Hollow Knight Silksong review bombing is underway for an unexpected reason

Hollow Knight: Silksong is currently being review bombed by Chinese players complaining that the game’s translation is terrible and an inexplicable downgrade from what was seen in the original Hollow Knight.

As spotted by Kotaku, Chinese Steam users were quick to pile on Silksong over its translation, complaining that the game’s translation isn’t exactly incorrect, but rather a misguided localization attempt that ruins the game’s tone, story, and overall gravitas.

I’m in no way equipped to judge the game’s Chinese translation, but many of these complaints seem to have some validity, as they prompted Matthew Griffin, head of marketing at Team Cherry, to address the matter on social media. Matthew said, “To our Chinese speaking fans: We appreciate you letting us know about quality issues with the current Simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong,” and “We’ll be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks. Thanks for your feedback and support.”

And yet, this acknowledgment and promise to fix things have not been well received, as yet another barrage of negative comments and quote tweets has hit Griffin, with one particularly angry user stating that the hatred towards the localizer isn’t “enough.”

Silksong was released yesterday to big numbers—so big, in fact, it caused Steam and many other storefronts to crumble underneath its weight for a while. The game quickly beat 500,000 concurrent players and has garnered rave reviews from fans and critics alike everywhere outside of China, where it’s average review rating is barely above the 50% mark.

Silksong still has overwhelmingly positive scores on Steam, but that’s only because Valve recently changed its policy in a way that prevented region-specific issues from tainting a game’s overall review score. Chinese players now make up the largest group of Steam users, so that policy change couldn’t have come at a better time for Silksong.

You can now get Hollow Knight: Silksong on Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and macOS.

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