Hollow Knight: Silksong from Team Cherry launched on September 4, arriving on Steam and other storefronts worldwide. Within hours it gathered tons of user reviews on Steam and reached an all-time concurrent peak of over 535,000 players, making the debut a huge moment for an indie sequel.
Early Steam feedback skewed overwhelmingly positive, with more than 15,000 tagged as “Overwhelmingly Positive” as players praised tighter combat and a broad array of build options. The Steam page for the release, linked as Silksong on Steam, shows the volume of reviews and the user rating banding across recent players. A number of short player quotes captured that sentiment, such as “Already better than the first game in every way that counts,” which appeared multiple times among recent posts.
Within minutes the game hit more than 100,000 concurrent players on Steam and then climbed to its peak by the end of the day, a rare spike for an indie release that pushed it ahead of several major launches earlier this year. It recorded higher concurrency than Assassin’s Creed Shadows and R.E.P.O. on their opening days, and sits well below Monster Hunter Wilds’ year-leading peak of around 1.38 million. Silksong also dominated Twitch viewership for much of the launch period, and digital storefronts across platforms briefly experienced outages as demand spiked.
Critic reviews are expected to go live next week, which will offer a fuller sense of whether professional opinion matches the community response. Many players highlighted fluid combat, challenging boss fights, and quality-of-life changes that felt like deliberate responses to the original Hollow Knight’s design choices. Some reviewers called the sequel an outright upgrade in multiple systems, while others praised the amount of content packed into the world.
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