After weeks of playing I’ve finally beaten Hollow Knight. If I may pull a games journalism, I’d say something like “Well it certainly made me feel hollow” but Hollow Knight is a good game. I was expecting that god-tier metroidvania everyone claimed it was, but between this and Bloodstained ROTN, I have now come to the conclusion that I much prefer the Vania half of metroidvanias.
The Vania half typically involves combat with RPG elements and a multitude of options to increase variety and gameplay style, while Metroid is about exploration through long winding maps with intersecting pathways and rooms sealed behind powers you get later. Hollow Knight is very much on the Metroid end of the spectrum which started out fine as the map starts small and you are taken on the critical path, but then some warning flags start to crop up. Maps are one thing; you can only get a map of an area once you buy it off a humming map guy hiding in the area. The problem is the areas can be so big and winding that you can easily miss the map guy at times because you have no sense of direction and all the corridors look the same with rarely a strategically placed identifiable landmark. This is more an early game problem that railroads you into finding a map first and foremost, but if it’s better for me to get a map of an area as soon as I get to a new one, and not go exploring until I get one, and when I do get it I have to fill most of it out myself, why can’t I just get the map right as I’m entering the area? Super Metroid does this way better; you get a map at the start that tracks where you’ve been and once you find a map room you find all the places you haven’t been yet in that area. I shudder to think what playing the vanilla version of the game without the DLC would’ve been like before they gave us map markers to mark things we couldn’t get to before. Good luck memorizing every point of interest without them, bitch.
The next red flag of the venereal metroidvania disease is the dreaded backtracking. Backtracking is par for the course of metroidvanias which one just has to accept like the grogginess of getting up after an afternoon nap or the inevitably of death. But Hollow Knight takes it too far when it doesn’t have to. Benches are the Dark Souls equivalent of bonfires where you get all your health back, respawn on them when you die, and all the enemies respawn when you sit on them. There’s also two-three methods of fast travel depending on how much you explore. The main method are stag beetle stations as fast travel points. There’s a tram that takes you to several specific locations, and an unlockable single fast travel point you can plunk down anywhere on the main map and travel to from wherever. In the early game when the maps are smaller they’re helpful to get you to your destination fast, but as the game progresses and thus the map opens up, the points of interest and fast travel points get further away from each other. It’s still helpful for getting closer to them, but you’ll still half to cross anywhere from 33%-50% of an entire area map just to get to where you need to go. I clocked 30 hours into Hollow Knight and a few of them were owed to backtracking frequently. An ability to fast travel between benches (which are more plentiful than stag stations and are closer to points of interest on the map) would’ve made the game more streamlined and cuts down on tedious unnecessary downtime.
The combat of Hollow Knight is the selling point. What it lacks in variety of ways to approach a fight it makes up for by taking what it has and refines it to near perfection. You have a nail and unlock spells that hit things far away, up and down, but more often than not, you’re gonna be swinging at things with your nail. Charms can be equipped on benches that allow you to spec into different play styles like long-range nail swings, magic DPS, heal focus, etc. You can buy and find upgrades on the map that increases your health, magic reserves and charm equip slots, but after you buy everything you can, the economy of Hollow Knight becomes fucked. I consistently spent all my money in the first half of the game with plenty of expensive things left to buy, but in the second half I had 20,000 money and nothing to spend it on. Enemies and bosses have recognizable attack patterns and cues that make most of them a joy to fight. Occasionally you’ll run into a shitter or two that demands near-impossible feats like “hey here’s a brand new boss at the end of a ten minute enemy rush” or “hey here’s a perfectly functional boss you could’ve fought solo but here’s multiple ones so you have to juggle all their cues and if one covers the ground and the other jumps in the air forcing you to take a hit then you can just eat shit on a sundae” but those are few and far between… until you get to the endgame and they become more frequent, but a lot of them are optional and I suppose it’s just the ol’ Dark Souls ram your head against a brick wall until it breaks mentality.
The best boss I encountered were the Mantis Lords. They’re fast and have recognizable patterns that demand split-second reactions, but they never felt unfair. Even when it becomes a two on one, they never cover all options and you can still read their moves and get some good slashes in. It took several attempts but after beating them I felt like I couldn’t turn around lest I accidentally smack someone across the face with my three-foot stiffie. The cherry on top was the reward. Sure I got access to a new area, but after backtracking through the Mantis Lord area, all the mantis enemies that before tried to dice me up into bug sashimi on sight, all bowed in my presence and I could walk right by them with no harm done. Hollow Knight is packed with a bunch of little moments that really stuck with me despite their briefness. The singing ghost girl that you can listen to and choose to put to rest, following another Knight that you find out is actually a nightmarish monstrosity that wears your kin like a trophy, the banker being a little bitch you can enact vengeance upon, the [SPOILER REDACTED] stabbing himself, etc. All it was missing was a Dark Souls limping dog boss moment and I would’ve needed to sit in the tub in the dark and stare blankly into the void for a while. All of these moments are well and good and help hold up what is otherwise a decent story.
Hollow Knight takes my least favorite approach to storytelling: storyless storytelling. Well that’s hardly fair. Hollow Knight does have a story, in the same way I have a USB cable in my desk drawer that I could find given some digging equipment and a couple days. The game starts and you go right and you find a little barren town. You then find a well that leads into the first area of the map and you explore because it is a video game. You proceed to fuck around for a few hours before Team Cherry snaps awake from their drunken slumber and remembers that games need stories, so they pull you into a dream world and tell you to find three sleeping souls and put them to rest (not to rest like they already are but to rest rest) so you can unlock a temple holding the final boss. But that’s just what the game tells you in a nutshell. In reality, the broader story is about a fallen kingdom ravaged by an infection that turned most of its denizens into mindless drones or resurrected dead folk that can’t be put to rest until you do all the dirty work. It’s a game not about the character but the world the character resides in. Until you get the Inception nail that lets you invade dream land, you have no goal or objective aside from the blanket “it is a video game; play” which kinda smothers my drive to explore and fight when I don’t know the context for why I’m doing it or why I should continue to do it. I was able to piece together the infection thing from context clues alone but the story behind all that is tucked behind a wall of lore that’s optional to find which leads to Hollow Knight’s greatest downfall: its insistence that the story be carried by lore that you have to go out of your way to find instead of just… telling a story. I’m sure all the lore behind the kingdom of Hallownest is quite interesting and deep but if I have to watch an hour long YouTube video to appreciate your game’s story, then methinks the writers didn’t exactly pull their weight, mate. Doom 2016 takes a similar approach by having the Doom Slayer in-canon blatantly disregard the story, but Id compensated for that by actually having a good story with an ideological conflict that I was thoroughly invested in. It also has a lot of lore in its codex files for all the nutters who want to learn, but the base story of Doom 2016 is present in the main game and doesn’t require an hour of homework to understand and appreciate.
While I’m kicking the story and lore in the balls, I might as well take a gonad shot at something I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone levy against the game: the aesthetic and theming. Now, the aesthetic and visual art of Hollow Knight is wonderful to look at, even if some environments can get a bit samey. The animations aren’t particularly impressive but hey, it’s not pixel art so it’s already standing out in the indie crowd. The atmosphere is also great; an oppressive, depressing world that has been dying/dead for a long time but there are still glimmers of life and hope within the darkness, like the grubs and the NPCs you can save and interact with that will populate the starting town and the map throughout. But what clips my clitoris is the theming. The world of Hollow Knight is a world of insects in an underground kingdom. But about two-thirds into the game, I started thinking… “why are they insects? In what way does them being insects service the story or the world?” And the answer is: it doesn’t. Very rarely does Hollow Knight justify its insect theming. Sure, the kingdom is underground, there are tunnels that burrowing insects crawl through, and they use tiny sharp things like nails and thread needles as weapons, but the world doesn’t mesh cohesively with the characters thematically. The City of Tears is a Gothic architectural city on a body of water with elevators and buildings made from metal… that if it were scaled up could be built and inhabited by humans. There’s the aforementioned tram stations… that if it were scaled up could be built and used by humans. The infection, the shades (essentially souls of people) the coliseum, the dream worlds, none of these are relevant to insects. You might call that nitpicking, but there are plenty of games that blend its world with its theming to create a more cohesive experience. Cuphead has a cup for a head which explains his fragility (there’s a shattering sound when he gets hit) and he lives in a 1930s cartoon world with a subtle tinge of darkness which explains why a lot of the bosses are so evil and aggressive. The SteamWorld Dig games center on a world of steam-powered robots that need to absorb water to stay functional, recharge their lamps on solar power, and can upgrade themselves with modular pieces and tech because they are robots. Shovel Knight is about a knight with a shovel, so digging is a core mechanic, be it digging up treasure (commonly buried in the dirt) or digging through dirt to progress through the level. Hollow Knight is like Cars (not directly in quality, that’d be insulting to Hollow Knight) where the game could be done with humans and not insects and you wouldn’t have to tweak the story that much to make it feasible, like how Cars didn’t benefit from being about living cars and could’ve been done with humans driving cars. Compare that to Toy Story, where the characters have to be toys and you can’t change them to being humans otherwise the story wouldn’t work. Hell, A Bug’s Life is more in-line with its insect theming than Hollow Knight. A Bug’s Life has cities built from human trash, the light posts are fireflies, a bar inside a soup can, a circus carriage made from a box of circus animal crackers, they harvest food and build machines from insect-obtainable things like grass, wood and seeds, not metal crafted into human-originated architecture. Bug Fables seems to be thematically cohesive with its insect aesthetic than Hollow Knight.
By the 20 hour mark in Hollow Knight I began to get a sense that I was gonna end up feeling positive overall on the game, but was desperate for it to be over and done with. I never felt that way about Bloodstained and can say definitively that games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2 are exactly the kind of metroidvania I can get behind and are overall better experiences. They may not have combat or bosses that are as tight as those found in Hollow Knight, but they do have better everything else. I can recall a bunch of songs from Bloodstained but like two from Hollow Knight because most of Hollow Knight’s music is just ambiance that got so monotonous I had to put on podcasts just to fill the sound. I plowed through the last third of the game, forgoing the good ending (but Team Cherry officially stated that there is no true canon ending to the game so by all intents and purposes I got an ending and that’s all that matters) and have no desire (at least at this moment in time) to play through the Grimm Troupe and Godmaster DLC. All of that was free, but it was also not base game so I don’t think I’m any less valid in my opinion. Hollow Knight is certainly worth its price of admission. $15 for a 30-hour game that has some stuff I didn’t even touch yet is a fuckin’ steal and I kinda feel like Team Cherry were underselling themselves here with all the work they put into it. I liked Hollow Knight and would recommend it for those into the Metroid half of metroidvanias, but I would much sooner recommend games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2, games I gave my GOTY status in 2019 and 2017 respectively. Silksong, which is just Hollow Knight 2 with a subtitle instead of a numeral, looks to address a lot of problems I had and be a better game. More memorable music, more insect theming, an actual character and not just a blank slate, a wider cast of memorable characters, etc. I look forward to its release and to what else Team Cherry is capable of. Hollow Knight is a 7/10 that could possibly be swayed by the DLC I didn’t play, but the thought of playing any more Hollow Knight right now actually depresses me so no thanks I’m good ok bye.
The Vania half typically involves combat with RPG elements and a multitude of options to increase variety and gameplay style, while Metroid is about exploration through long winding maps with intersecting pathways and rooms sealed behind powers you get later. Hollow Knight is very much on the Metroid end of the spectrum which started out fine as the map starts small and you are taken on the critical path, but then some warning flags start to crop up. Maps are one thing; you can only get a map of an area once you buy it off a humming map guy hiding in the area. The problem is the areas can be so big and winding that you can easily miss the map guy at times because you have no sense of direction and all the corridors look the same with rarely a strategically placed identifiable landmark. This is more an early game problem that railroads you into finding a map first and foremost, but if it’s better for me to get a map of an area as soon as I get to a new one, and not go exploring until I get one, and when I do get it I have to fill most of it out myself, why can’t I just get the map right as I’m entering the area? Super Metroid does this way better; you get a map at the start that tracks where you’ve been and once you find a map room you find all the places you haven’t been yet in that area. I shudder to think what playing the vanilla version of the game without the DLC would’ve been like before they gave us map markers to mark things we couldn’t get to before. Good luck memorizing every point of interest without them, bitch.
The next red flag of the venereal metroidvania disease is the dreaded backtracking. Backtracking is par for the course of metroidvanias which one just has to accept like the grogginess of getting up after an afternoon nap or the inevitably of death. But Hollow Knight takes it too far when it doesn’t have to. Benches are the Dark Souls equivalent of bonfires where you get all your health back, respawn on them when you die, and all the enemies respawn when you sit on them. There’s also two-three methods of fast travel depending on how much you explore. The main method are stag beetle stations as fast travel points. There’s a tram that takes you to several specific locations, and an unlockable single fast travel point you can plunk down anywhere on the main map and travel to from wherever. In the early game when the maps are smaller they’re helpful to get you to your destination fast, but as the game progresses and thus the map opens up, the points of interest and fast travel points get further away from each other. It’s still helpful for getting closer to them, but you’ll still half to cross anywhere from 33%-50% of an entire area map just to get to where you need to go. I clocked 30 hours into Hollow Knight and a few of them were owed to backtracking frequently. An ability to fast travel between benches (which are more plentiful than stag stations and are closer to points of interest on the map) would’ve made the game more streamlined and cuts down on tedious unnecessary downtime.
The combat of Hollow Knight is the selling point. What it lacks in variety of ways to approach a fight it makes up for by taking what it has and refines it to near perfection. You have a nail and unlock spells that hit things far away, up and down, but more often than not, you’re gonna be swinging at things with your nail. Charms can be equipped on benches that allow you to spec into different play styles like long-range nail swings, magic DPS, heal focus, etc. You can buy and find upgrades on the map that increases your health, magic reserves and charm equip slots, but after you buy everything you can, the economy of Hollow Knight becomes fucked. I consistently spent all my money in the first half of the game with plenty of expensive things left to buy, but in the second half I had 20,000 money and nothing to spend it on. Enemies and bosses have recognizable attack patterns and cues that make most of them a joy to fight. Occasionally you’ll run into a shitter or two that demands near-impossible feats like “hey here’s a brand new boss at the end of a ten minute enemy rush” or “hey here’s a perfectly functional boss you could’ve fought solo but here’s multiple ones so you have to juggle all their cues and if one covers the ground and the other jumps in the air forcing you to take a hit then you can just eat shit on a sundae” but those are few and far between… until you get to the endgame and they become more frequent, but a lot of them are optional and I suppose it’s just the ol’ Dark Souls ram your head against a brick wall until it breaks mentality.
The best boss I encountered were the Mantis Lords. They’re fast and have recognizable patterns that demand split-second reactions, but they never felt unfair. Even when it becomes a two on one, they never cover all options and you can still read their moves and get some good slashes in. It took several attempts but after beating them I felt like I couldn’t turn around lest I accidentally smack someone across the face with my three-foot stiffie. The cherry on top was the reward. Sure I got access to a new area, but after backtracking through the Mantis Lord area, all the mantis enemies that before tried to dice me up into bug sashimi on sight, all bowed in my presence and I could walk right by them with no harm done. Hollow Knight is packed with a bunch of little moments that really stuck with me despite their briefness. The singing ghost girl that you can listen to and choose to put to rest, following another Knight that you find out is actually a nightmarish monstrosity that wears your kin like a trophy, the banker being a little bitch you can enact vengeance upon, the [SPOILER REDACTED] stabbing himself, etc. All it was missing was a Dark Souls limping dog boss moment and I would’ve needed to sit in the tub in the dark and stare blankly into the void for a while. All of these moments are well and good and help hold up what is otherwise a decent story.
Hollow Knight takes my least favorite approach to storytelling: storyless storytelling. Well that’s hardly fair. Hollow Knight does have a story, in the same way I have a USB cable in my desk drawer that I could find given some digging equipment and a couple days. The game starts and you go right and you find a little barren town. You then find a well that leads into the first area of the map and you explore because it is a video game. You proceed to fuck around for a few hours before Team Cherry snaps awake from their drunken slumber and remembers that games need stories, so they pull you into a dream world and tell you to find three sleeping souls and put them to rest (not to rest like they already are but to rest rest) so you can unlock a temple holding the final boss. But that’s just what the game tells you in a nutshell. In reality, the broader story is about a fallen kingdom ravaged by an infection that turned most of its denizens into mindless drones or resurrected dead folk that can’t be put to rest until you do all the dirty work. It’s a game not about the character but the world the character resides in. Until you get the Inception nail that lets you invade dream land, you have no goal or objective aside from the blanket “it is a video game; play” which kinda smothers my drive to explore and fight when I don’t know the context for why I’m doing it or why I should continue to do it. I was able to piece together the infection thing from context clues alone but the story behind all that is tucked behind a wall of lore that’s optional to find which leads to Hollow Knight’s greatest downfall: its insistence that the story be carried by lore that you have to go out of your way to find instead of just… telling a story. I’m sure all the lore behind the kingdom of Hallownest is quite interesting and deep but if I have to watch an hour long YouTube video to appreciate your game’s story, then methinks the writers didn’t exactly pull their weight, mate. Doom 2016 takes a similar approach by having the Doom Slayer in-canon blatantly disregard the story, but Id compensated for that by actually having a good story with an ideological conflict that I was thoroughly invested in. It also has a lot of lore in its codex files for all the nutters who want to learn, but the base story of Doom 2016 is present in the main game and doesn’t require an hour of homework to understand and appreciate.
While I’m kicking the story and lore in the balls, I might as well take a gonad shot at something I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone levy against the game: the aesthetic and theming. Now, the aesthetic and visual art of Hollow Knight is wonderful to look at, even if some environments can get a bit samey. The animations aren’t particularly impressive but hey, it’s not pixel art so it’s already standing out in the indie crowd. The atmosphere is also great; an oppressive, depressing world that has been dying/dead for a long time but there are still glimmers of life and hope within the darkness, like the grubs and the NPCs you can save and interact with that will populate the starting town and the map throughout. But what clips my clitoris is the theming. The world of Hollow Knight is a world of insects in an underground kingdom. But about two-thirds into the game, I started thinking… “why are they insects? In what way does them being insects service the story or the world?” And the answer is: it doesn’t. Very rarely does Hollow Knight justify its insect theming. Sure, the kingdom is underground, there are tunnels that burrowing insects crawl through, and they use tiny sharp things like nails and thread needles as weapons, but the world doesn’t mesh cohesively with the characters thematically. The City of Tears is a Gothic architectural city on a body of water with elevators and buildings made from metal… that if it were scaled up could be built and inhabited by humans. There’s the aforementioned tram stations… that if it were scaled up could be built and used by humans. The infection, the shades (essentially souls of people) the coliseum, the dream worlds, none of these are relevant to insects. You might call that nitpicking, but there are plenty of games that blend its world with its theming to create a more cohesive experience. Cuphead has a cup for a head which explains his fragility (there’s a shattering sound when he gets hit) and he lives in a 1930s cartoon world with a subtle tinge of darkness which explains why a lot of the bosses are so evil and aggressive. The SteamWorld Dig games center on a world of steam-powered robots that need to absorb water to stay functional, recharge their lamps on solar power, and can upgrade themselves with modular pieces and tech because they are robots. Shovel Knight is about a knight with a shovel, so digging is a core mechanic, be it digging up treasure (commonly buried in the dirt) or digging through dirt to progress through the level. Hollow Knight is like Cars (not directly in quality, that’d be insulting to Hollow Knight) where the game could be done with humans and not insects and you wouldn’t have to tweak the story that much to make it feasible, like how Cars didn’t benefit from being about living cars and could’ve been done with humans driving cars. Compare that to Toy Story, where the characters have to be toys and you can’t change them to being humans otherwise the story wouldn’t work. Hell, A Bug’s Life is more in-line with its insect theming than Hollow Knight. A Bug’s Life has cities built from human trash, the light posts are fireflies, a bar inside a soup can, a circus carriage made from a box of circus animal crackers, they harvest food and build machines from insect-obtainable things like grass, wood and seeds, not metal crafted into human-originated architecture. Bug Fables seems to be thematically cohesive with its insect aesthetic than Hollow Knight.
By the 20 hour mark in Hollow Knight I began to get a sense that I was gonna end up feeling positive overall on the game, but was desperate for it to be over and done with. I never felt that way about Bloodstained and can say definitively that games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2 are exactly the kind of metroidvania I can get behind and are overall better experiences. They may not have combat or bosses that are as tight as those found in Hollow Knight, but they do have better everything else. I can recall a bunch of songs from Bloodstained but like two from Hollow Knight because most of Hollow Knight’s music is just ambiance that got so monotonous I had to put on podcasts just to fill the sound. I plowed through the last third of the game, forgoing the good ending (but Team Cherry officially stated that there is no true canon ending to the game so by all intents and purposes I got an ending and that’s all that matters) and have no desire (at least at this moment in time) to play through the Grimm Troupe and Godmaster DLC. All of that was free, but it was also not base game so I don’t think I’m any less valid in my opinion. Hollow Knight is certainly worth its price of admission. $15 for a 30-hour game that has some stuff I didn’t even touch yet is a fuckin’ steal and I kinda feel like Team Cherry were underselling themselves here with all the work they put into it. I liked Hollow Knight and would recommend it for those into the Metroid half of metroidvanias, but I would much sooner recommend games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2, games I gave my GOTY status in 2019 and 2017 respectively. Silksong, which is just Hollow Knight 2 with a subtitle instead of a numeral, looks to address a lot of problems I had and be a better game. More memorable music, more insect theming, an actual character and not just a blank slate, a wider cast of memorable characters, etc. I look forward to its release and to what else Team Cherry is capable of. Hollow Knight is a 7/10 that could possibly be swayed by the DLC I didn’t play, but the thought of playing any more Hollow Knight right now actually depresses me so no thanks I’m good ok bye.