The atmosphere captures you almost immediately. The darkness, the gloominess and the almost gothic-like architecture of Hallownest invites you to explore it and get lost in the world. When it comes to how we define a metroidvania, or any videogame for that matter: Hollow Knight is a monumental achievement.

I'll try to tackle every major aspect one at a time. Exploration is clearly the most important focus of Hollow Knight. Given what I said in the first section of the review, it should not surprise you that Hallownest instills a desire for exploration and adventure to the player. It encourages you to go off the beaten path, or actually, it has no beaten path whatsoever. Hallownest is filled to the brim with secrets, areas and atmospheres to take in and experience to the fullest. From the eeriest and deepest parts of Deepnest to the gothic City of Tears, the game is not only atmospheric, but well designed with an encouragement to explore every last inch of it and see everything that it has to show. The map mechanic works with this to never show you exactly what is where, and entice you to find out by yourself, or perhaps get lost.

When you get lost, all you have to yourself is your nail. You will face off against cute insects and terrifying monstrosities that will test your skills as a player but always offer fairness above anything. The combat is simple, but allows for endless possibilities and combinations of abilities through the Charm mechanic. Mixing and matching different playstyles for variety and an added level of challenge. Like any Metroidvania, you gain power-ups and abilities that unlock more paths to explore and more tactics during combat, but your go-to will always be your trusty nail sword, which you can use, refine and upgrade as you wish. The simplicity of the combat combined with the customization aspect grant Hollow Knight a challenging, but fair and fun combat system.

Moving on to the art: This game has an art-style and atmosphere which are unlike anything I've ever played. The hand-drawn animations are simple, but charming with character designs and voices that I will certainly never forget. The relief of finding Cornifer, or the intrigue of a character like Hornet. All of these characters are in equal parts memorable and well-written. The dialogue and story are reminiscent of Dark Souls, in that there are a lot of plot threads that the player can either interpret as they want to, or completely unfounded for someone who doesn't set out to find them. All of the art and story are pushed to even greater heights by Christopher Larkin's excellent score. The boss themes and area music are excellent, memorable and instill every emotion they want to instill. From fear, to challenge, to epicness, to serenity. Hollow Knight's soundtrack is one of the things I loved the most.

All of this comes in a complete package that, even if you are thorough, you will still have much to do in when you finish it. The amount of content is almost unbelievable when compared to the price-tag. The amount of sheer quality content is a testament to the passion of the developers. The Grimm Troupe is my favorite out of the DLCs with one of my favorite bosses and music added to the already complete package that is the base game of Hollow Knight. I fully expect someone to instill more than 60 hours into this adventure.

Hollow Knight comes to a gorgeous climax. Once your each the end, which I won't spoil, you start to see everything come together. The last 30 minutes of your playthrough will most likely combine every aspect I have talked about. The adventure to the final area, accompanied with beautiful and exciting music, art, and writing with a final segment that puts every one of your skills acquired to the test. And once it's all over, all you have is an even more vast, exciting and beautiful possibilities for adventure.

Even after the end, Hollow Knight instills an adventurous spirit into the player and encourages you to see it all and once you're done, look back at everything and marvel at how excellent, detailed and beautiful the game of Hollow Knight is.

Playing Hollow Knight and coming out of it saying: "Uh, yeah, it's like, Metroidvania Dark Souls dude." is a take so shallow that a mere glance at the store page's screenshots would prove that to be the case. Yet, after finishing the game it's also the most glowing compliment I can give it, as it marries the components of both styles in a remarkably elegant way.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is Castlevania, the environments Metroid, the level progression and music both at the same time! Add to that the atmosphere typical of a dying world, as well as elements like recovering lost resources after death, and you should already know where this sentence is heading.

The atmosphere of Hallownest is one of the densest, thickest and most engrossing you can find in gaming, where all characters, the warm and hospitable, the engimatic and elusive and the outright hostile, give the world a feeling of being lived in and a life and identity of its own. With the compliments out of the way, I would also like to vent about the size of the map. It is way too dang big, to the point where traversing it is a chore and I found myself constantly praying for quicker traversal tools.

Where the game should have taken less from Dark Souls is the main story (which is the only part of the plot I can discuss, having not bothered with the add-ons). That one is too much like FromSoft's seminal work. But we're getting into spoiler territory.

Another point of contention I have with Hollow Knight is its spells and nail techniques. The former feel a bit useless if you're willing to grow a spine and face the enemy head-on, locking eyes and unleashing a storm of attacks. Normal attacks that is. I rarely ever used the special nail techniques, since they are situational at best. Why would I want to charge up special moves when the additional effects they have aren't worth the effort compared to a simple string of normal attacks?

All things said, the game really is a cute little gem and i see why people like it so much, but it just didn't blow me away. I've seen a lot of (overblown) praise from my friend circle about this, so my expectations, as with any game which receives too much hype and acclaim, were somewhat let down. But it speaks volumes that a game I only played because it was in a bundle and gave me something to talk about with some nerdy girls at a party kept me going way after the day of that celebration.

Well, I finally did it, I finally beat Hollow Knight. A game that has been sitting in my backlog for a few months, but I finally wrapped it up. Hollow Knight is such a weird game to me, because I loved the second half but wasn’t a fan of the first. When you first start the game you don’t know how it works, you don’t fully understand enemy patterns, your moves are limited to simple attacks, making a very tedious first impression. But as you progress, it gets better. Up until the hornet fight I wanted to turn this game off but I kept telling myself “no, I will not drop this game, I will experience it from beginning to end.” 40 hours later and here we are.

Hollow Knight is not only a great game, but my favorite indie game (better than hades yes). As someone who doesn’t like indies after trying dozens of them over the years, I’m glad I was finally able to find one that clicked. The game starts off in dirt mouth, a dying town full of fog and dim lights, with very few remaining life. It already shows what this game is not even 10 minutes in. It is about you, the knight, traveling through this vast dying world to stop the infection from within. The games story is told through Npcs and atmosphere, which does a great job at conveying a depressing tone. The atmosphere is just phenomenal, and the gorgeous artstyle makes it even better. Each area in the game is distinct with its own unique personality and life to it. In the city of tears you are greeted by a rainy/dreary city, with a depressing tune playing in the back. The ancient basin is at the bottom of the world, the place you were born. The eerie and unsettling tone hits you from the moment you enter by showing you the lost souls of your fellow companions, slowly trying to escape their misery and escape to what’s left of the desolate wastelands above. These are my two personal favorite areas in the game, but nearly all of them are great (fuck you crystal peaks). Alongside the atmosphere you have the npcs, which add so much to the overall story and immersion. Every npc has a personality to them and a backstory that you can understand immediately just by looking at them. It’s great. The designs are so great, so unique, so distinct, especially the bosses. The bosses are one of the highlights in the game. While a good chunk of them are tedious (let’s say uhhh.. 40%?), the good ones are some of the best boss fights in any game ever. With Hornet and hollow knight being the best. One thing that’s rare is for me to have fun when dying to the same boss over and over again, which weirdly enough happened in this game. Fights like the soul master, hornet, hollow knight, dung beetle, and more were always fun regardless of how many times I died. Every time I return to a boss room I feel stronger. As you progress through a fight you understand the moves, the weaknesses, the patterns, spots for healing, which makes every try feel different from the last. Most games I die to a boss and go “what a fucking terrible fight” while in hollow knight I can die 20 times and still (mostly) have a great time. The gameplay itself is pretty mid and pretty fucking great at the same time, creating a weird blend. The main part of the game is of course the exploration, this being a metroidvania and all. Before you get abilities like the dash and double jump however, the exploration is very tedious. Even after receiving these abilities there were times where the platforming was just annoying and sucked total ass but it was easy to forgive. And then the combat which is... something. I don’t hate the combat, but it definitely could’ve been better. There’s a lot of customization options to make it better such as charms and weapon upgrades, but even at the end of the game I was still not satisfied with it. Luckily, it looks like silksong will be improving upon it in nearly every way.

The atmosphere, the tone, the story, the gameplay, the characters, the music, all create an incredible product in the end that everyone should play at least once. There are a lot of problems, sure, but most of them vanish as you progress and reach that end goal. And once you reach that end goal, you get an incredibly satisfying and emotional conclusion to an already fantastic game. I still have some things to do before I’m truly done with the game but as of right now all I can really say is

Play Hollow Knight.

Despite being set in a kingdom in ruins, with dead bodies littered everywhere, I've played few games as teeming with life as Hollow Knight. The world of Hallownest has such a rich history, and every area you explore, each with its own distinctive, memorable ecosystem, is dripping in hints towards what came before and the true nature of what is happening now. As a piece of storytelling Hollow Knight is very subtle, but as an act of worldbuilding it feels so rewarding to experience and full of depth. It feels like it's impossible not to learn something new every time you return to Hallownest.

The characters of this world exude so much personality too, written with such clear, individual voices. Even minor side characters feel like they have their own motivations, their own history leading them to this point, and like they exist beyond this game and your interactions with them.

As far as gameplay is concerned, I've never before played a metroidvania that gives such a compelling sense of freedom to its players, letting them genuinely choose their own path through the game. There's a huge amount of the game you can explore without access to the majority of your unlockable traversal abilities, and only the gentlest hints of where to head next. The downside to this is that very little of the world map can truly push your ability to use these traversal abilities to their fullest since it's simply not designed with the knowledge that you'll have them all available when you reach any individual place (thankfully The White Palace exists for this purpose), but the huge upside is that it feels like your first journey through Hallownest is distinctly yours; so many moments you experience will feel like your own personal story because of the fact that you're given so much freedom as to how to approach things and what order to do things in.

The design of this world you explore is even more impressive due to how much it understands player psychology. Deepnest is the clearest example of this, inverting a bunch of things you'd been taking as givens in regards to gameplay in order to contribute to the oppressive atmosphere and feeling of helplessness, but this sort of understanding of player expectations and how to either play into them or exploit them is, on a subtler level, everywhere. I had to use a guide and have some slight hints for a few bits and pieces I missed throughout my playthrough as I wanted to find every major thing in the game, but considering how many secrets Hallownest holds and how vast it is I really didn't have to look up that much and in part that's because the game knows how to direct you towards its secrets without ruining the feeling that you were the one actually uncovering them.

Finally, whilst it starts out very basic, the combat grows to become something incredibly elegant and satisfying; there's a moment as you're unlocking movement abilities where everything just clicks as you float from one enemy to the next, and that moment is so satisfying that it is worth the slow build-up to that point. There are a ton of different approaches you can take to fighting, the charm system allows you a lot of versatility in terms of complimenting your play-style or even creating a new one, and the game is very good at forcing you out of your comfort zone and making you fight in new ways as its creative, thrilling boss fights ramp up in difficulty. I expect to spend a fair amount more time in Godhome before I finally put down this Hollow Knight, and I'm not someone who's usually interested in replaying boss fights over and over in games.

Hollow Knight is certainly far from flawless, but this game was just so good at making me feel things; the joy of exploration, experimentation and growth, the adrenaline rush of barely clinging on against the game's hardest fights, all the emotions that come from digging into the past of Hallownest and its residents, soaking in its atmosphere alongside its gorgeous soundtrack. A true joy.