LogIn"Thou art the chalice of destiny. Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness."
Hollow Knight: Silksong – what more can be said about this game that hasn't been said already? A title that broke online stores, a long-awaited sensation that reached over 500K concurrent players on Steam at its peak, a guaranteed winner in the "indie" category at numerous awards shows to come, one of the strongest GOTY 2025 contenders, and on it goes. Sadly, even the most fragrant ointment has a fly swimming in it, and in Silksong's case, that metaphorical fly is the quality of the game's Chinese localization.
Team Cherry
While many may have missed it due to Steam's recent changes to its scoring system, Silksong's rating dropped sharply over the weekend, now sitting at 77% – not terrible, but certainly not reflective of the praise the game has otherwise received from the gaming community.
This drop comes largely from Chinese players, with reviews written in Simplified Chinese being only 38% positive – a stark contrast to the low-to-high 90s the game enjoys in most other languages. Of course, some reviews criticized other elements such as the game's economy or level design, but the bulk of negative feedback centered on its poor Chinese translation, or more precisely, not "poor" but vice versa, overly rich to the extent it becomes absurd.
As one review noted, the Chinese version turns Silksong's text into something resembling Old English, where you can read it and comprehend it somewhat, but a sentence that should take ten seconds to understand instead takes half a minute, a full minute, or sometimes becomes completely incomprehensible, all of which harms the experience. Loek van Kooten, a Game Localizer and Translator, provided an excellent example highlighting the contrast between the original text and its Chinese localization:
The original:
No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry out in suffering. Born of God and Void. You are the Vessel. You are the Hollow Knight.
The Chinese version:
With nary a spirit nor thought shalt thou persist, bereft of mortal will, unbent, unswayed. With no lament nor tearful cry, only sorrow's dirge to herald thine eternal woe. Born of gods and of the fathomless abyss, grasping heave's firmament in thine unworthy palm. Shackled to endless dream, tormented by pestilence and shadow, thy heart besieged by phantasmal demons. Thou art the chalice of destiny. Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness.
Thankfully, Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry moved quickly to address the backlash, choosing not to brush it aside and instead promising improvements to the localization in the coming weeks, according to Matthew Griffin, the studio's Head of Marketing and Publishing.
It's also worth pointing out that once the localization is fixed, Primordial Knight of Hollowness: Lullaby of Silketh Threads could very likely break its current Steam concurrent user record of 587,150 – especially since it's been recently reported that the majority of Steam's players are Chinese-speaking, with about 35% using Simplified or Traditional Chinese as their primary language.
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