Quite the game. Honestly it's been so long since I last played the parts of the game that aren't tied to the pantheons, boss rushes, etc that I kind of forgot some of the opinions I used to have on those things. But no matter, I will still try to talk about some of the things I enjoyed and disliked in this game.
For starters, I'm honestly impressed by how gorgeous this game looks, it's only about 5,3 Gigabytes yet it looks so good. This is also helped by presentation of this game, the amazing backgrounds and the gothic aesthetic really give this game a solid identity that is quite unique to it.
Now for the map design, It's quite good, there are a lot of areas to explore, each having their own fun gimmick and creatures, so you get to have a lot of fun exploring all the stuff there is in the game. If I recall correctly there are about 161 creatures in the entire game, which is quite a lot, I wish some of them weren't just fillers like the guy who fixes the sign at the beginning of the game that only appears with rng.
The powerleveling of the character is quite entertaining to witness too, going from only being to walk and use the nail to dashing, double jumping and getting to use many spells really gives you the feeling that you're progressing through the game and getting stronger, which helps with the game's pacing since it is quite long.
One thing I do wanna bring up is that I wish you could see the charms, masks, nail irons you missed in each area of the game after getting your first ending to make it less of a hassle to keep track of what you didn't collect in a certain area. It's not too big of a deal just something I'd have wanted.
Now the most important gameplay aspect of hollow knight in my opinion, the bosses. There are justso many of them, so many fun boss fights to experience. Some are godly like Pure Vessel, some are boring like winged Nosk, some are stressful like Markoth, some are just rng hell like one of them... Most of them have a distinct identity and backstory which makes them quite memorable except for a few ones which are just the same bosses but stronger. Still, there are enough bosses for it to not be too big of an issue. One thing I didn't particularly appreciate about the last section of the game that's filled with boss rushes and stuff is the amount of added difficulty the game slaps in. Like for example the arena change for Markoth just makes the guy a pain to go through every single time. There is also the bindings... I wasted so much time trying to get these all binding challenges down, it was nearly completely fruitless because the odds are so stacked against you it's not even funny. On all bindings, you have 4 hearts, a nail that does 13 damage, no charms and you can only save one spell. This is so ridiculous especially in Pantheon of Hallownest where you have to fight 42 bosses, some of them have 1600 hp. It just takes forever and it's so stupidly hard, like the challenge doesn't feel designed around these settings at all, you need an ungodly amount of practice in every single boss fight to even stand a chance and I just find it silly. Hopefully in silksong, if it has a challenge similar to Pantheon of Hallownest, the bindings will be more generous towards the player or at least make the bosses more tolerable to fight even with all the nerfs to your abilities. I needed to rant about this aspect of the game because it frustrated me so much.
Anyway, overall an amazing experience which nearly took a year of my life to complete, but it was all worth it in the end for me.