Game Review: Hollow Knight

[dorchadas]

Around six years ago, the group chat I have with a couple of guys to talk about video games (I'm sure you have one too, right?) blew up with discussion of a game called Hollow Knight. I had heard about it on both Rock Paper Shotgun and Bonfireside Chat, of course, but this was people I knew talking about the game, like listening in to a discussion on the playground the way that the designers of The Legend of Zelda hoped that people would do when talking about their game. It sounded amazing and right up my alley, especially when those same group chat friends started talking about a planned sequel called Silksong that was supposed to be coming out in a few short years.

Well, that was six years ago and I've beaten Hollow Knight and Silksong still isn't out. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I started playing Hollow Knight in April and originally thought, oh, this is a thirty-hour game, it'll take me a couple months to finish. But if you've been reading you know that I've gotten pulled into modding for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which takes up a chunk of my free time, and I also have Laila, which takes up a much larger chunk of my free time. Don't let the fact that I took almost eight months to beat this game imply anything about the quality of the game itself, however--Hollow Knight is a gaming masterpiece and I can perfectly understand why it monopolized gaming chat for weeks on end.

The last and only civilisation, the eternal kingdom...

You are...well, hmm, actually, let's skip that for the moment.

At the start, you're traveling through a windswept, lonely canyon, rusty nail on your back and tattered cloak over your carapace, toward the lonely light in the distance. As you approach the gates, you find a black monument covered in shining white lines, and the glow traces out a message:

Higher Beings, these words are for you alone.

Beyond this point you enter the land of King and Creator.
Step across the threshold and obey our laws.

Bear witness to the last and only civilization, the eternal kingdom.

Hallownest

now, I don't know about you, but I've played Dark Souls. I've played Momodora: Requiem in the Moonlight. I know that when you arrive at an ancient kingdom, legendary in its glory, that draws travelers from around the world, it's going to be a shattered wreck filled with whispering madmen and scurrying shadows, and Hallownest is no different. When you arrive, you have no idea what has befallen the kingdom and neither do most of its remaining inhabitants. At the entrance to the tunnels leading to Hallownest, you meet the Elderbug, one of the last residents of Dirtmouth, who tells you that the town used to be filled with light and laughter but, one by one, all the residents went down below in the ruins, chasing treasure or dreams or mad whispering, and none of them came back. And with those words in your ears, you proceed forward to the open mouth of the well and enter the Forgotten Crossroads, seeking something unnamed in the depths of kingdom.

Of course, you aren't the only one alive down there.

A friendly chap, I'm sure.

Nearly everything in the game is some variety of insect, and while some of them were obviously of animal intelligence even in the kingdom's glory days, many of them have arms and legs and wear clothes and attack you with the fury of a mindless beast. There are crawling things, running things, scurrying things, flying things, bugs that roar in fury and charge you, bugs that spit caustic goo at you from far away, a dizzying array of monsters to fight. There are a few friends, or at least neutral beings, but they are located in out-of-the-way places to avoid the myriad dangers of the fallen kingdom.

One thing Hollow Knight does much better than Dark Souls are its characters. Dark Souls' characters are famously all muttering madmen with creepy laughter, supposedly because since it doesn't have any Japanese voice acting, Miyazaki wanted to make sure to convey that none of these people were trustworthy to the Japanese playerbase. He was basing his game on European dark fantasy and Japanese works like Berserk that were inspired by it, though, so the mood is all tragedy and suspicion. Hollow Knight's characters are much more likeable--just compare the affable Elderbug in Dirtmouth with Dark Souls' Crestfallen Warrior at Firelink Shrine. Elderbug is always happy to see you, he welcomes you back and gives thanks that you have survived another expedition into the depths. Meanwhile, the Crestfallen Warrior laughs at your attempts to accomplish anything, talks about the futility of trying to save the world, and eventually goes mad and the player has to put him down.

Everyone remembers Solaire, but the cast of Hollow Knight is much more memorable to me than most of Dark Souls. There's Sly, the vendor in Dirtmouth who always has a hearty "Patamas Geo" to greet you with (none of the voice acting is in a recognizable language). There's Quirrel, the other wanderer, who you find throughout Hallownest as he takes in the sights and share one last silent moment on the shores of an underground lake before he departs to continue his journey. There's Cloth, the warrior who came to Hallownest seeking something and may or may not find it--in my game, she lived. That's not always the case. There's Millibelle the Banker, the kindly bug who offers to hold on to your geo for free! Until you collect a few thousand, at which points she disappears and her "bank" is revealed as a literal stage prop. The Seer, the last of the Moth Tribe remaining in Hallownest, who speaks of the power of dreams and the days before the Kingdom, and bids you seek you the spirits of ancient warriors. And of course, there's Zote. Zote the Mighty, Zote the Traveler, defeating all who come at him with his mighty nail Life Ender! And he'll gladly tell you all about his exploits, his prowess in battle, the Fifty-Seven Precepts of Zote for long as you're willing to listen to him.

Precept Eleven: 'Mothers Will Always Betray You'. Precept One: 'Always Win Your Battles'. Precept Forty-Four: 'You Can Not Breathe Water'. Precept Thirty-Nine: 'Eat Quickly and Drink Slowly'. Words of wisdom here.

Full of life.

The environments and ambience of Hollow Knight are just as much stars as the characters are, and they benefit from the greater detail afforded by the side-scrolling graphics. Here at the edge of the Queen's Garden, you can see every leaf and petal of every flower of the overgrown foliage, illuminated by the phosphorescent light of strange mosses. Deepnest is claustrophic and dark, requiring the lumafly lantern to properly navigate and full of scurrying spiders. Fog Canyon is misty and, in a bit of amazing ludonarrative consonance, you can't get the map for it until much later than you discover it, so the fog-shrouded area remains mysterious for most of the game. Kingdom's Edge is desolate and full of falling ash, representing the true end of the world. My favorite area, though, was the City of Tears. The capital of Hallownest, it was named for the eternal rain that fell, water seeping down from Blue Lake through the cavern ceiling, and there were many times I'd stand at some window and just watch the rain and listen to the music.

The music! If the graphics are good, the music is transcendent. The soft piano and endless rain in the City of Tears theme is the main reason I spent time there listening to the music. The Resting Grounds, the burial for all of Hallownest's dead and the location of the Seer, sounds of lost glory and ancient days, but also that they will be preserved in memory and dream. Or will they? As the Seer says:

"Don't remember us, Wielder. Don't honour us. We do not deserve it..."

The almost-ambient sounds of Deepnest, bringing to mind scurrying things and shadows moving in the darkness. And most memorable, the sad piano of Dirtmouth, the refuge that you always return to, the empty town whose glory days are long past it.

Most of the music and the mood in Hollow Knight is elegaic, which is a word I don't often use for video games.

I also have to point out the boss themes, which are not particularly sad or slow. The frantic strings of the broken vessel, mad with infection, reaching out to you in its last moments, desperate not to die alone. The Soul Master's synthesized vocals as its teleporting around and hurling bolts of magic at you. The harpsichord of the Mantis Lords as they challenge you for entering their domain and, upon being defeated, bow and instruct the Mantis Tribe to allow you free passage.

Shoutout to the Mantis Lords, by the way. It was a great moment when after some frantic dodging and fighting, the first one to attack bowed and left the arena and I was like, "That's right! Alright, which one of you is ne-" and then both of the remaining lords stood up.

A light in dark places.

I talked so far about the mood and the scenery and the pathos, but I should talk about the game too.

Hollow Knight is a soulslike, which means that in addition to the thematic elements listed above, death also has consequences. When you die, you respawn at the last bench you sat at and all of your geo (the game's currency) remains behind along with a shade, called by Confessor Jiji in Dirthmouth the leftover regrets that remain. If you die before finding that shade again and defeating it, all of your money is lost. This seems like a serious problem, but in practice it was vestigial. In contrast to Dark Souls, where I once lost tens of thousand of souls when I died before reaching my bloodstain, I don't think I ever failed to recover my geo and defeat the shade even once. Furthermore, if the shade dies in an obscure or hard-to-reach location, you can pay Confessor Jiji to summon the shade to Dirtmouth and kill it there, in perfect safety. It felt more like something that the developers included because oh, this is a soulslike, you have to get back to your corpse, rather than an integral part of gameplay.

As well, healing is always available, but at a cost. As you hit enemies you gain "Soul", the first and primary use of which is healing. Healing takes a short amount of time, during which you cannot move and are totally vulnerable, so an important part of any major fight is timing the boss's attacks to find spaces where you can heal, assuming you're like me and you're not so good that you never get hit. At least here, unlike Momodora, I realized that healing was a renewable resource!

Far more important is the Metroidvania aspect of the game. In the beginning, you have your rusty nail, you can jump, and that's about it. As you go through the game and defeat bosses you get all the diverse upgrades that platformers have as standard. The above-pictured Monarch's Wings, which allow you to double jump. The Mothwing Cloak, which allows you to dash. The Mantis Claw, which allows you to cling to walls and then jump off them. In the classic tradition originally set by Super Metroid, every new item you find unlocks the ability to go to new areas and find previously-inaccessible places in already-visited areas. Places that you used to have laboriously jump from platform to platform or nailjump off of enemies to get to can be easily reached with a Crystal Heart dash or a single Monarch jump.

The biggest upgrade, for me at least, is probably the Dream Nail. When you meet the Seer at the Resting Grounds, they cryptically say:

What a terrible fate they've visited upon you.
To cast you away into this space between body and soul.
Will you accept their judgement and fade slowly away?
Or will you take the weapon before you, and cut your way out of this sad, forgotten dream?

And in a dream, you're offered a sword. When you take it, you gain the ability to read minds, including the minds of bosses and almost all the NPCs in the game, and a single Dream Nail hit restores multiple times more Soul than a hit with the regular nail. Dream Nailing takes extra time and is very difficulty against speedy bosses, though, so I was always balancing trying to get in a Dream Nail hit vs. the odds that doing so would get me hit again. I needed that Soul to fuel my spells!

Higher Beings, these charms are for you alone.

In addition to the permanent upgrades is the Charm system, and this is where Hollow Knight really shines in its customization.

There are forty Charm in the game, gathered from defeating bosses, paying geo to merchants, completing requests from NPCs, and hidden in lonely places, and you can only equip a subset of them at any given time. If you look at the online discussion, it's dominated by people asking what Charm build is the best for a particular boss and, most importantly, there are often multiple suggested Charm builds with completely different Charms, indicating that there's more than one way to defeat the bosses. I myself went for the other use of Soul, casting spells, and equipped Charms like the Shaman Stone (increased spell damage), Spell Twister (reduced casting cost), and Soul Catcher (increased Soul when hitting enemies) and then blasted everything with spells. I could just as easily have equipped Quick Slash (above), Mark of Price (increased strike range), and Fragile/Unbreakable Strength (increased damage) and gone for a close-attack attack build.

But beyond those bread-and-butter Charms, there are many extra Charms with situational uses that you can add to your build. Shape of Uun transforms you into a grub-like being when focusing Soul to heal, which means that some difficulty-to-dodge boss attacks will simply pass over your head. Flukenest turns the Vengeful Spirit spell into a splatter of ethereal flukes, with a much shorter range but much more likely to hit a single target multiple times in a row. Dream Wielder makes strikes with the Dream Nail much faster, making it more easy to get those lore-filled boss mind-quotes. Weaversong summons some little spiders that jump out and attack your enemies, and there was one boss fight where I combined that with two other minion-summoning Charms and just hit up on the wall and let my minions kill the boss. Hey, it's not cheating if it's literally how the game is designed.

Here's another example. There was a boss fight in Kingdom's Edge that was the first real difficult fight I had in the game, and I tried maybe a dozen times before I thought, maybe there's a trick to this, the boss is too fast and I don't have time to get off spells, what do I do? So I went online to look at what other people suggested and I found this video that gave me a totally different approach--equip Lifeblood Heart, Quick Slash, and Stalwart Shell and just suicidally rush in and slash away. You'll attack so fast that you'll frequently stagger the boss, giving you time to heal, and the boss's quick attacks will often run into the increased invincibility frames from Stalwart Shell, meaning many of their attacks don't do any damage. I didn't do that--I kept trying and eventually won--but I could have, and the fact that I did won meant both approaches are viable.

That's me being lasered in the lower-right.

The boss fights are where Hollow Knight really shines, because once again, the Metroidvania is stronger than the soulslike. In Dark Souls, even late in the game, you can't treat normal enemies as ignorable speedbumps because every enemy is a threat that can drain your resources. In Hollow Knight, that's not true at all. The basic Metroid-esque enemies that just endlessly circle platforms are never a threat, and by the end you'll be repeatedly dashing through levels killing nearly everything on your way with one or two slashes as you try to get to your destination. Boss fights are where the challenge is. And boss fights are also where I learned a harsh truth about myself.

I'm getting old.

It happens to us all, of course. My game tastes have changed a lot--I used to play a lot of Unreal Tournament, including online with strangers, and I did pretty well, but there's a reason that competitive gamers are almost always in their late teens or early twenties. While I didn't have any trouble with most of the early boss fights, they got increasingly harder as the game went on. There were more moments than are my usual when I jumped to avoid an attack, or dashed through a boss charge, or attacked to parry a strike, and I was just a little too slow. Sure, I can blame my ten-year-old controller if I want, and maybe I should. But when I played Dark Souls almost ten years ago I didn't have any of these problems and overall found the game to be hard in a pleasant challenge way, not a frustrating way. When fighting that boss in Kingdom's Edge, or the one where I used a minion build, or the Trial of the Fool, I definitely got frustrated, but at myself.

And in that way, me playing Hollow Knight was the ultimate expression of a soulslike. I am also past my (video game playing) glory days. There will be new games coming out that are extremely good that I am simply unable to beat, because my coordination and reflexes are not good enough to do so. And so I have the two standard soulslike options--to pass it all on to a successor, who will restore the fallen grandeur for a time, or to embrace darkness and ruin. But I'm not sure Laila is going to enjoy playing nail-bitingly difficult platformers (sashagee sure does not), and I'm not willing to flip the table and give up. I still have platformers on my backlog I want to play before I declare that from now on it's turned-based strategy and turn-based roguelikes and turn-based RPGs for me only. In this way, I am like [NAME EXPUNGED] in Hallownest, endlessly enacting the same plan, hoping that this time it will finally work.

There's a DLC I did not touch in Hollow Knight that's entirely about fighting harder version of bosses you've already fought. I think I'll be okay. Ten years ago I would have relished the challenge, but not anymore. I have other challenges in my life.

A moment of respite.

It's a mark of Hollow Knight's quality that it made me think about these things at all. Dark Souls spawned an entire video essay industry, but it was about the in-game events. What was the world like before the Plague of Undeath, was the Lord of Cinder's war against the Everlasting Dragons justified or not, was the Furtive Pygmy the secret progenitor of humanity, is it a good think to link the fire and keep the cycle going? Hollow Knight has similar questions, of course, and if you look online you can find plenty of discussion about whether [NAME EXPUNGED] was justified or not, good or evil or just desperately trying to stave off the end, but that's not what I thought of.

I thought of age, like I wrote about. I thought about children, and how there are so many parents who think that their children are going to be vessels to pour their hopes and dreams into, all the wishes that they were never able to act on, and act so disappointed when their children have minds of their own and don't simply want to tread the path their parents set out for them. I thought about plans, and how sometimes it seems like the entire world is conspiring against you and you have to just keep trying things in the hope that maybe this time, it works. [NAME EXPUNGED] wanted a pure vessel with no thoughts, no mind, and no will of its own, a "Hollow Knight" who could save Hallownest. And he almost got it, except for one, small fragment of individuality. Just one, but it was enough. But who can blame it for wanting something more?

I don't care about Hollow Knight lore videos, but I'll gladly listen to someone's expanded version of an in-game song like the one in the "I Hear" section or read all the comments below that video of the Resting Grounds theme. I want to know what people got out of the game, not what's in it.

Mind over matter.

Hollow Knight is more than the sum of its parts. It's a soulslike, it's a Metroidvania, it's a visual treat, it's a boss rush, but those aren't what I think of when I think back on my memories of playing. I think about sitting next to Quirrel by that lake, pictured above, and rescuing Cloth from the enemies plaguing her in Deepnest, and whatever is going on with the Midwife, and why everyone in the game wears a mask--even the health meter is masks--and what that says about identity and being hollow. What does it mean to deny one's nature, especially if doing so makes you more civilized and less of a wild beast? Isn't that a good thing?

These are not questions that Dark Souls or Momodora asked of me. Dark Souls had more consistently engaging combat and it was an amazing game to play, but I don't think about what the game means about life other than that "You cheated not only the game" meme, and that wasn't even about Dark Souls. I feel like I'll be thinking about Hollow Knight for a much longer time after it's done.

Now, time for me too to join the chorus of voices clambering for Silksong.

Comments

[anxious_songbird]

I personally didn't actually play Hollow Knight myself (I just, suck at gaming TBH), but I get a lot of seeing some Let's players react to this pretty game. Though I'm also just a sucker for the tragedy that is/was The Hollow Knight themselves (IDK, I have a thing for the concept of ¨being empty¨ & what that even means).

[dorchadas]

Especially with the cut dialogue from the Hollow Knight. They cut it for a reason, but I love the idea that a single thought--"Sngure" (ROT13)--was enough to allow the infection to take hold. All that Radiance needed was that one bit of feeling.

[renegadefolkhero]

It took three tries to get into it, but I loved this game, and was mildly obsessed for a while. I had a similar feeling of being not quite fast enough. Try as I might, no matter how much I practiced and wanted to succeed, my fingers and brain weren't up to the task. And I ended up being okay with it.

When it was time to retire, I was happy to let it live on fondly in memory.

They made a game that wasn't "for me" due to the difficulty level, but I enjoyed it so much anyway. That really says something. I'm also looking forward top Silksong.

[dorchadas]

I beat the Trial of the Fool, I beat all the bosses, I beat the Radiance in a half-dozen attempts...and when I learned that the last DLC I hadn't done was all about fighting harder versions of bosses I had already beaten I was like "Nah, I'm good."

I'm not here because I must conquer a challenge. That's not the important part of Hollow Knight to me.