- Nov 16, 2006
- 6,812
- 7,168
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So I've just spent a couple hours every day over the last month playing through Hollow Knight. As a guy with a full time job, a family, bills to pay, and chores to do, this is really a somewhat remarkable feat. I've been playing video games for the last 30 years, and with that level of exposure it takes a lot for a game to transcend just basic casual enjoyment and become something like an obsession, the way a really good game might have when I was a kid playing on my NES.
Remember than scene in Ratatouille where the jaded critic guy takes a bite of a simple meal his mother would make him when he skinned his knee, and it took him straight back to his childhood when life was simpler and everything was gonna be ok? That was basically Hollow Knight in a nutshell, for me.
The game takes the Metroidvania genre, an already classic, clean game design methodology and executes it to near perfection while drawing on some of the Souls-like game design philosophies (not surprising, given Souls-likes and Metroidvanias are sort of cousins of each other) to elevate the genre.
From the Souls-like the major standout addition to the game is the varied timing related bosses as well as the "Shade retrieval" mechanic.
Shade retrieval is if you die in the world you respawn at the last bench you sat on and have to go kill the shade your death left behind to recover any money you had accumulated up to that point. Its fairly straight forward and a nice way to add some stakes to your own survival while not punishing you in the form of losing XP or any serious progress that cannot be quickly regained. Benches where you respawn are intelligently located, typically never more than a couple minutes away from a boss (where you will be leaving the most shades to recover) and the trip back to the boss fight actually serves a purpose in refilling your "Soul" which is essentially a mana pool used for casting spells or healing yourself that is replenished by striking enemies.
The real star of the show are the bosses. They are plentiful, they are varied, and they are most importantly extremely challenging but very very fair. Each of the bosses involves a solid mastery of The Knight's various powers, pattern recognition, tight timing, and generally involves some amount of repetition to beat. Like a Souls game, Hollow Knight punishes mistakes. There are 0 cheap shots, and in theory each and every boss in the game could be beaten with the starting kit and upgrades if a player was skilled enough. Take challenging but fair bosses and layer over some incredible back story (The Hollow Knight), fun lead ins (Nosk), and most importantly make contextual sense where you encounter them (Hive Knight, Crystal Guardian, Dung Defender).
The art direction in the game is absolutely beautiful, with most areas having unique art assets ranging from underground cavern, garden, mushroom kingdom, underwater caves and more. The hand drawn art has that timeless quality to it, it looks like what you remember really nice 2D SNES games looked like (although if you went back and looked at them, they don't actually look that great anymore).
The Music. Oh god the music. Its haunting, its beautiful. Such understated melancholy, the music and the art meld in a way I've rarely experienced in a game, where the two typically exist in their own lanes. The music is almost an outgrowth of the art, and vice versa. Its like a metaphor, or synesthesia, where the music sounds like the art looks, and the art looks like the music sounds. It helps that the music sort of just continues on in its melancholy way as you encounter enemies in game or as events happen, never falling into the contextual up-tempo action music thing with rare exception. I have the Dirtmouth theme playing in me head as I type this.
If I had issues with the game, and these would really be minor nitpicks, is that some of the meatier DLC (Grimm's Troup and Godhome) are difficult to just stumble across, often being hidden behind breakable walls in an area you may have already fully explored, not really giving you a solid clue on where to find the content unless you go out of the game. There are also a handful of quests that feel unnecessarily vague about what exactly you have to do to complete them (I'm looking right at you Pale Mourner and your Flower). Really these are extremely minor things and I am glad I let me ego get out of the way and just look up the wiki so I didn't get frustrated by them. Once you know what you have to do, its right back to skill and timing. Lastly, as beautiful as the art style and presentation is, there is occasionally some flavor stuff that's happening in the foreground of the 2d plane that can block your view of what's happening on the game plane. While its again a very minor nitpick and really adds to the overall ambiance of the game, I did get cheap-shotted once or twice thanks to this and although it never resulted in a death it definitely did not help the sweaty palms situation on my end.
I eventually rounded out the game with 99% completion (technically 112% is possible thanks to the free DLC packs that come with the game). Its been a long time since a game had gripped me like this, but I felt the burnout coming at me hard and fast. Unlike virtually every other game I've "patient gamed" over the last several years, I'll leave this one installed and come back to it in small bites between other games to finally hit that 112%. I know a full bodied sequel to the game is in the works, Silksong, which features one of the game's memorable NPCs and I look forward to see what Team Cherry does there as well.
In closing, if you like Metroidvanias, if you like Souls-likes, if you love the artistry of gaming, if you like a challenge, if enjoy 2D side scrollers, if you love tons of high quality content for little money, please please please pick up Hollow Knight. TWO PEOPLE MADE THIS and it is honestly so much better than the mountains of AAA openworld trash people will choke down while crying about bugs, imbalance, fetch quests, copy pasted assets and areas.
My only regret is I waited so long to play this.
Remember than scene in Ratatouille where the jaded critic guy takes a bite of a simple meal his mother would make him when he skinned his knee, and it took him straight back to his childhood when life was simpler and everything was gonna be ok? That was basically Hollow Knight in a nutshell, for me.
The game takes the Metroidvania genre, an already classic, clean game design methodology and executes it to near perfection while drawing on some of the Souls-like game design philosophies (not surprising, given Souls-likes and Metroidvanias are sort of cousins of each other) to elevate the genre.
From the Souls-like the major standout addition to the game is the varied timing related bosses as well as the "Shade retrieval" mechanic.
Shade retrieval is if you die in the world you respawn at the last bench you sat on and have to go kill the shade your death left behind to recover any money you had accumulated up to that point. Its fairly straight forward and a nice way to add some stakes to your own survival while not punishing you in the form of losing XP or any serious progress that cannot be quickly regained. Benches where you respawn are intelligently located, typically never more than a couple minutes away from a boss (where you will be leaving the most shades to recover) and the trip back to the boss fight actually serves a purpose in refilling your "Soul" which is essentially a mana pool used for casting spells or healing yourself that is replenished by striking enemies.
The real star of the show are the bosses. They are plentiful, they are varied, and they are most importantly extremely challenging but very very fair. Each of the bosses involves a solid mastery of The Knight's various powers, pattern recognition, tight timing, and generally involves some amount of repetition to beat. Like a Souls game, Hollow Knight punishes mistakes. There are 0 cheap shots, and in theory each and every boss in the game could be beaten with the starting kit and upgrades if a player was skilled enough. Take challenging but fair bosses and layer over some incredible back story (The Hollow Knight), fun lead ins (Nosk), and most importantly make contextual sense where you encounter them (Hive Knight, Crystal Guardian, Dung Defender).
The art direction in the game is absolutely beautiful, with most areas having unique art assets ranging from underground cavern, garden, mushroom kingdom, underwater caves and more. The hand drawn art has that timeless quality to it, it looks like what you remember really nice 2D SNES games looked like (although if you went back and looked at them, they don't actually look that great anymore).
The Music. Oh god the music. Its haunting, its beautiful. Such understated melancholy, the music and the art meld in a way I've rarely experienced in a game, where the two typically exist in their own lanes. The music is almost an outgrowth of the art, and vice versa. Its like a metaphor, or synesthesia, where the music sounds like the art looks, and the art looks like the music sounds. It helps that the music sort of just continues on in its melancholy way as you encounter enemies in game or as events happen, never falling into the contextual up-tempo action music thing with rare exception. I have the Dirtmouth theme playing in me head as I type this.
If I had issues with the game, and these would really be minor nitpicks, is that some of the meatier DLC (Grimm's Troup and Godhome) are difficult to just stumble across, often being hidden behind breakable walls in an area you may have already fully explored, not really giving you a solid clue on where to find the content unless you go out of the game. There are also a handful of quests that feel unnecessarily vague about what exactly you have to do to complete them (I'm looking right at you Pale Mourner and your Flower). Really these are extremely minor things and I am glad I let me ego get out of the way and just look up the wiki so I didn't get frustrated by them. Once you know what you have to do, its right back to skill and timing. Lastly, as beautiful as the art style and presentation is, there is occasionally some flavor stuff that's happening in the foreground of the 2d plane that can block your view of what's happening on the game plane. While its again a very minor nitpick and really adds to the overall ambiance of the game, I did get cheap-shotted once or twice thanks to this and although it never resulted in a death it definitely did not help the sweaty palms situation on my end.
I eventually rounded out the game with 99% completion (technically 112% is possible thanks to the free DLC packs that come with the game). Its been a long time since a game had gripped me like this, but I felt the burnout coming at me hard and fast. Unlike virtually every other game I've "patient gamed" over the last several years, I'll leave this one installed and come back to it in small bites between other games to finally hit that 112%. I know a full bodied sequel to the game is in the works, Silksong, which features one of the game's memorable NPCs and I look forward to see what Team Cherry does there as well.
In closing, if you like Metroidvanias, if you like Souls-likes, if you love the artistry of gaming, if you like a challenge, if enjoy 2D side scrollers, if you love tons of high quality content for little money, please please please pick up Hollow Knight. TWO PEOPLE MADE THIS and it is honestly so much better than the mountains of AAA openworld trash people will choke down while crying about bugs, imbalance, fetch quests, copy pasted assets and areas.
My only regret is I waited so long to play this.
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