Due to the unusual rollout that developer Team Cherry has given to Hollow Knight: Silksong, with no review codes distributed in advance of its Sept. 4 release, we don’t yet have a complete picture of the critical response to the game. Many reviewers, Polygon’s included, are still working their way through a game that’s already become notorious for its difficulty.
But enough reviews have surfaced to give us a clear indication of where Silksong’s critical reputation will land — and the result has fascinating implications for the 2025 Game of the Year race.
At the time of writing, Silksong has an aggregate score of 93 on Metacritc and 92 on OpenCritic. These ratings are exactly the same as those for the current favorite to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards in December: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And aggregate review ratings are one of the strongest indicators of success at The Game Awards. It looks like we have a dead heat on our hands. But do we?
It’s important to note that Silksong currently has far fewer reviews on file than Sandfall Interactive’s role-playing game. As more reviews come in, its rating will fluctuate. The first reviewers out of the gate all filed breathless raves, meaning that Silksong debuted on both sites with a perfect score of 100, which then deflated quickly. But at this stage we have a fair sample of the critical consensus, and the ratings are unlikely to change by more than one percentage point — two at the outside.
Crucially, Silksong already has reviews from a representative cross-section of sites that traditionally form part of The Game Awards’ large international jury, including the U.K.’s Eurogamer, India’s GamingBolt, Canada’s Screen Rant, Italy’s Multiplayer.it, France’s Jeuxvideo.com, South Korea’s Inven, and Germany’s PC Games.de. All of these filed 9s and 10s, with the exception of China’s Gamersky, which settled on 8.5.
In his five-star review on Eurogamer, Christian Donlan wrestles with the game’s difficulty but ultimately comes to value it as an expression of Team Cherry’s distinctive intent and personality. “It’s a Metroidvania with rare poise and — this is crucial, even after a recent patch — a fearsome sense of conviction,” he writes. “I was halfway through the slog, whining about locked benches, losing rosaries by the dozen, returning to bosses who I already knew would kill me in seconds even if the road back to them didn’t kill me first, and I suddenly realised I was having fun. Why? Because this was all intentional. The cruelty was part of what the team wanted to offer players. They’d found a way to make a lot of it entertaining.”
Most reviewers agree with this sentiment, but Donlan here puts his finger on one reason why Silksong may struggle to unseat Clair Obscur as the GOTY favorite. Reviewers, needing to push through the game for work, have mostly reached a point where they understand and value how hard it is, but the same doesn’t apply to everyone. Many outlets that vote in The Game Awards canvass their whole editorial staff for their opinions, not just the critics who happen to have reviewed the top games. In this context, Silksong’s willingness to challenge players hard from its earliest stages may well count against it. It has certainly soured the public discussion of the game.
Silksong, too, is a true indie game — albeit one that has seen an almost unprecedented level of anticipation, and whose developers have enjoyed a luxuriously long development process. As such, it comes with aesthetics and expectations that don’t generally mesh with what The Game Awards values in the Game of the Year category, which has never been won by an indie game — or a game with 2D graphics, for that matter.
Clair Obscur, on the other hand, gets to benefit from some of the goodwill usually generated by indies — it’s a debut game from an upstart studio, and an obvious passion project — while also possessing the slick production values that The Game Awards jury so often responds to. It’s also an original, which grants it the virtues of novelty and surprise. Silksong may be a sensation, but it’s a sequel, deeply familiar to anyone who played the first Hollow Knight.
These may be the reasons why, despite its very strong critical reception, Silksong has done almost nothing to dent Clair Obscur’s commanding lead in the GOTY race on the betting market Kalshi. It looks like we’ll be waiting at least one more year for the first indie GOTY winner. But then again, there’s always Hades 2…
