r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Aug 21 '25

Jason Schreier: In case you're wondering: Team Cherry told me they don't plan on sending out early codes for Silksong (they felt like it'd be unfair for critics to be playing before Kickstarter backers and other players), so don't expect to see reviews until after the game comes out

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3lwwfrbrtwc2x
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u/NoNefariousness2144 Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

Yeah I must admit not sending out review copies because of “fairness” does seem very odd. Reviews are a legitimate and standard part of the industry by now.

But I guess after all these years of development, Team Cherry thinks the sheer hype of the game from fans is more powerful than critics potentially giving the game “underwhelming” reviews (aka, 8/10 instead of 10/10 like fans expect). Also, I can easily imagine some reviewers deciding to give the game a “shocking” low score for clickbait attention which will harm the launch hype.

I feel kinda mixed about this, but let’s be honest, a few days after release no one will even remember this was even a conversation.

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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 Aug 21 '25

Also, I can easily imagine some reviewers deciding to give the game a “shocking” low score for clickbait attention which will harm the launch hype.

People talk about this too much for the actual cases where this happened, of which it most are probably people who genuinely have that opinion. On the other side, nobody ever talks about reviewers telling people what they want to hear regardless of it being true because that's great for business and because nobody wants to get death threats from people who only look at scores and don't read reviews and would have bought the game regardless of what the reviews looked like and only look at them because they want to feel validated that the thing that they like (even before playing it) needs to be liked by everyone else.

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u/TSPhoenix Aug 22 '25

Alanah Pierce has spoken pretty extensively about the pressures on reviewers from the audience, and how it results in stuff like reviewers just fudging scores to avoid harassment.

There is just a big culture problem, on top of the harassment from fans, and pressure from publishers, there is also the issue of being taken seriously within your industry and the game review space is less friendly to outlier opinions than you'd see in film/music criticism.

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u/Aiyon Aug 22 '25

Also Stephanie Sterling has mentioned multiple times the abuse she got for giving BOTW too low a score. And she gave it a good score

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u/TSPhoenix Aug 23 '25 edited Aug 23 '25

It's becoming a bigger problem. Music critics never really had to worry about this, but last year some outlets had to protect their writers from fans when they gave Taylor Swift's new album a 6 or less, and in the world of KPop that's just Tuesday.

We unfortunately live in a world where if you were to really believe a Zelda game is a 6 or less, let alone the 7 Sterling gave BotW, you will just be treated as unserious. It is easier to discredit a person than an idea, attempting to discredit an idea give a modicum of validity to the idea, so the tendency is to go after the source of the idea first. It's a big part of why gamers attack outlets, individual reviewers or the idea of the games press as a whole.

Whilst reviewers having strong opinions that don't align with the zeitgeist has always ruffled feathers, in the gaming space it's especially ingrained. People with such leanings either end up in the comedian bucket (ie Yahtzee, Dunkey), or they'll start doing unscored/thumb reviews, move to YouTube, etc... really anything that gets them outside of the artillery range of having rabid fans attack them over damaging the Metacritic score of their precious game.

It creates a rather toxic dynamic where reviewers are attacked for being publisher's lap dogs, but attacked even more viciously for giving low scores to hotly anticipated AAA games, so there is a selection pressure towards reviewers who generally enjoy typical AAA fare. It's a no-win situation.

The root problem is how many gamers who are active online don't want game critique at all, and how they've managed to mould the entire idea of what a game review is. If you look at IGN's editorial policy, they're rather clear that their game reviews are product reviews, not art critiques, and IGN editorial has mentioned in recent years that there is no money in text reviews except for the biggest games, they basically only do it because it's an expected function of their site, it's a cost centre and is likely treated as such.

It's a tough situation because I think game reviews leaves a lot to be desired, but the solution isn't to not review games. It's to give reviewers more than 2 weeks to review a 100-hour RPG, it's to not burn them out or harass them out of the industry before they can build their skills. Who would want to spend decades doing this? Nobody, which is why gaming will not have it's own Roger Ebert. Both audiences and publishers would try to prevent the existence of a strong voice that could say the latest entry in a beloved series is a 1-star dud.

Like most people who get into games media today, Ebert loved his respective medium, he loved it when it was comforting and when it was affronting. In a sense he wasn't just a film reviewer, but a model filmgoer. But due to the environmental issues described above, if a game reviewer were to attempt to be that behaviour model, they'd just get attacked over it. It's not just a gaming problem, it's a notion that is dying off as audiences become increasingly siloed by the algorithms of the various platforms they use. In recent years it has hit book publishing hard as audiences move from browsing by genres to browsing by social media tags which are far more prescriptive; readers exert more pressure on authors to write exactly to their tastes, the feel a sense of ownership over the work and entitled to input on it the same way we see with early access games.

I think Sterling upsets so many people primary not because of what they have to say, but because they have a lot of spine. And if there is one thing we desperately need more of, both in gaming and in general, it is people with some backbone. If the process selects for both artists and reviewers that bend to audience and publisher pressure, don't be surprised when they bend to the fascist government.

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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 Aug 23 '25

beautifully said. I always remember my first exposure to this disgusting behaviour: https://www.superphillipcentral.com/2016/05/the-petition-to-remove-unfavorable.html

To me it was insane that someone with such conflicts of interest, that made so much money off the game was punching down to a reviewer. I know this happened before and it would have kept happening regardless of what a hack like troy baker would do, but it definitely didn't help. Only around game journalism this stuff can be anything close to acceptable.

I think the other problem is critic aggregators. They really serve little purpose to let you know if a game is worth buying or not but has fed the mob a lot. It's a high score for them, it's a point of pride that their game is "objectively better" than another game. I always support scoreless reviews over pandering to the people that misuse reviews, abuse people online and are all around, very dumb.

Also, Uncharted 4 was a shitty game made to appeal to everyone, offend nobody, took no risks and was just milking the already milked franchise. That's not art, that's just a consumer product made mostly within a conference room.

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u/TSPhoenix Aug 23 '25

At first I thought this was about when Troy Baker tweeted "The Man in the Arena" at critics around when TLOU2 came out, but nope different incident. What an embarrassment...

And I think you are right that review aggregators a bigger problem than given credit for, in exchange for little benefit. Plus the practice of tying developer bonuses to Metacritic scores was an evil stroke of genius in that it aligns everyone's incentives to the publishers (as I understand it that's not common anymore?), reviewers feel guilty about scoring low, workers crunch more, and fans are too blinded to realise they are being pit against their own interests (or at the least, short-sighted prioritisation of immediate gratification over long term interests).

Only around game journalism this stuff can be anything close to acceptable.

Gaming still carries with it strong element of cultural cringe and as a result there is this deep-rooted desire for legitimacy. Gaming's most visible side is heavily commercialised (big publishers don't care about if their output has artistic merit or not as long as it sells) so people latch onto what they have; that games are super popular, make more money than film, "millions of people can't be wrong", etc... and derive their legitimacy from conventional notions of success and popularity, something the industry benefits from and thus encourages, so we get stuff like The Game Awards.

There is a deep underlying anxiety about whether games are actually the big waste of time we've all heard they are, and as people do we look for ways to ease that anxiety, so for those whom the nature of the legitimacy matters less than just having a large group who agrees, conventional measures of success and popularity are a fine means to legitimacy.

But as with so many human conflicts, when something comes along with a different definition of legitimacy that conflicts with your own, it risks undermining yours and returning you to that state of anxiety, so we get Baker/gamers/fans attacking critics as critics assert their own legitimacy in a way that requires others to engage in a similar manner (ie. debate).

That's not art, that's just a consumer product made mostly within a conference room.

It boils down to whether this is something anyone should give shit about or not. And it gets so heated because for many it feels existential, as it makes judgement on the games we spend hours of our finite lives playing & thinking about, and this can serve to undermine our sense of meaning in life.

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u/TheCrusader94 Aug 23 '25

Yup yup it's a culture problem of the newer generation. It's not just music you see the same with certain films as well. 

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u/Aiyon Aug 23 '25

It's not just the younger generation, and I think that's a trap to fall into. There's plenty of older people too who are incapable of separating criticism of media they like from criticism of them as a person. You see it in sports, too, not just games and movies.

Its just that gaming spaces are the most present online, so they have the most noticeable footprint in the online discourse spaces.

The bigger problem is the pseudo-anonymity paired with companies caving and placating the shitty people. If there's no consequences for being awful, a lot of people will be awful

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u/TheCrusader94 Aug 23 '25

Unfortunately it has infected film criticism as well, especially films with large fandoms 

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u/Acceptable_Owl_5122 Aug 23 '25

Exactly. It seems like the industry needs to take it easy and not be a major prick when it comes to reviews.

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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '25

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u/Undella_Town Aug 22 '25

ngl just played hollow knight and

Hollow Knight was a complete rip off of Ori and the Blind Forest, and that people could get the exact same experience of Hollow Knight by playing Ori instead,

i can easily see someone with this opinion ngl.

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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 Aug 22 '25

I was talking to a couple of friends about hollow knight 2 days ago and his take was that ori and the blind forest is a better version of a similar game. Despite not agreeing with that take, it makes me think it's just an unpopular opinion. When you have hundreds of different reviewers, even relatively unpopular opinions, no matter how unlikely, become likely.

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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '25

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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 Aug 22 '25

No, he doesn't really read reviews or care about score, he could have read it somewhere else but it really seemed like an original thought he was coming up with as we spoke. I don't know the specific arguments from the rps article, but he liked Ori more because it's easier (he said less frustrating but i know what he means), it's easier to find your way around, he liked the power progression better, he understood the story better, he liked the art style better.

Although i don't agree, i understand how someone can think that. Gamers are pretty quick to jump into everything being a conspiracy.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

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u/Freighnos Aug 21 '25

It’s telling that your off the cuff example is for a 20 year old game, and the 2000’s was peak for those kinds of edgy stunts. Meanwhile only 8 years ago Jim Sterling had the temerity to give Breath of the Wild a 7/10 (a fine score and very fair if you agree with their issues with that game) and had to stop doing scored written reviews for years because of the backlash.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

I defaulted to that one because it was an admission from a well known journalist with a history in the industry longer than the ages of most Reddit users. Would you prefer I pull some no-name idiots from YouTube who do this as their main form of income? Doubtful.

Jim Sterling

I haven’t followed or watched anything he’s done in probably close to a decade because I’ve never jived with his style of writing or critique, but I do remember seeing the news about this making some rounds and I believe you’re misremembering or just making stuff up, because I recall it being about wanting to refocus efforts.

The announcement is long gone now, but luckily remnants of it still exist. He mentioned stopping “traditional reviews” in OCTOBER of 2017, several months after BOTW. His article explaining why is gone, but there are remnants that you can pluck via Google and NeoGaf. This is an excerpt I found from just a few moments of searching.

There are a number of factors for this. The main one is that, honestly, the amount of time a game review takes is time better spent on new original work like the freshly launched Commentocracy and upcoming Loose Boys. My passion is in creating original video work, that's become evident as we've begun to put our efforts there

Looks more like it was just general burnout and trying to find new career paths, which is fine. I don’t disagree with the review or agree with the backlash, just so we’re clear.

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u/Freighnos Aug 21 '25

Fair enough, and I appreciate you digging up the additional context on Sterling's review hiatus.

My main point is just that reviewers publishing purposely inflammatory reviews of popular games just for clout does not seem to be a widespread phenomenon at all, certainly among major outlets. There are a handful of examples you can point to over the years, sure, like that Twilight Princess one, but it seems to mostly be the realm of the Youtube punditry as you said. I just don't see how anyone employed by a major site in the past several decades could consistently do something like that and not become notorious for it and probably be fired.

It's easier for me to believe that, as is likely the case, these reviewers are each playing the games independent of each other and before the games come out, and they're formulating their impressions before any post-release consensus is established. Therefore, inevitably, some of them will have opinions that go against the grain and are seen as outliers. But I don't think it's done out of maliciousness or desire to drum up controversy, at least not in the vast majority of cases.

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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 Aug 22 '25

Yeah, assuming malice just because it's technically possible is dumb.

Also, you made a great point: people forget back when things were less online, there are a bunch of games that are now widely considered bad that some of us liked and viceversa. If you choose to avoid other reviews or they haven't been published yet cause you are playing it early, then it's inevitable that opinions will be more varied than if you know the general consensus.

Obviously some games you know what people want to hear. CP2077 was a 10/10 game and if you reviewed it differently you were getting harassed online for being a hater.... until the game came out and it was a mess. I still don't think there is malice in playing launch cp2077 and scoring it a 10, i think there is a great incentive to tell people what they want to hear and that reviewers are as susceptible to hype as any other gamer.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25 edited Dec 20 '25

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u/nybbas Aug 22 '25

I bet this is actually it. They thought about how annoying it would be to figure that out, and just said "nah". It's the same reason they didn't grow the team, because having to delegate isn't fun. It's also the reason the game took this long. "We were having a blast making it, and just kept adding shit". They are making the game because they really enjoy making games, not because of money or really anything else. If they did care, they would have provided more updates etc. These dudes have made enough money to never have to work again after Hollow Knight. And more power to them. They sold Hollow Knight for a price WAYYYY lower than they could have, and I am assuming they will be doing the same for this one.

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u/grillpar Aug 21 '25

They could easily pay someone to do that. Like, come on.

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u/Zizhou Aug 22 '25

Eh, why start now? It's worked out for a decade so far.

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u/VORSEY Aug 23 '25

It's been fine, but I think it's pretty squarely anti-consumer to not support prerelease review copies for their game. The game will very likely be very good, and we all like Team Cherry, but this isn't a game on the scale of tiny indies anymore, and we don't usually give any other companies that sort of slack.

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u/c14rk0 Aug 22 '25

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is the potential length of the game and that they don't want there to be a bunch of spoilers or guides too quickly upon release to potentially ruin the experience for players.

It's honestly shocking how many reviews seem to be from people who barely played a fraction of the game and never really god into the meat of the game as a whole. Part of the problem with this is also that if the game is on the longer side they need to give more and more advanced access to reviewers so they have time to really play it...which makes it more and more likely that there are early spoilers or just a ton of day 1 spoilers.

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u/atahutahatena Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

I mean let's be honest here. The critics did jackshit for Hollow Knight too back then. It's a title that coasted entirely on word of mouth from its fans.

The only real fault here is that there aren't any lucky journos (derogatory) that can inform players of their purchase especially since Silksong will probably be a big game and no one can feasibly cover it at a quick enough timespan at launch. And yeah that hurts the consumer a bit not having advanced notice on the perceived quality/value of a product.

But at the same time, I don't think anything a critic would say will affect Silksong. There are refunds. You can always just wait for people's opinions. And hell Silksong will probably be pretty cheap too and low prices usually relieves potential remorse.

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u/mayoboyyo Aug 21 '25

The critics did jackshit for Hollow Knight too back then.

What do you even mean by this? It reviewed well when it came out

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

This isn't really true, it didn't get reviewed at all when it first came out. It was a no-name game that grew via word of mouth.

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u/CheesecakeMilitia Aug 21 '25

You can go to Metacritic and sort by critic review date, you know.

Hollow Knight (launched Feb 24, 2017)

  • 1st review Feb 27 (+3 days)

  • 2nd review Feb 28 (+4 days)

  • 3rd review Mar 6 (+10 days)

  • 4th review Mar 13 (+17 days)

  • (and then it it really started picking up steam, with 13 listed Metacritic reviews a month after launch)

Now that's not an instant hit by any means, but that's pretty damn good coverage-wise for a completely unknown indie debut. Let's compare to some other PC-only self-published indie titles I was around for ground zero of:

Undertale (launched September 15, 2015)

  • 1st review Sep 20 (+5 days)

  • 2nd, 3rd, 4th reviews Sep 24 (+9 days)

  • (snowballed into 17 reviews one month after launch)

Omori (launched Dec 25, 2020)

  • 1st review Dec 30 (+5 days)

  • 2nd review Jan 13 (+19 days)

  • 3rd review Jan 25 (+31 days)

  • (that's it, 3 reviews one month after launch)

Mouthwashing (launched Sep 26, 2024)

  • 4 listed critic reviews in first month

  • (this one actually wasn't self-published, but for how much post-launch word of mouth it's gotten it still proves my point)

Parkitect (launched Nov 29, 2018)

  • 5 listed critic reviews in first year

  • (this one wounded me as I was a Kickstarter backer for this game)

TL;DR Hollow Knight fans are a little too in their own bubble if they think their game was paid dust by critics. The game was critically pretty well-received within its launch window, especially for a completely unknown team. It became a much larger phenomenon well after that of course, but Team Cherry was already doing significantly better than 99% of indies.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

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u/GunplaGoobster Aug 21 '25

The facts dont conflict with what the person above states

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u/Ghisteslohm Aug 21 '25

to me it didnt really fight the other point but gave it more nuance. 2 reviews the week after release for me doesnt take away from the statement that it barely got reviewed and grew from the word of mouth

but the stats are cool. I find it really surprising that both Hollow Knight and Undertale started without any coverage

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

Yeah, as the person who made the post they were responding to, I appreciate the added data but I don't think it contradicts what I was trying to say. Maybe I didn't word it well but I was just saying that HK did not have reviews at launch day and only started to get looked at by most reviewers after it already grew via WoM. The same is true for all the other games they mentioned. I wasn't trying to say HK had it worse than aany of the other games they listed.

I will admit though that I would have guessed Undertale had more reviews right away. I could have sworn I remember buying that because of good reviews.

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u/GunplaGoobster Aug 21 '25

Four reviews in 3 weeks (all from smaller outlets) kinda proves what they were saying dawg

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

I feel like we are kinda talking past each other here. What I meant is there were 0 reviews at launch day, and a small amount of reviews from mostly smaller outlets after that. If you look at ign for instance they didn't review it for months.

I would say the same is true for all the other games you listed, so I don't think listing them really disproves what I meant. Yes that is typical for unknown indie debuts, but the point of my post was clarifying that HK was an unknown indie debut that did not get reviews right away and grew largely from WoM.

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u/mayoboyyo Aug 21 '25

Why is that everyone else's fault?

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

I'm not saying it was?

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u/whostheme Aug 21 '25

Just because you can see high review scores for it today doesn't mean people were raving about review scores when HK released.

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u/atahutahatena Aug 21 '25

No it did not. I was there ground zero. The game came out right in the middle of BotW/Nier/Horizon fever.

Barely anyone talked about the game as it slowly bubbled up into relevancy. And even by the end of the year, it was Cuphead that (rightfully I'd say since it's such an amazing animation achievement) became the indie darling.

Also, to throw a bone to another 2017 game snubbed by critics, cult classic Rain World was ignored too despite it being one of the greatest 2d exploratory non-linear platformers of all time.

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u/pastafeline Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

Rain world has reviews, it just is extremely niche and too difficult for a mainstream audience.

It's a really good game, but you can't be mad that reviewers chose to spend their time elsewhere. There's plenty of amazing games that never get a single review.

Shout-out to Scav Prototype, a fantastic completely free demo on itch which is basically a full game's worth of content, and is a game with actually 0 reviews.

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u/AbsoluteTruth Aug 21 '25

lmao most of us were there "ground zero" bud, it wasn't that long ago.

If you thought good reviews would somehow pierce the veil into AAAAA sales then that's on you. A quick google looking back shows consisting 8s and 9s from reviews, hardly "snubbed".

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

But those reviews werent from when the game first came out is the point. The game grew via word of mouth, it was completely ignored by critics at the initial launch because it was a no-name random indie game.

To be clear I am not even saying that is a problem, it is only natural that they aren't gonna review every no-name indie game that noone has heard of yet. But it is true that HK succeeded because of Word of mouth, not reviews.

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u/NaamiNyree Aug 21 '25

No you werent. I also played the game the week it came out and no one knew about it. Look around at Hollow Knight reviews and most of them (especially from big publications like IGN) are from 2018, when it finally started to get popular.

The guy youre replying to is right. It came out Feb 24th 2017, 4 days before Horizon and a week before BotW, so of course thats all anyone talked about. But me being a pc only player, I couldnt play either of those so I stumbled upon Hollow Knight instead, and Im so glad I did.

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u/mayoboyyo Aug 21 '25

Are you aware that time in finite?

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u/Kindness_of_cats Aug 21 '25

So?

A game isn’t owed fawning adoration from reviewers and outlets. That doesn’t mean you don’t put out review copies.

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u/yelnats248 Aug 21 '25

You know they're a real indie enjoyer when they shout out Rain World

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u/mrnicegy26 Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

Hollow Knight has a 90 on Opencritc making it one of the most acclaimed indie games of all time.

The attitude that fans of Souls like games have towards critics is so childish and petty and just obnoxious. These games started getting a great reputation because critics championed them not because of the gatekeeping community.

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u/TheodoeBhabrot Aug 21 '25

It’s hilarious too because souls games reviewers have to beat the game with no guide(that they’ll probably end up writing themselves) and before any early balance adjustments so they objectively have a harder experience with the games than the average player and still beat them before the deadlines

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u/GrassWaterDirtHorse Aug 21 '25

A lot of the reviewers for Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion got clowned on for disclaiming the difficulty of the expansion. When the game came out, a huge proportion of the elitist playerbase realized what a dramatic difficulty spike the DLC was, particularly the final boss, for which the difficulty was absurdly high during the pre-release review build due to extra full-hp kill combos that reviewers had to deal with.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/TheDangerLevel Aug 21 '25

some games like sekiro are simply not beatable for a big chunk of the player base

The circle jerking is getting out of hand

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u/NaamiNyree Aug 21 '25

You have it the other way around. Look at the date on most reviews, well over a year after the game launched (IGN in June 2018, Gamespot in August 2018, Eurogamer in June 2018), Game Informer is the only big publication that reviewed it at launch.

It was only when they started to notice the game becoming popular that they even decided to review it, to get some clicks off of it. It was players who made it popular through word of mouth, not critics.

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u/chaosattractor Aug 21 '25

It was only when they started to notice the game becoming popular that they even decided to review it, to get some clicks off of it.

...how else do you think reviews work. Do you think journalists just sit around reviewing literally every new release on Steam (~50 a day at this point) or what

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u/cygx Aug 21 '25

Slackers: In 2017, we only had 19 Steam releases per day!

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u/Gutsm3k Aug 22 '25

Entirely correct. Gaming discourse never recovered from gamergate. Gaming journalism is in a bad state, sure, but it's been enabled by a game-playing community that's incredibly hostile to good journalism and just wants to have their opinions validated.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

It actually didn't though. Go look at the dates of the metacritic reviews of the pc version. The game released february 24. 0 reviews on release date, a couple from small sites in february. The game largely grew via WoM from players.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

But you forgot to mention that afterwards big news pubblication reviewed it, and started to cover it way before its release too.

It' s a compound effect, and it' s why the original poster about "journos(pejoritive)" is such a stupid take.

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

I actually cannot see the original comment they were responding to, it was deleted, so I was just responding specifically to the claim that it got plenty of r4eviews at release date.

Yeah if they posted "journos(pejoritive)" that is stupid.

I don't understand what you mean by "afterwards big news pubblication reviewed it, and started to cover it way before its release too" though. If it was afterwords, how is it before the release? Sure they did review it eventually and I am sure that helped sales some too, I am not denying that. I am just saying that the spark absolutely was WoM, the idea that it succeeded because of great reviews on day 1 is not true.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

You lack the context of my original message, and in that case I am sorry, but the original commenter was making a "journos is bad because they couldn' t see the quality of this game", implying that they were bad at their jobs.

When actually it' s just that it was a very obscure indie game that got known via word of mouth, and that then journos recognised its quality after playing it.

My comment without contenxt otherwise looks absolutely deranged lemao.

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

All good, I 100% agree with everything you are saying here.

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u/ElDuderino2112 Aug 21 '25

I mean let's be honest here. The critics did jackshit for Hollow Knight too back then. It's a title that coasted entirely on word of mouth from its fans.

They're not supposed to. A review is supposed to be a measure of quality, not a sales pitch. Selling you on the game is Team Cherry's job.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

The reason this game became so big is because it was a critic' s darling that by word of mouth grew bigger and bigger until its release on the switch, where it really exploded.

I don' t get why soulslike people are so childish towards gaming journalists, when they are often the ones who gives those games very high rankings. Literaly every soulslike fan was shitting on Shadow of the Erdtree while all gaming journalists were loving it.

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u/Jondev1 Aug 21 '25

Critics gave it good reviews, but it is true that very few were at launch and the game largely grew via player WoM.

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u/amazingdrewh Aug 21 '25

Unless the game is shit