Hollow Knight vs Silksong: Two Store Pages, One Studio

Team Cherry is one of the few studios on Steam with two pages built by the same people, in the same art direction, eight years apart. Our analyzer scored Hollow Knight at 83 and Hollow Knight: Silksong at 85. Close. But the subscores are not close at all: Silksong’s capsule scored 95, the highest capsule score across all 373 pages in our sample, while Hollow Knight’s scored 85 — and the two capsules use the same typeface, the same layout, and the same amount of text.

The difference is what sits behind the letters. That is the whole post, and it is the cheapest lesson in this series.

A note on what these numbers are: they come from this product’s rubric, which grades how a page is built. They are not a Valve metric and they are not a sales prediction. The 373 pages are ones people chose to run through the free analyzer, so it is a convenience sample. Everything below was re-checked against the live pages on July 26, 2026.

Hollow Knight was analyzed on April 22, 2026; Silksong on February 10, 2026, five months after its September 2025 release.

The newer page wins on capsule and description. The older page wins on screenshots and tags, mostly because it has had eight years to accumulate both.

We downloaded both capsule_231x87.jpg files on July 26, 2026 and looked at them at the size Steam actually renders them.

They are structurally the same design. Both are a white serif wordmark, centred, filling most of the strip, with a small ornamental flourish. Neither shows a character. Neither shows gameplay. If you described them in words you would describe the same capsule twice.

At thumbnail size they behave completely differently:

• —Hollow Knight sets white letters on a near-black teal field with faint dark ornamentation. It reads as a dark rectangle in a browse row. Legible, but it recedes.
• —Silksong sets the same white letters on a burning orange-and-red field with visible motion in the background. It reads as a bright rectangle in the same row. It advances.

Ten capsule points, on a page where nothing else about the capsule concept changed. Our tally of 98 Steam top-seller capsules found 44 of 98 sitting on dark backgrounds, which means dark is the crowd, and being the crowd is the one thing a thumbnail cannot afford. We wrote that up in the capsule trends data post.

This is the transferable finding of the whole comparison, and it costs a background layer. You do not need a new capsule concept to beat your old capsule. You need your capsule to not look like the six capsules next to it. Drop your current art into the capsule validator at 120x45 and 231x87 and see whether it holds a shape or dissolves into the grid.

The fair caveat: Silksong’s warm palette is not an arbitrary marketing choice, it comes from the game’s setting. Team Cherry got the contrast advantage for free because Pharloom is orange and Hallownest is blue. If your game is genuinely a dark game, you can still win the row with a saturated accent, a hard silhouette edge, or a light title plate, without lying about the tone.

Here are both, live, quoted exactly.

Hollow Knight:

Forge your own path in Hollow Knight! An epic action adventure through a vast ruined kingdom of insects and heroes. Explore twisting caverns, battle tainted creatures and befriend bizarre bugs, all in a classic, hand-drawn 2D style.

Silksong:

Discover a vast, haunted kingdom in Hollow Knight: Silksong! Explore, fight and survive as you ascend to the peak of a land ruled by silk and song.

The analyzer raised a warning on each, and both warnings are the same shape. On Hollow Knight it said the opener “Forge your own path” is generic and “doesn’t create immediate emotional connection.” On Silksong it said “haunted kingdom” is generic and that “the unique elements like 'silk and song’ are buried at the end.”

Both are right, and the pattern is worth naming because it is the most common description failure in our whole sample: the sentence opens with a mood word that any game in the genre could use, and the specific, ownable detail arrives after the reader has decided.

“Insects and heroes” is the ownable detail in the first one. It arrives in the second sentence. “Silk and song” is the ownable detail in the second one. It arrives in the last four words. Neither page is badly written; both are ordered backwards for how people read a store page, where the first line has to survive a skim before anything else gets read at all.

The rewrite the analyzer proposed for Silksong was:

Master deadly acrobatic combat as Hornet in a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Ascend to the peak in this epic sequel to Hollow Knight.

That leads with the protagonist, the verb, and the ownable phrase. Whether or not you like the specific wording, the ordering principle is right, and it is the same one we found on the Hades page: verb, stake, mechanic, genre, in that order. More patterns are in the short description guide.

This is the biggest single gap between the two pages, and it explains most of the 10-point description difference.

The analyzer flagged it as an issue titled “Free content section buries core game appeal,” with the evidence: “First section is 'Hollow Knight Expands with Free Content’ with four DLC descriptions.” Its note was blunt: “New players don’t care about expansions until they’re convinced to buy the main game.”

We checked the live page on July 26, 2026. It still opens with the four free expansions — Godmaster, Lifeblood, The Grimm Troupe, Hidden Dreams — before reaching “Beneath the fading town of Dirtmouth sleeps an ancient, ruined kingdom.”

That opening line is excellent. It is also several hundred words down the page, behind content that only means something to a player who already owns the game.

Silksong’s About section is 3,358 characters against Hollow Knight’s 7,003, and it starts with Hornet and Pharloom. Half the length, none of the throat-clearing, ten more points.

The reason this happens to real pages is not carelessness, it is accretion. A page picks up an update banner, then a DLC block, then an award laurel, then a sale note, and each addition goes at the top because the top is where announcements go. Nobody ever re-reads the result as a first-time visitor. Once a year, open your own About section in a private window and read only until the point where you would have stopped if you did not already love the game. Whatever sits above that point should be the pitch, not the changelog.

Hollow Knight carries 15 screenshots and 5 trailers; Silksong carries 10 and 2. The older page scores 88 on screenshots to the newer page’s 80.

Part of that is simply time: eight years of updates produce more assets. But the analyzer’s screenshot notes on the two pages are revealing in a different way. On Hollow Knight it made a specific, checkable claim — that the first screenshot is a busy combat scene with heavy effects and UI, and that the calmer bridge shot in position two would establish the game faster. On Silksong it wrote an issue titled “Cannot verify screenshot variety and quality,” admitting it only had image URLs to work with.

We flag that openly because it matters for how you read any automated audit, including ours: an issue that says “cannot verify” is a prompt for you to look, not a finding. The Hollow Knight note is a finding. The Silksong note is a to-do list item addressed to a human.

If you want a rule rather than a judgment call for your own first frame, the screenshot checker tests order and readability, and the median page in our sample ships 9 screenshots and 1 trailer, so both of these pages are above the line on volume.

Being able to overrule the tool is part of using it. Three notes from these two reports do not survive contact with the live pages.

1. “Add wishlist call-to-action” on Silksong. The recommendation asks for a closing line inviting players to wishlist the game. Silksong released on September 4, 2025 and the live page carries a buy button. The analysis ran in February 2026, five months later. A wishlist CTA on a released page sends buyers to the wrong action.

2. “Move Metroidvania to the front” on Hollow Knight. The live tag order is Metroidvania, Platformer, Souls-like, Difficult, Great Soundtrack, 2D, Indie, Singleplayer, Exploration, Atmospheric, and on. Metroidvania is already first. Silksong’s list also opens with Metroidvania.

3. “Remove duplicate 'Single-player’ tag” on Silksong. There is no duplicate in the user tag cloud. What the report picked up is Steam’s Features box, which lists platform capabilities such as Single-player and Steam Achievements, separately from the community tags below the media. Those are two different lists doing two different jobs, and only one of them is yours to control. We found the same conflation on the Stardew Valley page, so it is a repeatable quirk rather than a one-off.

What does survive on tags: Hollow Knight carries “Open World” at position 17, which is arguably wrong for an interconnected but not open world, and neither page carries “Precision Platformer” or “Boss Rush,” both of which describe what these games actually are and both of which people search. The tag optimizer is the faster way to test that kind of swap on your own page.

The comparison is unusually clean because so many variables are held constant. Same art director, same genre, same audience, same typographic instinct. What changed between 2017 and 2025 is what you can copy:

• —Contrast beat concept. Ten capsule points came from a background, not a redesign. Check yours against a real browse row, not against a white artboard.
• —Shorter won on description. 3,358 characters scored 85; 7,003 characters scored 75. Length is not the enemy, order is, but length makes bad order more expensive.
• —The ownable phrase belongs in the first six words. “Silk and song” and “insects and heroes” are both excellent and both arrive too late.
• —Announcements accrete at the top and never leave. Audit the top of your About section on a schedule, or a DLC block from three years ago will keep greeting new buyers.
• —A sequel page is allowed to be smaller. Silksong ships two thirds fewer trailers and a third fewer screenshots than its predecessor and outscores it overall. Volume is not the lever people assume it is, which we take apart properly in the Palworld teardown.

Run your own page through the same rubric on the homepage, or see where other pages landed on the leaderboard.