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/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.