TL;DR: Hollow Knight is a uniquely fresh take on an exploration game that perfectly captures the principles of what it means for a video game to be fun. While its DLC is somewhat of a slog, the main game offers excitement at every turn for hours due to the amount of effort put in to build its world and story. It’s easily one of the best games I have ever played.
In almost everyone's lives there is a time where we are exposed to something so new we feel lost. It might be because we're going somewhere as exciting and large as the Grand Canyon, taking in every inch of its magnificent view from high above the ground or somewhere small yet crafted with such incredibly painstaking attention to detail that it's difficult not to admire it, like a museum. The world is full of new things to experience and when we humans are faced in a situation where we are to venture into the unknown our natural tendency for curiosity wants us to explore. We want to explore until every single turn, building, and other exciting thing is just etched into our memory. Even if we may find danger, there are very few things more thrilling to us humans than experiencing something new to distract us from our lives.
Hollow Knight takes this basic human instinct and turns it into a game. The foundation of Hollow Knight's story and gameplay is built on mystery and exploration and the game expertly and delicately crafts a world very unlike any you've ever seen. I can confidently say there are very few games that can offer an experience as charming, satisfying, and fun as the one presented in Hollow Knight. It's more than just a game, it's a thrilling journey through one of the most captivating universes ever put into a story.
When you start this game, you are introduced to The Knight; the main character of this story whose background and motivation is unknown. All we know is that he travels to a strange wasteland, equipped with nothing but a robe and a nail and starts from a cave. From the very first minutes of the game, the mystery has already begun. From here, how does the game help you solve the mystery? The answer is that it doesn't. At least not in any way traditional games do. There are no explicit objectives, there are no markers beyond the ones you set yourself, and there is not even an end goal to be achieved. You are, in the most literal sense, lost from the very beginning and it's up to you to find your way again.
This design choice perfectly reflects the philosophy that Hollow Knight sets out to prove works effectively. The only way to progress in this game is to explore. The game almost never tells you what you need to move forward, you have to figure it out for yourself by looking at things like your surroundings, interacting with characters you meet across the world, and learning to effectively traverse the map using the tools you've been given and the tools you find along the way as you explore. The game continues this practice all throughout its runtime.
Many modern games seem to assume the player is downright stupid or incompetent and feel the need to post tutorials at every second of the game or mark out explicitly in your face where you're supposed to go next to progress the game. The end result of this practice is that people become disassociated with the world the game is trying to build. "Who cares what this character is or what they're saying! I just need to move onto the next objective so I can be done with this game!" To me that is the very antithesis of a video game. Video games are meant to immerse people in them and to have developers build an entire world full of characters and locations only to have it completely ignored by the player feels downright disrespectful to the people who made the game.
Hollow Knight truly feels like what a video game is meant to be because of how heavy it leans on the player building their own path through the game. I would daresay that it's probably one of the most liberating games I have ever played because of how much freedom it gives the player while they play the game. Because there are no objectives or even a single order the game's map can be explored, the player is effectively forced to pay close attention to where they've been, what they've seen, and what they want to see next. In other words, it's a game purely driven by your own curiosity.
Of course, all this talk about exploration is meaningless if the world to be explored is boring. If every location in the game felt the same or did not have any substantial depth to them, this exploration would get boring very fast. Naturally then, Hollow Knight's locations have been carefully crafted such that there is variety in every single location.
When you start the game, things feel small; you start in a very boring town and there's only one way to progress; moving down into the depths of Hallownest. When you start, the game deceives you in this way by making you think that Hallownest is small and the only thing of note are the various caves full of Geo (in-game money) for you to get. However, Hollow Knight's map quickly becomes a hydra; explore one part of the map and then two new locations appear. After even a few hours of playing, you quickly realize that one small hole you found before has turned into over 10 different locations that are waiting for you to explore them. By the end of the game, the map becomes so massive that you start wondering how you even thought the game's map was so small to begin with.
While these locations are all a part of the same map, each one feels very distinct. Much like Minecraft biomes, the place you are exploring can change not only appearance, but tone is just a matter of seconds. One moment, you are in the calm, lively, open spaces of the City of Tears and the next you are in the dark, ominous, and crowded caves of Deepnest in your exploration. Each of these locations comes pact with their own set of enemies, music, and story that’s just waiting to be sought out through thorough investigation. Whether it’s talking to characters, searching through the remains of the deceased for a key item, or just plainly observing the scenery, every single location in Hollow Knight has some unique aspect it adds to the overall lore of the game.
It’s also worth calling out the interesting approach this game takes to developing its lore, story and mystery. There is almost never a point in the game where it’s just reciting some story to you or giving you some ten minute flashback about what happened in the past. It’s hidden in every aspect of the game. In fact, it is so hidden it’s possible to get through the entire game without really having any kind of understanding as to what is going on in the world.
There are some games out there that just drown the player in a completely unnecessary context that distracts from playing the game. While it’s nice when games have world building, there are times where I just want to play the game and not be given a 10 hour lecture on fictional science or politics. When a game has that kind of world building they want to give, they usually jam it away into optional side conversations that a player can activate if they want to learn or in what’s usually called a “journal” entry by some character you never get to meet. This is also, in my opinion, a very poor practice primarily because it’s incredibly boring and very inorganic. Many of these things feel like they were just given a second thought and exist to extend the game’s runtime/content for advertising.
In other games though, the developers do treat the world building with respect and at least put some effort into giving the backstory in a fun way. One of my personal favorites is how the backstory for Rosalina is explained in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s optional and short, the medium it is told through is Rosalina reading you a children’s book that goes over her experiences and how they formed her into who she is when you meet her in the game. It fits the theme of the game well and it’s just a nice piece of context that you aren’t required to know about if you want to just play the game. However, it’s not quite perfect because you actually need to stop playing the game in order to get that context. It’s almost as if in many games story and gameplay are treated as two distinct entities that need to be separately fleshed out in order to work.
Hollow Knight does away with this and interleaves the story with the gameplay. When I said that every aspect of the game has some lore behind it, I really do mean every aspect. Even things as insignificant as how the signs you look at for 5 seconds get rebuilt after you destroy them have lore behind it. Despite the lore being incredibly deep, the interesting thing is that it’s often not exposed to you through optional side conversations or the typical journal entry you find lying on the ground. It’s exposed to you as you play the game. And no, it’s not through cutscenes or character conversations that just halt the gameplay. The story is embedded in the gameplay. It’s in the look of enemies you encounter as you play. It’s in the architecture of the buildings that form each of the in-game locations. There is even a whole ability you can earn that allows you to learn lore by reading the thoughts of enemies while you fight them in combat. Everything is meticulously placed for a reason and the game challenges you to think about why things exist as you explore the game. Super dedicated Hollow Knight fans have investigated every single thing put into this game and even today, years after the game launched, they are still finding new things that deeply change how they look at the story and world of Hollow Knight.
The major benefit of this gameplay-first approach to storytelling is that much of the lore and story is effectively optional. Again, you do not need to invest yourself in the story to enjoy Hollow Knight and many people find a lot of fun out of just speedrunning the game. But if you do choose to invest in it, it’s not as boring as reading a bunch of dry text. It involves actually playing and improving at the game so you can unlock hidden things. In other words, the game rewards you for exploring and being curious by offering things that change your view of the world. There is a legitimately fun reason to want to understand more about Hollow Knight and dig into it. To me, that’s one of the primary things that makes Hollow Knight such a brilliant and captivating game. It’s a continuous cycle of the gameplay supporting the narrative and the narrative supporting the gameplay that is just almost never done in many games today and it’s hard to put the game down without getting an itching feeling that you missed something important.
World building and story, while critical to exploration, they are just half of the whole. The gameplay of Hollow Knight is the other half that completes the game. In Hollow Knight, the gameplay mostly involves two things; platforming and fighting enemies.
On the platforming side of things, this often involves traversing new areas on your quest to find key items and progress. At the start, the controls you are given for platforming are rather simple; you can walk, jump, and hit things with your weapon, a nail. Naturally, as you might expect, where you can go with just these three abilities is rather limited. However, once you play the game more and explore new areas, you encounter bosses that give you brand new abilities that help you reach not only more places, but also help you backtrack very quickly through places where you’ve already been. You can earn abilities such as a very quick forward dash, a double jump, and even a hook that helps you climb walls. Getting these abilities after exploring for a bit is such a satisfying experience. Almost immediately it’s easy to see how these abilities would help you get to places you’ve never been to before and exploring these new areas is just like getting a gift for Christmas; you don’t usually know what you’re going to get, but it’s probably something good.
Despite the numerous abilities you get throughout the game, it never feels overwhelming and it also does not feel like any of these abilities are put in randomly. In most situations you use about 4 of these abilities (the exact abilities depend on what you’re doing) and they are very easy to master even after just a few minutes of using them. It’s a common trap for games to introduce very “one-off” abilities that feel like they were made with the sole intention of getting through one specific part of the game and then are never intended to be used again. In Hollow Knight, even things that were introduced to you within the first hours of the game will be used again up until your last hours of playing the game and it seems Team Cherry had the discipline to make sure they were adding in only abilities that could be used more than a couple times throughout the game. The result is that the set of abilities to help you platform is rather small, yet large enough that you actually have to think about how your abilities can be used in unique combos together to help you reach new areas in the map. Sometimes you need to climb up a wall then do a double jump dash to get to where you need to go. Other times, you need to carefully dash then do a double jump to avoid an obstacle or enemy. Again, the abilities are easy to master and by the end of the game you feel like a real speedrunning pro with how you use these abilities in tandem to traverse the map.
Next is the enemies. As I’ve mentioned before, every area in the game has a unique set of enemies. While there are hundreds of different enemies in this game each with their own unique quirks, the important ones are the big bosses that you encounter along the way. These bosses are usually what give you access to new abilities such as increased health, damage, or perks (called charms in the game) as well as access to new areas in the game. What’s interesting about these bosses is how you can feel your progression through the game as you fight them. If you are playing the game normally, you will typically encounter each boss once, yet each boss, in addition to the abilities they offer, give you some additional knowledge that helps bosses later on. Knowledge in this game comes in two categories; “factual” and “intuitive” knowledge.
As every boss in the game has a very small set of attacks and phases to them, there is at least one strategy that works very effectively for each boss in the game. Strategy is either using your abilities in the game to effectively dodge and attack the boss or coming up with an optimal charm build that works against the boss. I would call this knowledge “factual” as you get to experiment with combos against bosses that can be leveraged against other bosses as well as interesting quirks about the gameplay system that can make your life easier for some other bosses. In other words, these are factual tips that can help out later. For example, one interesting thing that people might not know when starting out is that you can attack spikes while jumping to get another bounce off of them. This is useful for quite a few bosses that require a good amount of dexterity to fight effectively.
The other form of knowledge is what I’ll coin “intuitive” as there’s really no numbers or factual thing about the gameplay that you’re learning, but just general things that can be applied to bosses later on. Things like how to get better at dodging attacks, how to be more confident and precise with your nail strikes, and how to effectively leverage spells to take out bosses quickly fall into this category. As you play the game more, you become more comfortable with its combat systems and learn how to effectively make use of them based on your style of play. If you are more of a pro at platforming, you can equip charms that will help you move around faster and more precisely which makes it easier to dodge attacks. If you’re more of the brawler type, there are charms and abilities that help you tank attacks while also dealing a lot more damage.
You might notice I am going deep into the combat system of Hollow Knight to explain the last few points. That’s because I am trying to illustrate that the gameplay itself is another form of the brilliant exploration the game utilizes. Beyond finding new areas, the game encourages you to experiment with enemies and abilities to match your style of play and to improve overall. I think that’s another key to why the exploration in this game works effectively. This game is not simply walking and exploring. Your progress is impeded constantly by huge and hard bosses looking to be an obstacle. At these points you are faced with a choice; you can try and fight the boss and experiment until you’ve mastered them or you can turn back and look for new abilities that will help you fight the boss. While there is often no correct choice, what you choose has major implications on what your experience will be in the game. Some players may choose to challenge themselves and take on bosses without having too many abilities under their belt. They will die a lot early on, but quickly ramp up on “intuitive” knowledge as they will not be relying heavily on abilities to take out bosses. This is critical for fighting very skill heavy bosses that appear near the end. On the other hand, you can also prioritize exploration and finding items which helps with getting through the easy bosses early, but makes things a bit of a struggle when fighting hard bosses at the end. This is what most people would call the “risk” aspect of the game and in this sense, the fun of the game is coming up with strategies to mitigate it. When should I fight this boss? Should I explore this area now or save it for later after I fight X? And certainly your choices are not the end all be all. If you fight a boss a few times and find it to be too hard, there is no shame in trying out some other area in the hopes it will reward you with something that will help you. Hollow Knight’s death system encourages you to take risks and face only minor penalties when they don’t pan out as you expect. When you die a little shadow is at the spot you died and you lose your money as well as a bit of your capacity to hold soul (the thing that powers your attack spells). To regain this, you just need to go back and kill the shadow. Once done, you’re back to exactly as you were before and nothing was lost except a bit of time. So it’s certainly very easy to experiment with bosses and have fun with learning their attack patterns as well as what works and what doesn’t.
So overall, the key to Hollow Knight’s fun is in its exploration. How you choose to explore the map. How you choose to fight bosses, And how you choose to solve the mystery the game has laid out in front of you. All of these things work together to give a unique take on risk versus reward that is unlike one I’ve seen in a game. There’s plenty of fun to be had in Hollow Knight even after the credits roll and after spending over 82 hours in the game myself, I can say that the base game has very little to be upset about, especially for the very low price tag it has on it today.
Now that I’ve talked about what works, let’s also spend a bit of time talking about what doesn’t work too well.
While this approach of letting the players explore the game completely works at the start while there are things to explore, it becomes a bit of a burden near the end. As I’ve mentioned before, the map is very huge once you’ve explored a good amount of it. At some points you run into walls that you cannot pass simply because you don’t have the right ability for it. Unless you were keeping track of all of these with markers, it’s extraordinarily hard to remember where you’ve gotten stuck before. Sometimes you can see it because the in-game map is cut off at the point where you were stuck, but other times it’s difficult to pinpoint every location on the map that’s cutoff. Sometimes these incredibly small entrances can be holding very key things to getting completion in the game, so it was rather annoying finding these places again without a guide.
There are also some things that are not even shown on the map or hinted at at all that are key to progressing the game. For instance, the last two DLCs in the game are accessed by breaking a couple of hidden walls in different areas. These walls are not shown on the map, there are no abilities to help you find it, and there are absolutely 0 interactions or objects in the game that allude to the location of the DLC. You just somehow have to have the eyesight to notice the wall is breakable when you pass it which is really annoying. At some point I just gave up and looked up a guide on where they were. I wish for things like this there was some indication as to where you needed to go to access it, but maybe I missed it. This really only becomes a problem when you are trying to complete the game though. I was able to pass the game without 100% completion without a guide just fine.
Lastly, there is the Godmaster DLC. This is the last DLC of the game and it essentially adds boss rush modes to the game. These boss rushes have you face bosses you have fought throughout the game previously as well as new bosses created just for the DLC. While I like the concept from the surface, its execution isn’t that great and it really goes in opposition to the points I made before. The exploration in this mode comes from the new bosses; the old bosses are sometimes slightly modified (e.g. for one of the bosses they removed the floor and made it so there are only floating platforms available to stand on). While that’s fine and dandy, to get to these bosses you have to go through bosses you’ve seen before. As I’ve mentioned before, these bosses are pretty hard. Some of them are fairly easy once you’re at this stage of the game and have pretty much every ability and upgrade in the game, but some bosses are a challenge even at this point. You have to be extraordinarily good at these bosses to beat the rushes (also called pantheons) and often that requires hours upon hours of practice. It’s very easy to get discouraged as a result.
The final pantheon is probably the worst of them all because in addition to adding new bosses, it takes pretty much every boss in the game and jams them all into a super mega boss rush that lasts for about an hour. And even worse it’s sorted by easiest to hardest meaning you are more likely to die at the end where you’ve spent the most time. Dying in the rush means you have to start at the very beginning with the easy bosses again. I have no idea why there are no checkpoints anywhere in the final pantheon. It just becomes an absolute slog fighting the first 30 bosses over and over again because they aren’t that hard. It’s really only the last bosses that cause trouble. Even dumber is that the final boss in that rush can only be practiced in isolation after being fought one time meaning you have to waste 45 minutes of your time to even get good enough to fight them. At this stage, the aspects of the game that were fun are now gone because all it is is just practicing at getting better at execution. You aren’t experimenting anymore and you certainly don’t have a choice of exploring other parts of the map for better abilities as you are already at your peak at this point. It just becomes a waiting game for the boss AI to finally like you and give you the win. I think just attempting this final room added 60 hours to my playtime. Your reward for this suffering is an achievement and a new ending so unless you really want it, I wouldn’t recommend going for it.
Hollow Knight is a really great game. It’s clear that Team Cherry put their absolute heart and soul into making sure this game was perfect and they did not disappoint. Every aspect of this game is polished. The gameplay is absolutely fun and it's clear they had a vision to make exploration the driving factor of this game from the very beginning and it shows in every aspect of the game. My only gripes with the game are if you are trying to be a completionist and do everything, but even then if you are dedicated enough to complete the game, I’m sure you could look past these flaws. I would highly recommend this game as not only just a fun game, but also as a project many other game developers can look at to understand the basic tenets of making a game fun. Hollow Knight may seem like a small game from the outside, but it has a lot of heart and soul to offer the player and a lot of charm to back it up. We will meet again when Silksong finally comes out.
In almost everyone's lives there is a time where we are exposed to something so new we feel lost. It might be because we're going somewhere as exciting and large as the Grand Canyon, taking in every inch of its magnificent view from high above the ground or somewhere small yet crafted with such incredibly painstaking attention to detail that it's difficult not to admire it, like a museum. The world is full of new things to experience and when we humans are faced in a situation where we are to venture into the unknown our natural tendency for curiosity wants us to explore. We want to explore until every single turn, building, and other exciting thing is just etched into our memory. Even if we may find danger, there are very few things more thrilling to us humans than experiencing something new to distract us from our lives.
Hollow Knight takes this basic human instinct and turns it into a game. The foundation of Hollow Knight's story and gameplay is built on mystery and exploration and the game expertly and delicately crafts a world very unlike any you've ever seen. I can confidently say there are very few games that can offer an experience as charming, satisfying, and fun as the one presented in Hollow Knight. It's more than just a game, it's a thrilling journey through one of the most captivating universes ever put into a story.
When you start this game, you are introduced to The Knight; the main character of this story whose background and motivation is unknown. All we know is that he travels to a strange wasteland, equipped with nothing but a robe and a nail and starts from a cave. From the very first minutes of the game, the mystery has already begun. From here, how does the game help you solve the mystery? The answer is that it doesn't. At least not in any way traditional games do. There are no explicit objectives, there are no markers beyond the ones you set yourself, and there is not even an end goal to be achieved. You are, in the most literal sense, lost from the very beginning and it's up to you to find your way again.
This design choice perfectly reflects the philosophy that Hollow Knight sets out to prove works effectively. The only way to progress in this game is to explore. The game almost never tells you what you need to move forward, you have to figure it out for yourself by looking at things like your surroundings, interacting with characters you meet across the world, and learning to effectively traverse the map using the tools you've been given and the tools you find along the way as you explore. The game continues this practice all throughout its runtime.
Many modern games seem to assume the player is downright stupid or incompetent and feel the need to post tutorials at every second of the game or mark out explicitly in your face where you're supposed to go next to progress the game. The end result of this practice is that people become disassociated with the world the game is trying to build. "Who cares what this character is or what they're saying! I just need to move onto the next objective so I can be done with this game!" To me that is the very antithesis of a video game. Video games are meant to immerse people in them and to have developers build an entire world full of characters and locations only to have it completely ignored by the player feels downright disrespectful to the people who made the game.
Hollow Knight truly feels like what a video game is meant to be because of how heavy it leans on the player building their own path through the game. I would daresay that it's probably one of the most liberating games I have ever played because of how much freedom it gives the player while they play the game. Because there are no objectives or even a single order the game's map can be explored, the player is effectively forced to pay close attention to where they've been, what they've seen, and what they want to see next. In other words, it's a game purely driven by your own curiosity.
Of course, all this talk about exploration is meaningless if the world to be explored is boring. If every location in the game felt the same or did not have any substantial depth to them, this exploration would get boring very fast. Naturally then, Hollow Knight's locations have been carefully crafted such that there is variety in every single location.
When you start the game, things feel small; you start in a very boring town and there's only one way to progress; moving down into the depths of Hallownest. When you start, the game deceives you in this way by making you think that Hallownest is small and the only thing of note are the various caves full of Geo (in-game money) for you to get. However, Hollow Knight's map quickly becomes a hydra; explore one part of the map and then two new locations appear. After even a few hours of playing, you quickly realize that one small hole you found before has turned into over 10 different locations that are waiting for you to explore them. By the end of the game, the map becomes so massive that you start wondering how you even thought the game's map was so small to begin with.
While these locations are all a part of the same map, each one feels very distinct. Much like Minecraft biomes, the place you are exploring can change not only appearance, but tone is just a matter of seconds. One moment, you are in the calm, lively, open spaces of the City of Tears and the next you are in the dark, ominous, and crowded caves of Deepnest in your exploration. Each of these locations comes pact with their own set of enemies, music, and story that’s just waiting to be sought out through thorough investigation. Whether it’s talking to characters, searching through the remains of the deceased for a key item, or just plainly observing the scenery, every single location in Hollow Knight has some unique aspect it adds to the overall lore of the game.
It’s also worth calling out the interesting approach this game takes to developing its lore, story and mystery. There is almost never a point in the game where it’s just reciting some story to you or giving you some ten minute flashback about what happened in the past. It’s hidden in every aspect of the game. In fact, it is so hidden it’s possible to get through the entire game without really having any kind of understanding as to what is going on in the world.
There are some games out there that just drown the player in a completely unnecessary context that distracts from playing the game. While it’s nice when games have world building, there are times where I just want to play the game and not be given a 10 hour lecture on fictional science or politics. When a game has that kind of world building they want to give, they usually jam it away into optional side conversations that a player can activate if they want to learn or in what’s usually called a “journal” entry by some character you never get to meet. This is also, in my opinion, a very poor practice primarily because it’s incredibly boring and very inorganic. Many of these things feel like they were just given a second thought and exist to extend the game’s runtime/content for advertising.
In other games though, the developers do treat the world building with respect and at least put some effort into giving the backstory in a fun way. One of my personal favorites is how the backstory for Rosalina is explained in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s optional and short, the medium it is told through is Rosalina reading you a children’s book that goes over her experiences and how they formed her into who she is when you meet her in the game. It fits the theme of the game well and it’s just a nice piece of context that you aren’t required to know about if you want to just play the game. However, it’s not quite perfect because you actually need to stop playing the game in order to get that context. It’s almost as if in many games story and gameplay are treated as two distinct entities that need to be separately fleshed out in order to work.
Hollow Knight does away with this and interleaves the story with the gameplay. When I said that every aspect of the game has some lore behind it, I really do mean every aspect. Even things as insignificant as how the signs you look at for 5 seconds get rebuilt after you destroy them have lore behind it. Despite the lore being incredibly deep, the interesting thing is that it’s often not exposed to you through optional side conversations or the typical journal entry you find lying on the ground. It’s exposed to you as you play the game. And no, it’s not through cutscenes or character conversations that just halt the gameplay. The story is embedded in the gameplay. It’s in the look of enemies you encounter as you play. It’s in the architecture of the buildings that form each of the in-game locations. There is even a whole ability you can earn that allows you to learn lore by reading the thoughts of enemies while you fight them in combat. Everything is meticulously placed for a reason and the game challenges you to think about why things exist as you explore the game. Super dedicated Hollow Knight fans have investigated every single thing put into this game and even today, years after the game launched, they are still finding new things that deeply change how they look at the story and world of Hollow Knight.
The major benefit of this gameplay-first approach to storytelling is that much of the lore and story is effectively optional. Again, you do not need to invest yourself in the story to enjoy Hollow Knight and many people find a lot of fun out of just speedrunning the game. But if you do choose to invest in it, it’s not as boring as reading a bunch of dry text. It involves actually playing and improving at the game so you can unlock hidden things. In other words, the game rewards you for exploring and being curious by offering things that change your view of the world. There is a legitimately fun reason to want to understand more about Hollow Knight and dig into it. To me, that’s one of the primary things that makes Hollow Knight such a brilliant and captivating game. It’s a continuous cycle of the gameplay supporting the narrative and the narrative supporting the gameplay that is just almost never done in many games today and it’s hard to put the game down without getting an itching feeling that you missed something important.
World building and story, while critical to exploration, they are just half of the whole. The gameplay of Hollow Knight is the other half that completes the game. In Hollow Knight, the gameplay mostly involves two things; platforming and fighting enemies.
On the platforming side of things, this often involves traversing new areas on your quest to find key items and progress. At the start, the controls you are given for platforming are rather simple; you can walk, jump, and hit things with your weapon, a nail. Naturally, as you might expect, where you can go with just these three abilities is rather limited. However, once you play the game more and explore new areas, you encounter bosses that give you brand new abilities that help you reach not only more places, but also help you backtrack very quickly through places where you’ve already been. You can earn abilities such as a very quick forward dash, a double jump, and even a hook that helps you climb walls. Getting these abilities after exploring for a bit is such a satisfying experience. Almost immediately it’s easy to see how these abilities would help you get to places you’ve never been to before and exploring these new areas is just like getting a gift for Christmas; you don’t usually know what you’re going to get, but it’s probably something good.
Despite the numerous abilities you get throughout the game, it never feels overwhelming and it also does not feel like any of these abilities are put in randomly. In most situations you use about 4 of these abilities (the exact abilities depend on what you’re doing) and they are very easy to master even after just a few minutes of using them. It’s a common trap for games to introduce very “one-off” abilities that feel like they were made with the sole intention of getting through one specific part of the game and then are never intended to be used again. In Hollow Knight, even things that were introduced to you within the first hours of the game will be used again up until your last hours of playing the game and it seems Team Cherry had the discipline to make sure they were adding in only abilities that could be used more than a couple times throughout the game. The result is that the set of abilities to help you platform is rather small, yet large enough that you actually have to think about how your abilities can be used in unique combos together to help you reach new areas in the map. Sometimes you need to climb up a wall then do a double jump dash to get to where you need to go. Other times, you need to carefully dash then do a double jump to avoid an obstacle or enemy. Again, the abilities are easy to master and by the end of the game you feel like a real speedrunning pro with how you use these abilities in tandem to traverse the map.
Next is the enemies. As I’ve mentioned before, every area in the game has a unique set of enemies. While there are hundreds of different enemies in this game each with their own unique quirks, the important ones are the big bosses that you encounter along the way. These bosses are usually what give you access to new abilities such as increased health, damage, or perks (called charms in the game) as well as access to new areas in the game. What’s interesting about these bosses is how you can feel your progression through the game as you fight them. If you are playing the game normally, you will typically encounter each boss once, yet each boss, in addition to the abilities they offer, give you some additional knowledge that helps bosses later on. Knowledge in this game comes in two categories; “factual” and “intuitive” knowledge.
As every boss in the game has a very small set of attacks and phases to them, there is at least one strategy that works very effectively for each boss in the game. Strategy is either using your abilities in the game to effectively dodge and attack the boss or coming up with an optimal charm build that works against the boss. I would call this knowledge “factual” as you get to experiment with combos against bosses that can be leveraged against other bosses as well as interesting quirks about the gameplay system that can make your life easier for some other bosses. In other words, these are factual tips that can help out later. For example, one interesting thing that people might not know when starting out is that you can attack spikes while jumping to get another bounce off of them. This is useful for quite a few bosses that require a good amount of dexterity to fight effectively.
The other form of knowledge is what I’ll coin “intuitive” as there’s really no numbers or factual thing about the gameplay that you’re learning, but just general things that can be applied to bosses later on. Things like how to get better at dodging attacks, how to be more confident and precise with your nail strikes, and how to effectively leverage spells to take out bosses quickly fall into this category. As you play the game more, you become more comfortable with its combat systems and learn how to effectively make use of them based on your style of play. If you are more of a pro at platforming, you can equip charms that will help you move around faster and more precisely which makes it easier to dodge attacks. If you’re more of the brawler type, there are charms and abilities that help you tank attacks while also dealing a lot more damage.
You might notice I am going deep into the combat system of Hollow Knight to explain the last few points. That’s because I am trying to illustrate that the gameplay itself is another form of the brilliant exploration the game utilizes. Beyond finding new areas, the game encourages you to experiment with enemies and abilities to match your style of play and to improve overall. I think that’s another key to why the exploration in this game works effectively. This game is not simply walking and exploring. Your progress is impeded constantly by huge and hard bosses looking to be an obstacle. At these points you are faced with a choice; you can try and fight the boss and experiment until you’ve mastered them or you can turn back and look for new abilities that will help you fight the boss. While there is often no correct choice, what you choose has major implications on what your experience will be in the game. Some players may choose to challenge themselves and take on bosses without having too many abilities under their belt. They will die a lot early on, but quickly ramp up on “intuitive” knowledge as they will not be relying heavily on abilities to take out bosses. This is critical for fighting very skill heavy bosses that appear near the end. On the other hand, you can also prioritize exploration and finding items which helps with getting through the easy bosses early, but makes things a bit of a struggle when fighting hard bosses at the end. This is what most people would call the “risk” aspect of the game and in this sense, the fun of the game is coming up with strategies to mitigate it. When should I fight this boss? Should I explore this area now or save it for later after I fight X? And certainly your choices are not the end all be all. If you fight a boss a few times and find it to be too hard, there is no shame in trying out some other area in the hopes it will reward you with something that will help you. Hollow Knight’s death system encourages you to take risks and face only minor penalties when they don’t pan out as you expect. When you die a little shadow is at the spot you died and you lose your money as well as a bit of your capacity to hold soul (the thing that powers your attack spells). To regain this, you just need to go back and kill the shadow. Once done, you’re back to exactly as you were before and nothing was lost except a bit of time. So it’s certainly very easy to experiment with bosses and have fun with learning their attack patterns as well as what works and what doesn’t.
So overall, the key to Hollow Knight’s fun is in its exploration. How you choose to explore the map. How you choose to fight bosses, And how you choose to solve the mystery the game has laid out in front of you. All of these things work together to give a unique take on risk versus reward that is unlike one I’ve seen in a game. There’s plenty of fun to be had in Hollow Knight even after the credits roll and after spending over 82 hours in the game myself, I can say that the base game has very little to be upset about, especially for the very low price tag it has on it today.
Now that I’ve talked about what works, let’s also spend a bit of time talking about what doesn’t work too well.
While this approach of letting the players explore the game completely works at the start while there are things to explore, it becomes a bit of a burden near the end. As I’ve mentioned before, the map is very huge once you’ve explored a good amount of it. At some points you run into walls that you cannot pass simply because you don’t have the right ability for it. Unless you were keeping track of all of these with markers, it’s extraordinarily hard to remember where you’ve gotten stuck before. Sometimes you can see it because the in-game map is cut off at the point where you were stuck, but other times it’s difficult to pinpoint every location on the map that’s cutoff. Sometimes these incredibly small entrances can be holding very key things to getting completion in the game, so it was rather annoying finding these places again without a guide.
There are also some things that are not even shown on the map or hinted at at all that are key to progressing the game. For instance, the last two DLCs in the game are accessed by breaking a couple of hidden walls in different areas. These walls are not shown on the map, there are no abilities to help you find it, and there are absolutely 0 interactions or objects in the game that allude to the location of the DLC. You just somehow have to have the eyesight to notice the wall is breakable when you pass it which is really annoying. At some point I just gave up and looked up a guide on where they were. I wish for things like this there was some indication as to where you needed to go to access it, but maybe I missed it. This really only becomes a problem when you are trying to complete the game though. I was able to pass the game without 100% completion without a guide just fine.
Lastly, there is the Godmaster DLC. This is the last DLC of the game and it essentially adds boss rush modes to the game. These boss rushes have you face bosses you have fought throughout the game previously as well as new bosses created just for the DLC. While I like the concept from the surface, its execution isn’t that great and it really goes in opposition to the points I made before. The exploration in this mode comes from the new bosses; the old bosses are sometimes slightly modified (e.g. for one of the bosses they removed the floor and made it so there are only floating platforms available to stand on). While that’s fine and dandy, to get to these bosses you have to go through bosses you’ve seen before. As I’ve mentioned before, these bosses are pretty hard. Some of them are fairly easy once you’re at this stage of the game and have pretty much every ability and upgrade in the game, but some bosses are a challenge even at this point. You have to be extraordinarily good at these bosses to beat the rushes (also called pantheons) and often that requires hours upon hours of practice. It’s very easy to get discouraged as a result.
The final pantheon is probably the worst of them all because in addition to adding new bosses, it takes pretty much every boss in the game and jams them all into a super mega boss rush that lasts for about an hour. And even worse it’s sorted by easiest to hardest meaning you are more likely to die at the end where you’ve spent the most time. Dying in the rush means you have to start at the very beginning with the easy bosses again. I have no idea why there are no checkpoints anywhere in the final pantheon. It just becomes an absolute slog fighting the first 30 bosses over and over again because they aren’t that hard. It’s really only the last bosses that cause trouble. Even dumber is that the final boss in that rush can only be practiced in isolation after being fought one time meaning you have to waste 45 minutes of your time to even get good enough to fight them. At this stage, the aspects of the game that were fun are now gone because all it is is just practicing at getting better at execution. You aren’t experimenting anymore and you certainly don’t have a choice of exploring other parts of the map for better abilities as you are already at your peak at this point. It just becomes a waiting game for the boss AI to finally like you and give you the win. I think just attempting this final room added 60 hours to my playtime. Your reward for this suffering is an achievement and a new ending so unless you really want it, I wouldn’t recommend going for it.
Hollow Knight is a really great game. It’s clear that Team Cherry put their absolute heart and soul into making sure this game was perfect and they did not disappoint. Every aspect of this game is polished. The gameplay is absolutely fun and it's clear they had a vision to make exploration the driving factor of this game from the very beginning and it shows in every aspect of the game. My only gripes with the game are if you are trying to be a completionist and do everything, but even then if you are dedicated enough to complete the game, I’m sure you could look past these flaws. I would highly recommend this game as not only just a fun game, but also as a project many other game developers can look at to understand the basic tenets of making a game fun. Hollow Knight may seem like a small game from the outside, but it has a lot of heart and soul to offer the player and a lot of charm to back it up. We will meet again when Silksong finally comes out.