Generally I don't do informal reviews talking about my experience with a piece of media because that's really just quite boring--but, for once, after finishing this game, I feel this sense of giddy optimism that's completely unrivaled by most gaming experiences I've had recently.
I first heard about Hollow Knight back in 2017 on the cusp of its release. It was the hot new indie kid on the block, covered with a fresh coat of paint, a delightful soundtrack, and a promising reputation that was boosted by its infamous difficulty. I ended up giving it a shot in 2018. The first time I played, I got about 90 minutes in and gave up once I got to Greenpath. The lack of mobility was frustrating and the combat felt stiff and unfulfilling. I ended up giving it another go a few months later and fought through the sluggishness of the opening two hours, eventually getting the dash and the wall jump.
People frequently talk about the non-linearity of Hollow Knight but I must really stress here that the game practically explodes once you get the dash and the wall jump. With just those two abilities, you can go to practically any area in the game with a few exceptions. This was really overwhelming to me both as someone who didn't have much experience with metroidvanias outside of a mediocre stint with Ori and the Blind Forest the year prior and preferred more linearly-focused or guided experiences. I found myself frequently looking for guides to tell me where to go. I got my ass kicked left, right, upside-down and sideways by nearly every boss in the game. I'd routinely spend half an hour or an hour on difficult bosses. Soul Master? Watcher Knights? As far as I was concerned, those fuckers might as well have murdered my parents. I hated them so much.
Eventually I got to the Traitor Lord in Queens Gardens (which is significantly late game, and, on both playthroughs, was one of the last bosses I beated). I gave him a few goes. He killed me a lot. I gave him a few more goes. He kept killing me. I stared at my computer screen and was overcome with this sense of exhaustion and languish. I realized that, for the last several hours of the game, I had not been enjoying it remotely, and that the difficulty was just too much. I stopped playing it, right before the finish line.
Even after my fresh new playthrough I still have a few problems with Hollow Knight. The vast openness of the game can lead to some confusion regarding where to go if you're not already somewhat familiar with the map. Because areas tie into each other in multiple ways too, it's easy to find yourself stumbling into a late-game area early on and questioning if you're going the right way. This can also cause you to encounter extraordinarily difficult bosses very early on and extraordinarily easy bosses very late on, which causes a bizarre difficulty curve that can make the boss fights glom poorly. The shade system can also be extremely frustrating until you learn that geo is practically useless past a few upgrades and purchases. If somebody told me that they didn't like Hollow Knight, I would completely understand. The culture around the game is frustrating--like most other hot delicious indie games, it's elevated to this pantheonic level that can make enjoying the game frustrating if you aren't absolutely loving it. The amount of backtracking can get pretty overwhelming, and the huge size of the map can become a roadblock to discovery and advancement. Most metroidvanias clock in at under ten hours for a reason. Your first playthrough of Hollow Knight will probably take somewhere between 15 and 25 hours depending on how good you are and how much exploration you're doing. That's a long game! Even while enjoying the game I could feel the pacing start to lag as I got near the end which is why I didn't (and likely won't) bother with 100% completion.
Flashing forward, after a few inane conversations of the game with friends and several hours of letting some LPs of it run in the background while working on homework, I felt subliminally-charged to give the game another shot. After triumphing over all 24 levels of Celeste, I felt that HK was the obvious follow-up for a challenging revisit. I was hoping to like it a bit more and I suspected I might. I could not have expected what would actually come of the playthrough.
Immediately out of the gate I was kicking the game's ass. I beat almost every boss on the first try and had gone through half a dozen areas in the first four or five hours. My first (and one of the only) real challenges was found in Deepnest, facing off against Galien and Nosk, but I eventually prevailed thanks to some well-earned upgrades. Even bosses that had previous troubled and irritated me--like Soul Master--went down in a single attempt. I had, to phrase it crudely, "gotten gud."
Whenever difficulty is brought up in gaming, people frequently attempt to justify punishing difficulty by referencing the feeling of accomplishment experienced after completing a ruthless challenge. I generally don't agree with this philosophy--if a challenge is too punishing (and here, punishing specifically means unfair, largely in regards to loss of progress, repetition, and randomness) players tend to drop off with interest. On my first playthrough, I thought that HK was an impenetrable and unfair crock of horseshit that was intent on making its players as miserable as possible. It's certainly challenging and I won't diminish it of that, but I found my experience on a replaythrough to be frankly breezy. Combat is purposefully simple, with the pared-back melee system allowing for flexible yet easily comprehensible combat situations. There are certainly more than a few bosses whose existence feels unmerited at times or whose movesets are uninteresting (like, why is Flukemarm in this game?) but for each of those you get an extravagant and fantastic boss like the Mantis Lords, the Watcher Knights, or the Dung Defender.
It's taken an awful lot of rambling for me to get to the real point here--your enjoyment with Hollow Knight is going to be directly proportionate to how good you are at the game. If you're bad early on then you will likely be bad for the rest of the game unless you really put in the work to be better. It's unforgiving at times but it's never unfair. There are, at times, some filler and padding, but there is remarkably little fat for a game of this length. Even the exploration feels streamlined--the game naturally guides you towards places of interest and I never felt like I had to actively search for some next place to go. You get lost, but only in the way that you just keep on going one direction to keep getting to interesting places.
It really makes me sad that the most frequently-discussed talking points of this game are the size of the development team and the impressiveness of the content vs game price. Both are certainly awing but it results in a very boring quantity vs quality culture surrounding the game. I rarely hear people talk about how diverse the combat can be despite such a simple setup, or how each area feels geometrically designed in such a distinct way when compared to each other. Almost everything in this game is optional and to me that's just absolutely crazy. You can have ten people play through this game and they'd all do it in different ways. With the exception of a few tricks, you can't even really sequence break the game either, since that would imply a sequence even existing in the first place. It's a miracle that a game this intricate manages to hold up so structurally well without falling apart. The discovery of shortcuts from areas to areas is so gratifying. It's truly magical to spend an hour or two wandering through new environments just to find yourself discovering some secret path back to an early-game area.
I could rave all day about so many of the systems this game does well--the way the maps work, the way that collectibles are discovered naturally rather than through deliberate hunting, the simplicity of each area that leads to complex situations--but so much of that has already been retreaded over.
In all honesty, I never thought I'd like a game like Hollow Knight after playing it the first time. I'm no stranger to difficult games--I love roguelikes a lot and the only thing that's prevented me from clocking in hundreds upon hundreds of hours into some of my favorites is just the lack of time in my life. I love ridiculously difficult albeit fair platformers too like Celeste and VVVVVV. When the skill floor is low, and the ceiling is high, you truly get a magnificent experience. After playing through DS3 and Bloodborne in co-op and suffering through HK singleplayer, I felt like my interest in such games was just a complete lost cause. This game has given me hope that maybe I do enjoy these kinds of games. I can't wait to play more in the future, and I'm eager to check out Silksong. Team Cherry has deservedly won over a massive amount of goodwill and they've crafted something that's truly, truly special.
I first heard about Hollow Knight back in 2017 on the cusp of its release. It was the hot new indie kid on the block, covered with a fresh coat of paint, a delightful soundtrack, and a promising reputation that was boosted by its infamous difficulty. I ended up giving it a shot in 2018. The first time I played, I got about 90 minutes in and gave up once I got to Greenpath. The lack of mobility was frustrating and the combat felt stiff and unfulfilling. I ended up giving it another go a few months later and fought through the sluggishness of the opening two hours, eventually getting the dash and the wall jump.
People frequently talk about the non-linearity of Hollow Knight but I must really stress here that the game practically explodes once you get the dash and the wall jump. With just those two abilities, you can go to practically any area in the game with a few exceptions. This was really overwhelming to me both as someone who didn't have much experience with metroidvanias outside of a mediocre stint with Ori and the Blind Forest the year prior and preferred more linearly-focused or guided experiences. I found myself frequently looking for guides to tell me where to go. I got my ass kicked left, right, upside-down and sideways by nearly every boss in the game. I'd routinely spend half an hour or an hour on difficult bosses. Soul Master? Watcher Knights? As far as I was concerned, those fuckers might as well have murdered my parents. I hated them so much.
Eventually I got to the Traitor Lord in Queens Gardens (which is significantly late game, and, on both playthroughs, was one of the last bosses I beated). I gave him a few goes. He killed me a lot. I gave him a few more goes. He kept killing me. I stared at my computer screen and was overcome with this sense of exhaustion and languish. I realized that, for the last several hours of the game, I had not been enjoying it remotely, and that the difficulty was just too much. I stopped playing it, right before the finish line.
Even after my fresh new playthrough I still have a few problems with Hollow Knight. The vast openness of the game can lead to some confusion regarding where to go if you're not already somewhat familiar with the map. Because areas tie into each other in multiple ways too, it's easy to find yourself stumbling into a late-game area early on and questioning if you're going the right way. This can also cause you to encounter extraordinarily difficult bosses very early on and extraordinarily easy bosses very late on, which causes a bizarre difficulty curve that can make the boss fights glom poorly. The shade system can also be extremely frustrating until you learn that geo is practically useless past a few upgrades and purchases. If somebody told me that they didn't like Hollow Knight, I would completely understand. The culture around the game is frustrating--like most other hot delicious indie games, it's elevated to this pantheonic level that can make enjoying the game frustrating if you aren't absolutely loving it. The amount of backtracking can get pretty overwhelming, and the huge size of the map can become a roadblock to discovery and advancement. Most metroidvanias clock in at under ten hours for a reason. Your first playthrough of Hollow Knight will probably take somewhere between 15 and 25 hours depending on how good you are and how much exploration you're doing. That's a long game! Even while enjoying the game I could feel the pacing start to lag as I got near the end which is why I didn't (and likely won't) bother with 100% completion.
Flashing forward, after a few inane conversations of the game with friends and several hours of letting some LPs of it run in the background while working on homework, I felt subliminally-charged to give the game another shot. After triumphing over all 24 levels of Celeste, I felt that HK was the obvious follow-up for a challenging revisit. I was hoping to like it a bit more and I suspected I might. I could not have expected what would actually come of the playthrough.
Immediately out of the gate I was kicking the game's ass. I beat almost every boss on the first try and had gone through half a dozen areas in the first four or five hours. My first (and one of the only) real challenges was found in Deepnest, facing off against Galien and Nosk, but I eventually prevailed thanks to some well-earned upgrades. Even bosses that had previous troubled and irritated me--like Soul Master--went down in a single attempt. I had, to phrase it crudely, "gotten gud."
Whenever difficulty is brought up in gaming, people frequently attempt to justify punishing difficulty by referencing the feeling of accomplishment experienced after completing a ruthless challenge. I generally don't agree with this philosophy--if a challenge is too punishing (and here, punishing specifically means unfair, largely in regards to loss of progress, repetition, and randomness) players tend to drop off with interest. On my first playthrough, I thought that HK was an impenetrable and unfair crock of horseshit that was intent on making its players as miserable as possible. It's certainly challenging and I won't diminish it of that, but I found my experience on a replaythrough to be frankly breezy. Combat is purposefully simple, with the pared-back melee system allowing for flexible yet easily comprehensible combat situations. There are certainly more than a few bosses whose existence feels unmerited at times or whose movesets are uninteresting (like, why is Flukemarm in this game?) but for each of those you get an extravagant and fantastic boss like the Mantis Lords, the Watcher Knights, or the Dung Defender.
It's taken an awful lot of rambling for me to get to the real point here--your enjoyment with Hollow Knight is going to be directly proportionate to how good you are at the game. If you're bad early on then you will likely be bad for the rest of the game unless you really put in the work to be better. It's unforgiving at times but it's never unfair. There are, at times, some filler and padding, but there is remarkably little fat for a game of this length. Even the exploration feels streamlined--the game naturally guides you towards places of interest and I never felt like I had to actively search for some next place to go. You get lost, but only in the way that you just keep on going one direction to keep getting to interesting places.
It really makes me sad that the most frequently-discussed talking points of this game are the size of the development team and the impressiveness of the content vs game price. Both are certainly awing but it results in a very boring quantity vs quality culture surrounding the game. I rarely hear people talk about how diverse the combat can be despite such a simple setup, or how each area feels geometrically designed in such a distinct way when compared to each other. Almost everything in this game is optional and to me that's just absolutely crazy. You can have ten people play through this game and they'd all do it in different ways. With the exception of a few tricks, you can't even really sequence break the game either, since that would imply a sequence even existing in the first place. It's a miracle that a game this intricate manages to hold up so structurally well without falling apart. The discovery of shortcuts from areas to areas is so gratifying. It's truly magical to spend an hour or two wandering through new environments just to find yourself discovering some secret path back to an early-game area.
I could rave all day about so many of the systems this game does well--the way the maps work, the way that collectibles are discovered naturally rather than through deliberate hunting, the simplicity of each area that leads to complex situations--but so much of that has already been retreaded over.
In all honesty, I never thought I'd like a game like Hollow Knight after playing it the first time. I'm no stranger to difficult games--I love roguelikes a lot and the only thing that's prevented me from clocking in hundreds upon hundreds of hours into some of my favorites is just the lack of time in my life. I love ridiculously difficult albeit fair platformers too like Celeste and VVVVVV. When the skill floor is low, and the ceiling is high, you truly get a magnificent experience. After playing through DS3 and Bloodborne in co-op and suffering through HK singleplayer, I felt like my interest in such games was just a complete lost cause. This game has given me hope that maybe I do enjoy these kinds of games. I can't wait to play more in the future, and I'm eager to check out Silksong. Team Cherry has deservedly won over a massive amount of goodwill and they've crafted something that's truly, truly special.