Hollow Knight review

The strongest part of the game is its world. It's pretty, has consistently great atmosphere, and feels like a place and not just a series of platforming tubes. Once you're a few hours in and getting anywhere, anyway.

The beginning of the game sucks. You get to explore the most plain area of the game, which still manages to feel like everything's obviously designed for a wider ability set than what you start with, which is nothing and feels thoroughly unsatisfying. Everywhere is dead-ends either teasing you to come back later but unclear with what unlock and whether there's anything important there even then, or some fancy building or something that may or may not be relevant later but sure isn't now. Also shops are introduced immediately and acquiring currency is - at least initially - just a menial grind.

Moving through areas has a similar issue as many old console platformers where the pieces kinda are just there without a clear idea of how you're expected to approach them, so that if you try to play careful and focus hard it's not interesting enough to keep that up, but if you play fast and loose you'll keep taking hits here and there which feels bad too because the game isn't lenient enough with that. In those old games you'd slowly whittle down your resources and get punished for it later. Hollow Knight makes you stop to heal which is effectively free except for being slow enough to quickly get grating, but still a lesser evil compared to slowing down and being super careful around every single bug you come across.

Once the game opens up I found there were broadly three modes of play I engaged in. The best parts were getting to a new area with enough powers unlocked that I felt I could explore it without being constrained to a very narrow slice of it and knowing I'd have to come back again multiple times later. An area or two were annoying (*cough*Deepnest) but for most part it successfully tapped into that feeling of awe and wonder of uncovering the world's secrets. This was the main driver that kept me going.

The worst parts were backtracking through old areas trying to find the next opening to make tangible progress from. Especially early on when every possible gate blocks you, you're leaving open branches on the map everywhere and it quickly becomes unwieldy to try and keep track of what's what. So either you do a stupid amount of bookkeeping on the side or will repeatedly check the same places because oh yeah this dead-end had *this* thing in the way so I still can't get there. And I mentioned the world is big, yes? That's great for immersion and all but there's nowhere near enough fast travel and shortcut options for how much you keep poking at the edges. Way too much of my game time was spent in a loop of looking at the map, deciding a spot to check, figuring out the fastest way to get there and sighing at what a chore it still is, retreading old ground to get there, finding it's still locked or finding there was just some minor thing that doesn't open up anything - which happens a LOT because there's a very low number of upgrades that strictly matter for progress and a very high number of various trinkets and collectibles - and starting all over with the next potential lead.

For the third thing, there were bosses and arena gauntlets. Before getting to those I need to note that the difficulty curve of the game is bonkers. It goes nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing GET HIT BY A TRUCK nothing nothing nothing nothing... the vast majority of the game by playtime is going through the corridors and outside of the designated challenges they are just a chore. The regular exploration did manage to kill me two or three times upon encountering a new type of enemy that dealt two damage a hit and needed to be carefully dealt with, and getting blown up before realising I needed to briefly reorient from the enemies are irrelevant mindset until I learn what to do with those. When you get asked to fight for real it's like switching from Animal Crossing to Street Fighter after having settled in for just going around places, with how few and far between those are.

The fights themselves were... okay? I felt like there were two tiers of difficulty. The mandatory fights were not very hard, so things would get tense but it would be because the thing interrupted your low intensity exploration and the last bench is so and so far back and you just want to get it over with in one take. And then there's a number of optional fights where you need to actually try and focus but generally those are there for you to do for their own sake without any significant rewards behind them. As of writing this I've rolled credits at 74% completion and not really sought out the optional bosses besides doing a few conveniently placed ones. I may go back to do some still but it really feels like a different game that I haven't played as much as the exploration one and I'm not sure what to think about it.

Overall my foremost impression about the game is about how much of it was tedious and annoying, but I did finish it. Part of it is surely the game being highly acclaimed and getting the benefit of doubt where a no-name alternative probably would not have, with a dose of sunk cost fallacy too, but also I am probably going back for at least some of the things I missed so clearly there are some intangibles here that the game has going for it. I don't know how to rate it. It was an experience.


UPDATE: Eight months after writing this and seven months after deciding I was done with the game, Hollow Knight was mentioned in a chat and I thought to check when exactly I had written this and if I said anything about the endgame. I spoilered up and cleared just about everything I managed to learn of, maybe actually everything. Got all the charms, fragments, grubs and whatnot. I'll refrain from naming anything to avoid spoilers here. There were quite a few bullshit obscure leads there I'm sure I wouldn't have got on my own, and the frustration with traversing the same rooms over and over and over again remained a big mood all the way through. What kept me going was the idea that the bosses are a big part of why the big fans of the game love it, right? So while I had already come this far, I should give the endgame challenges a shot.

They were in fact, both the platforming and boss segments, some of the more enjoyable parts of the whole game. Up until Pantheons. I tried the first one of those with a full binding set and it was just an exercise in tedium. Most of the fights were very easy if playing safe, but when playing safe you deal damage so slowly and the fights take stupidly long and there's a stupid amount of them you need to in one go. I think it took like half an hour? a full hour? and it was just pure tedium, until finally getting to see the unique boss for the first time and die to it. And that's when I decided I was done with the game and would not need to see the very final part of it through.