is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the hottest games of the year with a reported five million players in its first week, didn’t launch on smartphones. But that won’t stop you from playing it on Android — because a new leap in Windows to Android emulation means you can easily install and run the Steam version on flagship phones like my Galaxy S25.
I’m talking about GameHub, the app from Chinese mobile gamepad manufacturer GameSir, which just launched version 5.0 with two key features that help it rise above the Windows-on-phone emulation scene.
First, it automatically configures itself with the right graphics drivers, translation layer, and other components when you launch the game — something that I spent hours trying to do manually with rivals Winlator, GameNative, and an earlier version of GameHub with far worse results. Second and just as importantly: it can download your Steam savegames from your PC.
The result: you can download this app, log into your Steam account, tap to install the game, tap to play the game, tap a couple more times to enable Steam cloud saves… and then you’re playing a Steam game on a phone! Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet work the other way around: as of September 11th, GameSir was actively working on getting your savegames to upload and sync back to your Steam PCs, too, but it’s still not working in Silksong.
Is it worth it? On my vanilla Samsung Galaxy S25, this PC game really does feel playable on a phone, at least once I attach a USB-C gamepad with an integrated cooler like the GameSir X3 Pro I’m testing right now. I played over an hour yesterday and didn’t feel the need to pick up my Steam Deck instead.
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