Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight

Good Old Games - World - Title card - 1st version.

Developer Team Cherry Publisher Team Cherry Published 2017-02-24 Platforms Linux, Macintosh, Switch, Windows Genres Adventure, Beat 'em up, Exploration, Metroidvania, Platformer Themes Action, Adventure, Post-Apocalyptic Distribution Commercial

Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania video game developed and published by Team Cherry for Windows 2017-02-24. It was programmed in C# in Unity.

Personal

Own?	Yes. On Steam.
Won?	No.

I remember seeing rave reviews about this game and, since Metroidvanias are among my favorite genres, I was eager to try it out. When it was heavily on sale, I bought it and started playing it and fell in love with it.

Review

Good

• The art is phenomenal. Each of the various regions have their own palettes, but there is a cohesive style across the entire game. Different areas evoke feelings like desolation, verdancy, and ancientness.
• The ambient music is very fitting and emotion-inducing.
• The controls feel tight and responsive. It's clear a lot of time was spent on them.
• Each section has its own feel with unique monsters and game mechanics.
• The game has some tense moments, like when you are low on health in a new area, and not sure if you're going to trigger a boss battle.
• I found the game to be quite challenging, but fair. The bosses are harder than a lot of Metroidvanias, and require you to learn their pattern to defeat them. Brute force will almost always get you killed.
• The hit point mechanic, where you can only take a few hits, but can heal by using stored energy (if you can find a safe place) was a great way to force the player to be more careful compared to most games which just give you a large energy pool.
• I like how the game handles death. You lose your money, but it can be reclaimed if you return and defeat your lost soul. However, if you die again before retrieving it, it is lost permanently. And, if it's in a particularly dangerous area, where you don't want to risk losing it, you can spend an item to recover it safely.
• The various NPCs you meet through the game have a lot of character and I love the voice acting for the artificial language.
• I like how you can find a map icon for many of the otherwise hidden objects in the game. This makes it much easier to find the secrets of the game.
• I love rescuing the grubs. They're so cute.

Bad

• I found the game map to be too large. Trying to navigate from one section to another often required a fairly long commute, and there just weren't enough fast travel locations. I would often debate if I cared enough about an item to go all they back for it.
• The game goes on a bit long. When I got around 40 hours into it, I was just starting it up to grind through a boss and putting it back down.
• I got so many of the charms so late in the game, they were pretty useless to me. And, since some are objectively better than others, a lot of them sat in my inventory completely unused.
• I found the story to be a bit lacking. You're able to glean pieces of the ruined society from various conversations, but, for most of the game, I felt like I was in the dark.
• My only gripe about the controls is the downward attack when trying to bounce off monsters. My swing was frequently too late despite appearing to be on time, and it looks like you're able to hit monsters before your nail would hit them.
• When you're still trying to get a feel of the game it requires a lot of grinding for money. This wouldn't be so bad if money didn't explode in unpredictable ways when you kill monsters, where it often falls into pits. Getting the money magnet charm is a must.
• When I first saw all the map tokens for sale, I figured it was overkill, but, it didn't take me long before I ran out. Having such a large number of loose ends in the map at all times is rather annoying because you end up back-tracking all over the place, and, because the token only convey color, not useful information, it's easy to forget what was there. I would prefer a map where you could add notes. That way, I don't spend a bunch of time returning to a token only to discover I still don't have the power-up I needed to bypass it.
• Since losing money upon death is part of the game mechanic, dealing with money becomes annoying. The only bank in the game is a pain to reach, and selling the valuable artifacts is a dull process, it just becomes a chore to manage. I would have preferred eliminating the money loss mechanic.
• Destroying all the random objects in the background seemed fun at first, but just became a bit annoying later on.

Ugly

• The White Palace is too long and difficult. It stopped being enjoyable and just became frustrating.

Media

Title Cards

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  Good Old Games - World - 1st version.

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  Good Old Games - World - 2nd version.

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  Steam - World - 1st version.

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  Steam - World - 2nd version.

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  Steam - World - 3rd version.

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  Steam - World - 4th version.

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  Steam - World - 5th version.

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  Switch - USA.

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  Switch - Japan.

Videos

Longplay - PlayStation 4.

Longplay - Switch.

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	The hornet is a powerful adversary who also helps you multiple times.
Bechdel test?	Fail	Women never speak to each other.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	There are no humans.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no clearly queer characters.

Links