You can now play Silksong on flagship Android phones — and pick up where you left off on PC

Hole Knight: Silksong, one of many hottest video games of the 12 months with a reported five million players in its first week, didn’t launch on smartphones. However that received’t cease you from taking part in it on Android — as a result of a brand new leap in Home windows to Android emulation means you can simply set up and run the Steam model on flagship phones like my Galaxy S25.

I’m speaking about GameHub, the app from Chinese language cellular gamepad producer GameSir, which simply launched model 5.0 with two key options that assist it rise above the Home windows-on-phone emulation scene.

First, it robotically configures itself with the precise graphics drivers, translation layer, and different elements when you launch the sport — one thing that I spent hours making an attempt to do manually with rivals Winlator, GameNative, and an earlier model of GameHub with far worse outcomes. Second and simply as importantly: it can obtain your Steam savegames out of your PC.

The consequence: you can obtain this app, log into your Steam account, faucet to put in the sport, faucet to play the sport, faucet a pair extra occasions to allow Steam cloud saves… and then you’re taking part in a Steam sport on a telephone! Sadly, it doesn’t but work the opposite approach round: as of September eleventh, GameSir was actively working on getting your savegames to add and sync again to your Steam PCs, too, nevertheless it’s nonetheless not working in Silksong.

Is it price it? On my vanilla Samsung Galaxy S25, this PC sport actually does really feel playable on a telephone, at the least as soon as I connect a USB-C gamepad with an built-in cooler just like the GameSir X3 Professional I’m testing proper now. I performed over an hour yesterday and didn’t really feel the necessity to pick up my Steam Deck as a substitute.

With a traditional PS5 controller, I noticed framerates anyplace between 50 and 120 frames per second at my telephone’s full, widescreen native decision — did I point out GameHub helps widescreen and HDR? — and it runs a bit higher at 720p.

However with the X3 Professional, beneath I used to be capable of keep framerates of over 100fps even in huge fights, as long as I plugged the gamepad’s Peltier cooling plate and noisy fan into USB-C energy. I suppose I shouldn’t make enjoyable of telephone coolers anymore!

It’s not as clean as my Steam Deck or different handhelds with out that added cooling: when my telephone is thermally throttling, moments where it hits 50 or 60fps don’t really feel like 50fps or 60fps, they really feel like the sport is borderline unplayable. However I used to be happy to see the cooling resolution do its job! I think about a bigger Galaxy telephone, or a telephone designed for gaming, would in all probability have a neater time.

You in all probability received’t need to use a telephone a lot weaker than the S25 for this quick-reflex sport. After I tried GameHub and Silksong on an older Pixel 9 with a Tensor G4, it balanced on the knife’s fringe of playability, and positively fell off and not using a cooler hooked up. The Pixel 9 additionally doesn’t at present let me watch the sport’s cutscenes, a little bit of a dealbreaker if you’re shopping for the sport to play on telephone, although the Galaxy S25 performs cutscenes advantageous as of this newest GameHub launch.

Some within the Android emulation group have turned to the Nintendo Switch emulator Eden for higher sustained efficiency in Silksong, and I’ve heard that one runs at a steady 120Hz with out additional cooling. However that might require one way or the other acquiring a downloadable copy of the Swap model of the sport, and it is likely to be tough to switch saves with an actual Swap.

With GameHub, I’m downloading my legitimately bought video games and saves from Steam itself.

Home windows emulation on Android is trying like a game-changer. And Silksong is simply one of many video games it is likely to be about to vary. As we speak, that’s as a result of this sport requires an extremely low quantity of efficiency and energy to play, however future phones would possibly carve out extra and extra of the PC sport library.

Simply don’t rely on GameHub an excessive amount of but. Though many are enthusiastic concerning the huge enhancements in GameHub 5.0, others are complaining that it broke video games that have been beforehand working. It might be price ready for the mud to settle.