"Because it's there." - British climber George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest (also me, when my wife asks me why I want to finish the burger and all the fries when I'm no longer hungry)

It's no Everest, but the world of Hallownest is huge, intimidating, and wondrous; in a game where the 'plot breadcrumbs' style of storytelling means a general lack of narrative thrust, the mere existence of Hallownest is reason enough to want to explore it. Hollow Knight is sensationally good at worldbuilding through level design, and even through the so-called "slow start" I found myself wanting to get down and dirty exploring every nook of the game world; it helps that a huge portion of the world is almost immediately accessible without extra movement abilities, meaning that my journey of discovering Hallownest for the first time felt unique by virtue of how Hollow Knight seems more open-ended than other Metroidvanias.

Better writers than me have discussed the mechanics in much depth, but I do have to mention them anyway. Combat and movement is tight, consistent, and refined - this is evident in the sheer depth that your relatively small moveset brings to the boss fights, but also in how each new movement option adds more fluency and expressivity in how you traverse each area, bringing a joy to exploration that even the game's slight over-reliance on 'gotcha' hits cannot extinguish.

The 3.5 score at the top of this entry is probably a spoiler that there is a pretty big caveat to my praise above, and that comes in the form of something seemingly inconsequential to anyone who hasn't played the game: the benches (reload points) are on many occasions placed so far from bosses that it feels borderline spiteful. My issue here isn't that the game is hard; I think the difficulty level of the bosses is perfect and it really makes you earn your victories! But punishing failure with 5 minutes of backtracking so you can try again, only to get your ass kicked in 30 seconds, only to repeat the process ad nauseam, is a really frustrating way to git gud. It doesn't help that a fair few of the pre-boss 'gauntlets' are rather unengaging (the tunnel mazes before facing Nosk, or waiting for the series of elevators leading up to the Soul Warrior + Follies).

And much like the affliction that has spread to even the furthest reaches of Hallownest, this 'little' issue of bench placement has infected many other aspects of the game. The bosses are one of the big highlights of Hollow Knight but the bench placement makes the process of learning how to beat them more frustrating than it needs to be. And even the exploration is not spared - backtracking from bench to boss reduces the wonder of charting a living breathing world to a perfunctory and linear commute through a series of rooms I've seen dozens of times before, its effect on my play experience not unlike a long unskippable cutscene in the way it kills my momentum.

It would be easy for me to sum up my experience as thus: Hollow Knight is an otherwise-nearly-perfect game which was tarnished by one small flaw. And yet it's not that simple either! After completing the game and watching the end credits, I found myself experiencing not relief (as I usually do on finishing long games I'm ambivalent on) but profound melancholy. I watched excerpts of speedruns. I watched some videos on the the lore. I reloaded my save and tried some of the challenges that I previously decided were not worth my time cough White Palace cough. Tried and failed, but still. It's hard for me to leave it behind and move onto the next game - there's something alluring about the ruined world of Hallownest and I feel it will occupy my mind for some time.

Because it's there.

(101% completion, standard ending)