Someone decided to delve into the reviews and scrutinize them closely.
Hollow Knight: Silksong drew a massive audience and accumulated a vast number of reviews. Reports circulated about criticism over a poor Chinese translation and the game’s perceived “difficulty”, and a user known as Newbie Indie Game Dev set out to dig deeper and identify more specific issues.
He examined nearly all Silksong reviews on Steam — roughly 260,000 entries. From that dataset he generated a word-frequency chart highlighting commonly used terms and categorized them by sentiment.
- There are complaints about the game’s economy — many players call it overly “grindy”.
- Mentions related to enemies dealing double damage tend to skew negative, showing roughly 45%–60% positive sentiment.
- There are references to “long runs” — players express frustration at having to backtrack to bosses, and some are unhappy with checkpoint placement.
- Mentions of FromSoftware titles — Dark Souls and Elden Ring — appear about 1,700 times and carry roughly 67% positive sentiment.
- Reviews that mention flying enemies are mostly negative; the phrase “lots of flying enemies” registers 43.48% positive sentiment across 69 reviews.
Newbie Indie Game Dev admits his methodology isn’t flawless (a positive review can still contain negative remarks about difficulty or bosses, which distorts results). Still, the analysis offers useful insight into the community’s main pain points.
Source: iXBT.games