Hollow Knight - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

In spite of its gloomy demeanor, Hollow Knight is a blindingly brilliant game. Name any aspect—music, visuals, gameplay, ambiance, boss fights—and Hollow Knight not only delivers on that front but does so with an enviable finesse. It's a carefully crafted experience that's breathtakingly massive, lasting longer than most Metroidvanias without ever slowing down or losing its grip on your curiosity. In spite of its monstrous size, Hollow Knight develops slowly, maturing from an exploration-focused platformer into a behemoth of buttery-smooth combat. What I appreciate most however, is that it rarely holds your hand—instead, it shoves you off of a steep cliff, hurtling into the dark unknown.

At first, it can be hard to acknowledge what makes Hollow Knight so damn special. Its intro is dusty and modest, calmly welcoming you to its kingdom and preventing you from getting lost or diving too deep. Within the first few hours you might feel that the color palette is lacking, that enemies are devoid of flavor, and that your moveset is disappointingly simple. Even after your first few bosses, you may remain vaguely unimpressed, skeptical how this little bug of a game could even challenge the gods of the metroidvania genre.

But gradually as you plumb its depths, Hollow Knight will start to click. You'll emerge onto the rain-soaked streets of the City of Tears, amazed at the game's quiet melancholy. You'll delve into the unnerving Deepnest, aghast at the size of the maze before you. And once you fell the Broken Vessel (or best the first arena challenge), you'll begin to understand how truly invigorating the combat feels. Time and time again, Hollow Knight will surprise you in miniscule ways, frequently eliciting an unexpected "wow that's cool!" or gasp of "oh I see!" Whereas some games suffer a death by one thousand cuts, Hollow Knight epitomizes the inverse, soaring high off one thousand plaudits.

Of these accolades, one of the most refreshing is how the game handles customization. Along with your standard energy & hp upgrades, you can uncover charms hidden throughout the Hollownest—ability-changing modifiers that range from minimal to revolutionary. You can only have a handful equipped however, with impactful charms taking up more space than simpler ones. At first this system appears unremarkable (one of the first charms you get is just a compass) but by the end you'll have a wealth of options. Should you make a magic build? Focus on melee? Defense? Minion spam? What about a glass cannon that can't heal? Charms allow for a variety of playstyles, and my favorite thing is that you'll always wish you had space for just one more.

Likewise, I adore the mapping system, although I understand the criticism against it. Hollow Knight treats mapping as a privilege, not a right—in order to receive even a bare-bones outline of the zone you're in, you have to sniff out the hiding spot of a particular vendor. While he's never too far off the beaten path, this adds to Hollow Knight's labyrinthine nature; you're better off memorizing room layouts as well as optimal routes, even with the map secured in your back pocket. I can see how this can be frustrating to the less-directionally inclined, but I absolutely adored etching this world onto my brain. Most of the rooms have at least one aspect that helps make them memorable (enemy, background, tricky section) and the pin system wisely reminds you which spots to return to in the future.

Capturing the magic of the world map best, in my opinion, is a late-game side mission where you have to run from one end of the Hollownest to the other—without taking damage. What's great is that the path isn't immediately obvious; there are several dozen rooms between you and your objective, and only by recalling what's in them can you plot the safest route. Should you risk fighting tougher foes for a shorter journey? Is the northern section of Queen's Gardens safer than the southern section? Are there any charms that can help you? It's an arduous journey that will reveal how much you know about the game's world, and it's one (among a myriad) of reasons why I enjoyed my playthrough so much.

Combat is another one of Hollow Knight's strong suits, and it's the aspect that evolves the most over the course of your journey. Like with the exploration, it's nothing remarkable at the start—all you're really doing is smacking foes with a single blade strike. But by end you'll feel like a subterranean samurai, dispatching foes with an awesome speed and grace. Seamlessly, you'll learn to blend spellcasting with charged techniques, figuring out how to dash in as well as dancing atop an enemy's head. Yet Hollow Knight's staggering bestiary will keep you humble—especially when it comes to the bosses. Anyone that has faced NKG and lived to tell the tale knows that this game has some of the hardest, frantic, white-knuckled boss battles the metroidvania genre has ever seen. Even though there's a few stinkers, the majority of them provide a delectable dance you'll be yearning to savor again.

Lastly, a cool ability unique to Hollow Knight is the Dream Nail: an ethereal blade that can peer into the mind of creatures both living and dead. Gameplay-wise it does very little—it physically lets you access a couple more boss fights and new areas—but it deepens the already-rich atmosphere of the world, enticing you to Dream Nail enemies and bosses just to see what they're thinking. Plus later on, it gets the ability to create custom checkpoints, which is a skill so useful that it practically feels essential for every large-scale metroidvania going forward.

For all of Hollow Knight's many, many achievements (I didn't even touch on how utterly majestic and passionate the soundtrack is) perhaps the biggest knock against it's clearly a child of the Souls school. There are plenty of parallels you can draw between the two: healing that leaves you vulnerable, corpse runs, a dying civilization, light vs dark, the final battle with a tragic figure, etc. Likewise, the Knight's agile abilities are reminiscent of Super Metroid, with Mantis Claw echoing Samus's infinite wall jump and the Crystal Heart working as a horizontal-only shinespark. Of course, Dark Souls and Metroid don't have a perpetual patent on these systems; I'm merely pointing out that Hollow Knight owes much to its spiritual forebearers.

If that sounds like a weak criticism to you—honestly, that's because it is. Hollow Knight brings enough personality and new concepts to the table that I think it's pretty easy to overlook its soulsian tropes. The detailed setting alone keeps the game from feeling like an uninspired knock-off; I can firmly remember more about the Hollownest than Metroid Dread's ZDR. Hollow Knight also features an extensive and lore-filled postgame centered around increasingly-difficult boss gauntlets, which I'm frankly not sure I'll ever beat (besting NKG was enough excitement for me.) Still, it's cool to see how Team Cherry has supported the title post-launch, and that they're as passionate about the game as its most ardent fans are.

I don't believe any piece of media is "perfect", but Hollow Knight is one of the blessed few to come shockingly close. It's an experience that you can't help but think back to, ruminating on all the cool things about it and the different ways it surprised you. You'll discover bizarre secrets, witness character deaths, rescue a maiden, get robbed, uncover a zone below the lowest point on the map, and much more; Hollow Knight is teeming with events humbly waiting to be stumbled upon. It's an experience that's centered around discovery, offering a seemingly dead world you'll realize is burdened by loss, regret, and broken dreams. Throw in a solid amount of customization and some of the fiercest boss battles ever made, and it's hard not to overstate the appeal of the game. Ultimately however, how much you end up getting out of Hollow Knight depends on how deeply you want to dig—and the greater the effort, the greater the spoils.