I finally got around to playing Hollow Knight, so you all get an unnecessary essay of my ramblings. It's easily the best Metroidvania in years, though by no means perfect. While not all too innovative, the game is lovingly crafted and of a consistently high level of quality throughout, boasting great gameplay and a charming atmosphere in a world that offers a frankly staggering amount of things to explore and challenges to overcome. While most similar games offer about 10-20 hours of content, I managed to spend 45 hours over the course of my first playthrough, likely in some part due to the amount of free DLC content that's been integrated since the game's release.
The star of the show is of course the world design. The progression through each level starts off fairly linear as the standard for Metroid-like games, with the likes of Forgotten Crossroads, Greenpath, and the Fungal wastes offering multiple routes and forks to explore in the local area until the player stumbles onto a boss which guards a key upgrade that allows the player to proceed to the next area. After this point, however, the player is offered a surprising degree of freedom to carve their own path through the fallen kingdom of Hallownest. As soon as you're equipped with the dash and wall jump, you can explore quite a large portion of the world. I took what could be called the intended path to the City of Tears via the main gate, after which I conquered Soul Sanctum and obtained the groundslam to gain access to Crystal Peak. However, a more adventurous player could first delve further into Deepnest and use the Tram Pass to travel to Ancient Basin and the Kingdom's Edge and loop back around to City of Tears. Alternatively, a player who purchased the Lumafly lantern could pay their way into the Crystal Peak, get the super dash ability early, and use it to skip the platforming gauntlet that guards the main gate to the City of Tears. While the upgrade progression in the game can be a bit slow (I'll get to this later), it allows the designers to build paths through the game world that afford players the opportunity to make their own personal journey through the world. These looping paths are designed such that they can be traversed in either direction while organically pushing the player forward. For example, if a player manages to find the northern entrance to Deepnest before they fight the Mantis Lords, the other path back to the Fungal Wastes will be closed off to them, likely directing them further into the area. This path functioned in the opposite manner for me, as I fought the Mantis Lords in Fungal Wastes at the earliest opportunity and climbed my way back up through Deepnest. One thing that stood out to me about this model of world design is that there was always somewhere new to explore, and always something new to find while backtracking. In Metroid-like games with linear progression paths, you must backtrack through the world after each key upgrade to rediscover the critical path. In Hollow Knight's nonlinear structure, the critical path bends and folds back in on itself, with opportunities to find and use key upgrades dotted throughout the world to make return visits to each area unique no matter how you first arrived there.
This gives me an opportunity to talk about the things you'll actually find over the course of exploration. While Super Metroid used the same principle as Hollow Knight to reward the player with hidden items when they used their new abilities in old areas, the rewards themselves were inconsistent in their value and impact for the player. While energy tanks and a handful of optional beam upgrades massively increase the player's survivability and damage, missile capacity upgrades translated to increasingly marginal gains. Combined with a rather loose combat system with little depth in enemy and boss designs, this meant that overcoming challenges in Super Metroid often had more to do with the player's perceptiveness during exploration than their skill at dodging enemy patterns. Hollow Knight manages to strike a much more even balance thanks to a much tighter combat system and a more balanced and layered set of collectibles. In the very beginning of the game, all you'll generally find for poking your nose around are pockets of geo, which allow you to purchase a variety of important items such as maps, map markers, and equippable charms. I found this a little boring at first, but it puts all secrets on a level playing field in terms of reward early on, and allows for a bit of grinding if needed or desired for less perceptive players. As they're given more agency, the player will begin to find more unique items, such as the aforementioned charms, mask shards which can add up to another tick of health, soul vessel fragments which can add up to another tick of mana, and ore which can be used to forge a better nail. The player can also find grubs trapped in glass jars whose father rewards all of the above (primarily heaps of geo) for each rescued. What especially works here is that increases to health and raw damage are tangible but rare, while the more common geo and charms are still rewarding in their potential to offer the player new ways to approach the game. The charms amount to equippable perks, which can be mixed and match for different "builds". This system allows players to tailor their experience towards a certain playstyle or remove certain obstacles to their enjoyment, while also offering the flexibility to alter their strategy for a difficult section. Because I enjoyed the baseline melee combat and wanted to see it flourish, I stuck with charms that improved my agility and the utility of my nail and shunned charms that made it easier to heal or boosted my spells. Charms of greater and lesser value are balanced by how many slots they take up, and the designers made the especially smart choice to lock the purchase of more slots behind the acquisition of more charms, gating the player's power level and ensuring they have a wider set to choose from before they can minmax. Lastly, in addition to some optional upgrades for your nail moveset and magic spells, you eventually find an item which can read the dreams of creatures you find which must be powered up with essence found around the world. This adds another layer to backtracking, as you can find essence by defeating optional bosses and by seeking out trees which repurpose some of the larger rooms as minor platforming challenges. All of this adds up to a large set of interesting things to find as you make your own way through the world and return to previous areas.
At this stage, I should discuss the combat system in a bit more detail. It veers on the simpler side of the scale (more towards Metroid than Castlevania), but it is well-executed and features a fair bit of depth. Your only melee weapon is the nail, which slashes in any direction at a fairly quick rate. Your strikes notably push away smaller creatures as well as your character, which makes for a unique sense of rhythm and timing. It also allows for a quick bounce on enemies when struck from above, which requires more timing than other similar downward strikes in other games (though the larger hitbox requires less precision and affords greater flexibility). This can allow you to "reverse juggle" yourself over one or more enemies to dispatch them quickly, or even bounce your way to new areas, as is required for some optional challenges and opens up possibilities for sequence breaks. This is all basic stuff, but it works together rather nicely with the snappy movement which features 1:1 air control with instant acceleration to create combat scenarios that reward agile movements and well-placed strikes. The magic system is smartly tied into this basic combat loop -- every sword strike (and a couple of other situations, depending on your charm setup) will grant you a bit of mana which you can use to either heal from damage or cast damaging spells. This encourages active play in the face of danger and simultaneously balances defensive and aggressive options. What I found especially clever is that upgrades to your nail damage meant less mana to work with since you were hitting each enemy fewer times. This meant that breezing through earlier areas wasn't a complete cakewalk and required some degree of attention from the player, while still hastening the speed of backtracking and adding to the feeling of growth. There are only a few spells, but they can all be accessed with simple input combos and no finagling with menus, so it's a worthwhile tradeoff in that all of your combat options are available at all times. These include a projectile spell, a ground slam, and an upwards explosion, all of which have distinct optimal use cases. Dashing, wall jumping, and double jumping further expand the player's movement repertoire and eventually allow for long strings of uninterrupted aerial combos since each wall jump and nail bounce reset the player's dash and double jump. The final addition to the set of combat options are nail arts which offer highly damaging strikes if the player is willing to charge up their nail and wait for an opportunity. While I initially gravitated to the wide neutral slash and forward dash strike, I later realized that the helicopter spin technique could be repeatedly tapped to slow my descent in midair and strike enemies multiple times for huge damage totals if timed correctly. This was the playstyle I eventually gravitated to, as I enjoyed the loop of dodging enemy patterns and waiting for the opportune moment to unleash a precise critical attack. I completed the Colosseum trials and the endgame bosses using almost nothing but these nail arts (and a bit of nail bouncing), as my build was optimized for their use. As previously mentioned, you'll steadily find upgrades and useful charms for each of these mechanics (basic nail combat, spells and healing, special moves) that round out your options and gradually grow your power in all areas, while encouraging experimentation as you temporarily find your spells more potent than your nail, or vice versa.
The player's mechanical options are only one side of the coin in combat -- enemy encounters and bosses make up the other half. Initially the creatures you'll find are comparable to Metroid's wall crawlers and floaters, but they become more varied and challenging as each zone features one or more unique enemies that fit with the theme and platforming challenges on hand, such as the camouflaged enemies that ambush you in Greenpath, the swordsmen and flying sentinels in the City of Tears, the explosive jellyfish in Fog Canyon, the spike throwers and beam spitters of the Crystal Peak, and so on. I would say that the game still veers closer to Metroid than Castlevania in its encounters, with the enemies serving more as obstacles to exploration than as discrete challenges in their own right. However, this means that there are some zones with enemies very tightly integrated into the platforming -- my favorite was Crystal Peak, both for how it crafted challenges out of many types of hazards and ranged enemies in highly vertical environments as well as for its chilling atmosphere. There are a few moments where the game locks you in a room and sets you against waves of enemies, and these encounters are a welcome inclusion and showcase the depth that emerges in group combat though they still pale in comparison to my personal favorite aspect of the game, which is its boss design. There are an absurd number of bosses, from elite enemy types as minibosses to more complex mandatory bosses that gate key items to one-off encounters built around a single concept and everywhere in between. I thought the False Knight and Hornet were great early encounters which tested the player on their ability to read basic patterns and weave in attacks of their own. The Mantis Lords became my early favorite of the roster for taking that concept to the next level, with the first Mantis offering you a chance to learn its many patterns before facing off against two at once a la the Ruin Sentinels in Dark Souls 2. I was impressed when this multiple boss encounter was outdone by the Watcher Knights, which wake up in pairs for each one you take out (these could be compared to DS1's Four Kings, and Ornstein and Smough find their equivalent in the God Tamer). I faced this boss immediately after acquiring the double jump with minimal upgrades, and it took me about 30 tries and a great deal of frustration to finally conquer it. When I finally did, I found myself in a zen state of spacing myself to bait out the slashes, rolls, and bounces of each individual Watcher Knight in order to find opportunities for counterattacks and risky heals. My favorite aspect of the boss design is the meticulous placement of opportunities to heal during otherwise hectic fights -- this is why I refused to use any charms that improved my healing. The Watcher Knights have fairly relentless attacks which can overlap, but with some forethought and proper positioning you can weave through their patterns and find greedy moments to heal (sometimes even twice). I counted 16 heals in my final attempt, which surprised someone who told me they just spammed spells to victory after assuming there were hardly opportunities. Of course, sometimes these moments are more explicit -- bosses will frequently have a brief period of rest after you've dealt enough damage to allow you the chance to recover or get free hits in, and the moments before the next Watcher Knight spawns offers a similar respite. My other favorite boss encounters were Grimm for his tight attack patterns reminiscent of Dracula, and the final gauntlet including the secret final boss. Other bosses are notable for their spectacle or shock value, such as Broken Vessel, the Traitor Lord (if you've completed Cloth's questline), and the Collector. There are only a few mediocre fights, and with all of the marvelous exploration on offer it's a nice surprise to see such a great roster of challenging boss battles as well. This is something that most Metroid games its clones have failed to provide, with the Castlevania series set apart by its more robust offering. I'm glad to see Hollow Knight measure up so competently in this aspect.
While I've had nothing but praise up to this point, there are some areas where the game falls short. I stated that the game's slow upgrade progression was an asset to its nonlinear world design, but it also comes with its own problems. The player's moveset at the beginning is extremely basic, and while the player's combat options will have expanded greatly by the end, most of the game is built without them in mind. I only felt really comfortable with the game's movement after acquiring both the dash and the wall jump, which took several hours of gameplay (though I will praise how these separately grant the midair correction and upward mobility of double jump long before it can be acquired). Only a few challenges can be designed around the invincibility dash or the player's full moveset with double jump, at which point the game is nearly over. I would have liked to see a few more abilities that added additional movement utility, with the endgame upgrades moved earlier so they could be integrated into more bosses and platforming gauntlets. Another major critique I have with the game is its geo economy and death system. I don't think I'm the best player in the world, but I never had trouble buying out all of the vendors, maps, and warp stations as soon as I found them, and by the midgame my stack of geo was in the tens of thousands with nothing to spend it all on. Hollow Knight copies the contiguous death and respawn system from Dark Souls, where all of the currency you've collected stays with your corpse (along with a third of your mana bar) which you must retrieve before dying again. This system was essentially pointless as far as I was concerned, because I only lost my geo once or twice near the end and had so little connection to the mountains of useless geo I had acquired, and fighting the ghost for retrieval was a mere nuisance every single time. With no incremental purchases like leveling up, the death system makes the slow grind to essential purchases a needlessly painful one for less skilled players, a total non-issue for reasonably skilled players who have already purchased everything they want. When the fraudulent bank teller absconded with my 4k in savings, I wasn't even annoyed; in fact, I laughed for about five minutes straight about how hilarious of a twist it was. When I finally lost 11k to a nest of exploding jellyfish in Fog Canyon, I was mostly just miffed that I hadn't found anything to spend it on earlier. Without any pull to spend your stack on, the death system serves null purpose and standard save points with a stable currency (balanced with higher prices) would have suited the game better. My other nitpicky complaints include the disorienting screen-filling visual effects and brief pause that occur when you are hit, the latter of which also appears when you successfully "parry" an enemy attack. I found both of these muddled the clarity of attack animations and disrupted my rhythm, which was particularly annoying when I was trying to bounce on an enemy and happened to slash at the same time they did and got my timing thrown off. Subtler effects would be welcome.
My biggest disappointment, though, was the way the main objective was handled. When I made my way into the Resting Grounds and had the three Dreamers marked in unexplored spaces of my map, I expected to encounter a tough challenge and boss at each location, like you see in Super Metroid with the statue blocking your way to Tourian or with the four lords in Dark Souls. This was reinforced when I made my way up to the Watcher Knights and got my teeth kicked in. My expectations were at an all time high when I ventured into Deepnest and found myself in a den of spiders and after an obvious ruse was trapped in a web. I made my way through a densely infested network of tunnels and... found the Dreamer unguarded by any boss. What a letdown! I didn't need a particularly hard boss, just something to capstone the journey (even the harmless Nosk would do). Fog Canyon's jellyfish boss was little more than a narrative spectacle to conclude Quirrel's storyline, and it was a satisfying enough journey there as I had used the shade cloak to enter the area rather than the "intended" path with Isma's tear (though I had both at the time). The game is replete with great content and the world is masterfully constructed in the service of player agency, but some moments simply did not land with me and left me feeling a bit disappointed. On a similar level, I barely connected with the story at all, as was the case with Dark Souls for the same reason. I prefer a more explicit narrative rather than a bunch of loose threads that hint at a larger whole, so I mostly appreciated Hollow Knight for the gameplay and atmosphere, with ultimately little sense for what I had accomplished or what the point was supposed to be. I don't particularly mind, but I thought I'd mention it as something that just doesn't appeal to me much.
On the whole, Hollow Knight is one of the better experiences I've had with a game in recent years, even if it lacks some of the qualities that draw me to e.g. the Castlevania series. I'd recommend it to any fans of Metroidvania games, or anyone with a passing interest in 2D platformers as it does so much right in its design that it's hard to go wrong with it. I think some of the ideas it borrows from other games are out of place and there are a few things which I would have liked to see get a bit more development, but it's a tremendous achievement considering that it was made by only three people while maintaining such a high level of quality throughout. I can't wait to see what they have in store for the sequel.
