After three weeks, Hollow Knight: Silksong has amassed several hundred thousand user reviews across multiple platforms, and rather fascinatingly, it's scoring slightly below Hollow Knight almost across the board.
Having finally completed Silksong 100%, I've just argued that I like Hollow Knight more but would still score the sequel quite highly, and it would appear that I'm in good company. (Critic reviews, per Metacritic, notably put Silksong slightly above, and you can read our Hollow Knight: Silksong review at the link.)
That comes with caveats, of course. Hollow Knight has substantially more user reviews, some of which would have been written or amended after the game received several patches and DLCs, and it has developed a cult of personality over time that could've affected more recent reviews. (Counterpoint: Silksong, with no DLC, is already ha-yuge.)
We're only seeing the early impressions for Silksong. The volume of impressions is still significant, however, as Silksong has had a considerably more explosive launch than the original game.
Given the magnetic hype around it, plenty of Silksong user reviews have assuredly come from people who never played Hollow Knight to begin with, so we can't necessarily draw straight-line comparisons concluding X person likes Silksong more.
That being said, we can still draw fair comparisons, and the aggregate data as of writing is pretty decisive. These caveats demonstrate that there is room for Silksong's score to rise, but it would take an unbelievable turnaround for it to match or overtake Hollow Knight at this rate.
Here's how Hollow Knight and Silksong user reviews currently break down by platform.
- Hollow Knight - Steam (all): 96% positive with 419,259 reviews
- Silksong - Steam (all): 83% positive with 224,008 reviews
- Hollow Knight - Steam (EN): 97% positive with 150,415 reviews
- Silksong - Steam (EN): 91% positive with 84,492 reviews
- Hollow Knight - PlayStation: 4.71 stars with 79k ratings
- Silksong - PlayStation: 4.61 stars with 27k ratings
- Hollow Knight - Xbox: 4.5 stars with 6.9k ratings
- Silksong - Xbox: 4 stars with 3.2k ratings
I've included two batches of Steam data here – one for English reviews only, and one for all reviews – because Silksong's user review score was heavily impacted by blowback from a shoddy but soon-to-be-fixed Chinese translation which rightly bothered an even larger Chinese gaming audience than the one around at Hollow Knight's launch. This is a real problem with this version of the game, but it's separate from what everyone else is talking about and experiencing, so I didn't want it to skew the only data set.
Nintendo, a big platform for Hollow Knight, isn't on the list because the eShop doesn't display this kind of review data. With PC being Silksong's biggest platform, at least in the US, Steam is the focal point anyway.
Even with those 63,224 "Mixed" Simplified Chinese reviews excluded, Silksong Steam reviews are several points below Hollow Knight, landing in the Valve-defined "Very Positive" band whereas the first game is basking in "Overwhelmingly Positive" light.
These scores are interesting in the context of the discussions that Silksong has sparked, especially with regards to difficulty and expectations. That's doubly true since Team Cherry seemed to agree with some exhausted players in Silksong's first patch, which nerfed a few early bosses and softened the difficulty and progression curve for the first act of the game.
Both games have reviewed and sold incredibly well, and virtually any game would kill for this kind of reception, but Silksong has seen sticking points that Hollow Knight really didn't, and user reviews seem to reflect that prickliness. Everyone has a different tolerance for difficulty, and while everything in Silksong is perfectly beatable (and often cheese-able), the noticeable step up from Hollow Knight seems to have flummoxed some fans.
There isn't a great way to holistically analyze this wealth of more critical Silksong Steam reviews – at least not one that I can do myself, right now – but a decent way to start is to check out the negative reviews rated as "most helpful" by other Steam users. I've read dozens of these, and wouldn't you know it, a lot of people reckon Silksong is overly or even senselessly punishing, tedious, un-fun, annoying, and so on, with a clear pattern.
"However, while the gameplay, in my opinion, is fine difficulty-wise (for the most part), the amount of unnecessary tedium is not," reads the top-rated review from Gorfir Grå.
"'Gotcha' moments are so frequent and so punishing, many of the initial areas has literal 'jump king'/'getting over it' segments where you have to blindly jump into the unknown, with minor miss-steps resulting in massive run backs," says elpern.
"Incredibly frustrating. The difficulty curve is a wall: it begins at the difficulty that Hollow Knight ended at," writes tweedgeezer.
"If you thought HK needed longer runbacks, horrible economy and all bosses dealing two hearts of damage you are going to love Silksong," says 1 Panda.
"Silksong is all tension all the time. Sometimes tension go up. But it never comes back down. And that can be exhausting instead of fun," echoes [S] Modus Pwnens.
Or my personal favorite review, from one Mr. Skill-issue: "Savage Beastfly".
