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Hollow Knight's Review Shift After Silksong: A Storm in a Teacup? Hollow Knight and Silksong spark record Steam reviews in 2025-2026, shifting ratings but confirming the game's enduring indie legacy. In the quiet aftermath of 2025, as 2026 rolls on, Hollow Knight remains one of indie gaming's crown jewels. Eight years after its release, the game has earned nearly 440,000 positive Steam reviews and fewer than 14,000 negative ones. That ratio is the stuff of legend. But when Hollow Knight: Silksong finally arrived, it brought a flood of new players into Hallownest, and with them came a small but noticeable shift in how the original game is being reviewed. For the first time in its history, Hollow Knight's recent Steam reviews slipped from Overwhelmingly Positive to Very Positive. It is not a crisis, but it is a fascinating wrinkle in the story of a modern classic. The Numbers Behind the Shift According to SteamDB, in the first ten days of September 2025, Hollow Knight received 660 negative reviews. That may not sound like much for a game with hundreds of thousands of reviews, but it was the highest monthly negative total in the game's history, and September was only one-third over. The previous record was set in August 2025 with 378 negative reviews. Before that, January 2025 held the record with 340 negative reviews. To put it plainly, the game was not suddenly review-bombed into oblivion. It was simply being played by more people than ever before. Period Negative reviews Notes First 10 days of September 2025 660 Highest monthly total ever, with two-thirds of the month remaining August 2025 378 Previous monthly record January 2025 340 Record before August 2025 Lifetime before September 2025 Fewer than 14,000 Against almost 440,000 positive reviews Why More Players Meant More Mixed Feedback The surge in reviews was not just negative. Hollow Knight actually received more positive reviews than in any other month. But the ratio changed. More players than ever before were trying the game, partly because Silksong had finally launched, and partly because the sequel sent curious newcomers back to the original. Between August 23 and September 2, the game broke its own concurrent player count record almost every day. On September 7, it hit a peak of 95,655 concurrent players. That is a lot of nails being swung. ️ When a game reaches a new audience, some of that audience will bounce off. Hollow Knight is brilliant, but it is also challenging, cryptic, and occasionally unforgiving. Not everyone wants to wander through Deepnest without a map. Some negative reviews likely came from players who expected a more conventional sequel-style experience, or who found the original's pace slower than Silksong's more aggressive combat. It is a classic case of a rising tide lifting all boats, including the ones carrying complaints. ️ Silksong's Own Review Storm It is worth putting Hollow Knight's review shift into perspective. Silksong, despite still holding a Very Positive rating on Steam, has received more than double the negative reviews that Hollow Knight has received in its entire lifetime. That is a wild statistic. Part of that is due to a poor Chinese translation, which Team Cherry has said it will rectify. Part of it is due to the game's perceived higher difficulty, something the developers plan to address in an upcoming patch. In other words, Hollow Knight's 660 negative reviews in ten days look like a gentle breeze next to the hurricane that greeted its sequel. The original game is still an all-timer, and its overall score remains Overwhelmingly Positive. The recent review change is a footnote, not a fall from grace. ️ What This Means for Hollow Knight in 2026 As 2026 unfolds, the dust has settled. Hollow Knight is still beloved. Silksong is still being patched and debated. The review ratio shift says less about Hollow Knight's quality and more about the strange alchemy of a sequel's release. A new game can send players running back to the old one, and not all of them will leave a five-star review. Some will complain about the map. Some will complain about the difficulty. Some will complain about the lack of a sequel for eight years, even though the sequel now exists. That is the internet for you. But there is no need to sound the alarms. Hollow Knight has survived worse: the wait for Silksong. If anything, the renewed attention proves that Team Cherry created lightning in a bottle twice. The first game's review score is still the envy of the indie world. The second game is still finding its footing. And players are still talking about both. In the grand scheme, a few hundred extra negative reviews are a storm in a teacup. The Knight's journey through Hallownest remains one of gaming's great modern epics, and no temporary dip in recent review sentiment is going to change that. If all this talk of revisiting Hallownest has you itching to replay the original—or finally give Silksong a try despite the review storm—you might as well keep an eye on your wallet while you do it. Between Team Cherry's patches, DLC speculation, and the sheer number of indie metroidvanias that have flooded Steam in the wake of Hollow Knight's success, there has never been a better time to be a patient, bargain-hunting bug enthusiast. A good [steam deal finder]( can save you the hassle of refreshing store pages and waiting for seasonal sales to roll around. That is exactly the gap DealNest aims to fill. Rather than scrolling through hundreds of discounted listings or guessing when a price drop might hit, you can let the site track the games you actually care about and surface the moments when they become genuinely affordable. Whether you are hunting for a cheap copy of Hollow Knight to gift a friend or waiting for Silksong's first meaningful discount, it is worth having a tool like DealNest in your corner. https://dealnesthq.com

This question comes up constantly once organizations complete an accessibility audit. Someone runs a scan, finds out they have 30,000+ PDFs sitting in a document library or LMS, does the math on manual remediation, and realizes that finishing everything one document at a time could take years. So how are organizations actually getting through this without a multi-year backlog? A few patterns show up consistently in the ones that pull it off. 1. They stop treating every PDF the same Not all 30,000 documents are equal. The teams that move fast triage first: High traffic, high complexity (course materials, public forms, financial reports) → gets full attention, often human-reviewed High traffic, low complexity (simple flyers, single-column text docs) → near-fully automatable Low traffic, low complexity → automate and batch, don't overthink it Low traffic, rarely accessed archival content → may legitimately qualify for an archive exception depending on the applicable regulation, instead of full remediation Doing this sorting up front is what turns "30,000 documents" into "actually, 22,000 of these are simple and can go through automation almost untouched." 2. AI handles the mechanical 80%, humans handle the judgment 20% This is the actual unlock. Today’s modern document remediation platforms use AI to automate: Structural tagging (headings, lists, tables of contents, reading order) Alt text generation for images at scale, including specialized content like STEM diagrams, charts, and math notation Table structure detection and tagging Form field tagging Some platforms report automating roughly 90% of the tagging work this way. That's the difference between "a person opens each file and manually tags every element" and "a person reviews and approves what the system already did." One is measured in minutes per document; the other in hours. Humans still matter, reviewing AI-generated alt text for accuracy, handling genuinely irregular layouts, and doing final QA before anything ships. But they're reviewing, not building from scratch. 3. They stop outsourcing 1:1 and start batching Sending every file to a vendor for individual manual remediation doesn't scale any better than doing it in-house manually, you're still paying for human hours per document, just someone else's. Orgs that get through large backlogs faster typically use a hybrid model: self-service automated remediation for the easy majority, with outsourced expert remediation reserved for the genuinely complex minority (scanned documents, dense multilingual content, heavily irregular tables). 4. They build it into the pipeline instead of doing a one-time sprint The backlog only gets bigger if new inaccessible documents keep getting added while you're working through the old ones. Orgs that actually close the gap add automated remediation/tagging at publish time going forward, so the "thousands of PDFs" problem doesn't regenerate itself every semester or fiscal year. What this looks like at scale, in practice Publishers dealing with legacy content libraries in the millions of documents have reported turnaround times cut significantly and throughput increased by an order of magnitude when shifting from manual, post-production fixes to AI-driven workflows integrated earlier in the content pipeline, this is showing up right now with publishers racing to get ahead of the ADA Title II vendor requirements. Similarly, government and municipal document libraries, think meeting minutes, budget reports, public forms, are increasingly being processed this way rather than farmed out page-by-page. We've seen more organizations moving toward AI-assisted remediation because manual workflows simply aren't keeping up with document volume. Is that what you're seeing too?