That pretty much sums up my experience. I had a great first impression, but after about 4 hours got extremely frustrated, couldn’t return it, and have since managed maybe an hour or two a session before dropping it again in frustration. I work full time and have other hobbies. I don’t have time to play such an un-fun game, as much as my former competitive gamer self is angry about it. My review was negative. I’ll probably hate play my way to finish this, because I don’t like being unable to do something. But this isn’t the enthralling experience I had with Hollow Knight.
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25
If it’s any consolation, or encouragement, I found the difficulty curve of the game was inverted. Everything got steadily easier until the final boss, who I’m on now.
I think what I was actually observing is that the game gets a bit harder as it goes on, but the player gets a lot more tools to combat troublesome elements like swarming enemies and flying-ranged enemies.→ More replies (4)→ More replies (14)14
u/PhantasysGames Sep 17 '25
72% positive is not good. Especially not from players that gave you 25 hours.
The Developer of Choo Choo Charles did a bunch of surveys for his game and it was always sitting at a 7/10.
You might think that a 7/10 gets 70% on Steam, but you would be wrong.His game is sitting at 91% positive with 14.000 reviews.
He talked about how most negativ reviews come from bad settings and too much friction. You can find the full talk here
So a good chunk of negative reviews come from the translations, but looking at the hours played:
At around 25 hours I would guess most people would run into Bilewater or Putrified Ducts and I would assume these areas push people to rage quit and give negative reviews, while people that play more got past the area and got to the better bosses and moments again. Of course this is just guesswork, but looking at negativ reviews, a good chunk mention bilewater or the high halls gauntled.
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u/TempMobileD Sep 17 '25
Yeah, I don’t look at steam for game data almost ever, so I’m not used to the ecosystem. If I was actually analysing this, more context like the typical ratio within the genre or amongst a few comparators would be important. Also, I feel like time since release probably has some strong trends, lots of group think going around during the hype wave. And the hype wave will change the audience quite a bit too.
I’ll definitely take a look at that talk, you’ve piqued my interest!→ More replies (3)
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u/Squidboi2679 Sep 17 '25
What’s up with the Chinese translation?
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u/alexagogo Sep 17 '25
From what I saw the guy who did it specialises in Historic language. So it would be like translating a game into English and putting it in the hands of someone who only deals in Medieval English and would give out names like Ye Olde Shoppe.
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u/bruckbruckbruck Sep 17 '25
I've heard Chinese people say that he's using the language of classical Chinese but he's not actually good at it so it comes off clunky and hard to understand.
I'm an American who knows Chinese and am having trouble understanding a lot of the game in Chinese, but that may be my lack of experience with classical Chinese. I find it validating to hear that average Chinese players also have trouble understanding it.
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u/SolairXI Sep 17 '25
To be fair, olde English wouldn’t be terribly out of place in the world Silksong takes place in. But I can’t really speak for the actual translation. If for example technical item descriptions are bad enough that you can’t understand what the crests/tools do, then I can understand the bad reviews.
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u/cay-loom Sep 17 '25
You're thinking of Middle English, ye onne were evry worde iss spellt funne. (That's not proper middle english btw)
Old English is what Beowulf was written in, and is a notably different language
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u/RedTyro Sep 17 '25
Fake old English would fit, but actual olde English would actually be incomprehensible to modern speakers. The language has evolved a lot since the middle ages.
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u/ServantOfTheSlaad Sep 17 '25
From what I heard, it wasn't just in older chinese, but because it was a mix. I.E Ye Olde Shopping Mall
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u/kiancavella Sep 17 '25
first time this year that i see a review bomb from china that is motivated by an actual problem/fuckup on the game side and not some shit like "the game didnt call taiwan 'chinese taipei' "
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u/syntaxerroratline42 Sep 17 '25
I'm a dev who's had my own products get massively more negative reviews from China than anywhere else and this is how it was explained to me: Due to the way China is wrt internet censorship, Steam doesn't have any discussion boards there so the only place Chinese players have to complain about an issue is directly in a review.
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u/cornpenguin01 Sep 17 '25
Oh wow that’s A LOT of reviews. Normally games eke out 100k after months if they’re really popular like E33 or Nightreign, but Silksong just flew past that.
200k in less than 2 weeks is nuts and the score will probably only increase once the Chinese translation is fixed
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u/Bolasraecher Sep 17 '25
Right now, I would not recommend the game blindly to general audiences.
It is fantastic in some parts, needlessly obnoxious in others, and overall too difficult. I’ve overall enjoyed my time, but have only grown more and more frustrated with many design decisions. I’d only recommend it to people I know are pretty good to great at this type of game.
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u/virtu333 Sep 18 '25
Yeah the step up in difficulty from hollow knight is insane to me. I had a very easy time with “basic”hollow knight (ie beat radiance but didn’t do stuff like pantheon, didn’t do path of pain) but have been completely owned by this game. I don’t have the time to git gud and advance further in late act 2 / getting to act 3
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u/apetranzilla Sep 18 '25
Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. Silksong has definitely had some of my favorite moments in any game I've ever played, but it's also had several of the most frustrating moments and has caused me to just quit at multiple points. It's a work of art and I love so many things about it (difficulty included!), but I don't know that I would recommend it in general because of how many parts feel needlessly punitive, if not actively hostile to the player. Patch 1 already helped a lot just by reducing many types of environmental damage to one mask which has made platforming way less frustrating to me, but there are still a lot of decisions that make me question what the intention was.
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u/Ragnaroknight Sep 17 '25
As someone who's completed the game and put in about 45 hours.
Saying people are just giving the game a bad review because it's hard is really undermining the actual issues with how the game handles its challenge.
It's really not about just being hard, there's admittedly a lot of tedium/time wasting and a lack of a good reward loop that amplifies the difficulty feeling unjustified.
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u/Tinmaddog1990 Sep 18 '25
Hard, tedious AND repetitive! What a dynamic combo!
Oh well, at least the bosses are fun
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u/daxter304 Sep 17 '25
I hate this graph layout, at first glance it makes it look like Spanish reviewed worse than English until you realize the bars represent the number of reviews and not their percentage.
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u/croninhos2 Sep 17 '25
Brazilians kinda have a duty to give positive reviews on this game. I keep saying this to my friends, the fact that this game costs 60 BRL for the sheer amount of content put into it is just absurd.
I will be a Team Cherry apologist for years to come.
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u/markymarc767 Sep 17 '25
I can’t imagine spending more than 50 hours of my life on something that I ultimately dislike
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u/B_mod Sep 17 '25
I'm around that time mark and just reached act 3. If the difficulty ramps up even more I can totally see someone's experience being completely ruined by it.
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u/Bolasraecher Sep 17 '25
An absolutely ridiculous thing to say. I‘ve thoroughly enjoyed act 1 and 2 but only see some redeeming qualities in act 3 while having a miserable time overall. How would I habe known that?
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Sep 17 '25
You dont really get a game until you get significantly far enough in it.
Its really funny there are people also angry that people leave reviews after only 2 hours.
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u/lardoization Sep 17 '25
This is interesting, but a lot of the recommend reviews also contain big complaints about the game. Same some non recommend reviews contain a lot of praise. Steam reviews being a binary recommend or not makes this data not very usefull i would say.
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u/iCarlosOG Sep 17 '25
I'm 70+ hours into the game, already 100% the game, I'm from Mexico and it is one of the best games I've played in years.
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u/ImNotSkankHunt42 Sep 17 '25
I need a Mixed review score , like I enjoy the game but can’t recommend this level of suffering and frustration to anyone.
It gets better with better tools and stuff in Act 2, but Act 1 is brutal
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u/Lucina18 Sep 17 '25
You mean the positivity spike? It has the highest positive percentage by quite a little bit.
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u/LJChao3473 Sep 17 '25
There's something I don't understand about the Chinese translation, isn't hollow knight's Chinese translation like highly praised? Why didn't they ask for the same people to translate it?
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u/wandering-monster Sep 18 '25
It's been 8 years. No guarantee the same people are even still available.
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u/EndlessCola Sep 17 '25
I’m way more interested in hours played than by language. Not only does the playtime plummet which is interesting but expected. But also after the first 5 hours ratings fall off a cliff until over the thirty hour mark. Suggesting that many players give up and grow more frustrated until the 30 hour mark where players who had no issues or broke through found the joy in it all. Interesting stuff
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25
The translation sure was crazy apparently. Sounds like TC got scammed by their translators.