A Tribute to Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.

I don't think that statement comes as a surprise to most gamers. It's a pretty popular game at this point, and has been praised to death by now - but as we approach Silksong's release this week (!!!) I wanted to write a little something to reflect on my personal experience with the game.

The first playthrough

I think it's generally well-accepted that Hollow Knight has a pretty slow start. There's a brief tutorial on movement and combat before you reach the town of Dirtmouth, a sleepy village you'll be coming back to a lot throughout the game. But the real meat of the adventure starts when you drop down Dirtmouth's well and enter the Forgotten Crossroads.

To get out of the Crossroads, you have to wrap your way around the area, fighting enemies and jumping between platforms, and then fight a boss. Afterwards, you do another little platforming challenge and get your first new ability, a ranged attack.

Hollow Knight is a metroidvania, but not really a normal one. In other metroidvanias, you often get your first movement ability pretty early on, a dash or a double jump, to navigate the winding hallways of the game easier than if you just had a basic moveset. In Hollow Knight, you have to fight at least two bosses to get a dash, and the double jump is near the end of the game (in some ways - I'll elaborate further on this later). That was a very big adjustment for me as a player, coming from Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

I streamed the first 10 hours or so of my first playthrough live. Watch at your own risk if you want to see 17 year old Kaden get really salty. HK has Soulslike elements to it, especially in its design philosophy of making a genuinely hard but fair game. I'd never played a game like that before, and to say it was shocking to me would be an understatement. I almost bounced off the game completely during the first Hornet fight.

The last stream I did of HK did actually bounce me off of the game. During the two hours I played, I encountered two exceptionally difficult challenges for me, not knowing that they were optional. The first was a room in Deepnest where you get a vessel fragment after pogoing the hell out of some Garpedes. I won't even try to explain that sentence to someone who doesn't play the game, just know that it's really hard! And the second was Brooding Mawlek, an optional boss that has patterns that just don't mesh well with my brain - I struggle to defeat it even late-game, which is realistically a skill issue.

Point is, those two things were so exceptionally difficult for me at the time, that I decided the game was just built for people with better hand-eye coordination than me. I convinced myself that I could not beat Hollow Knight, to make myself feel better about my own failure.

But something kept nagging at my mind, even after I ragequit the game and didn't boot it up again.

The second half of the first playthrough

I eventually returned to Hollow Knight.

I'm not sure why. I'd thoroughly convinced myself that difficult games like this were just beyond my forte. I was the Minecraft guy, I'd play chill survival-crafting games, stuff that tested your mind more than your reflexes.

Maybe it was spite. I'm a pretty competitive person, probably because of my upbringing as a "gifted kid" - I felt pressure my whole life to be the best, that anything less than perfection was a failure. Hollow Knight had beat me, and I held a grudge against it for that.

It might've also been the allure of exploration. At the time, I'd become very interested in metroidvanias, and Hollow Knight has been heralded for a long time as one of the best; there was a lot of the world I hadn't seen yet, and Hallownest was such an intriguing and well-drawn setting that that might've drawn me back in.

Whatever the reason, about 6 months after my last Hollow Knight stream, I returned to the game. Not streaming it, just playing. And I got hooked.

I started following the quest given to me in the last stream, to kill all three Dreamers. That led me deeper into the game, to new bosses I hadn't fought before, and I found that the more I played, the more I honed my reflexes and the easier the game became. Tasks that had felt impossible to me started to become possible.

I beat all the Dreamers, explored much of the map, and found new abilities I had no idea existed. Eventually, the time came to beat the Hollow Knight, the titular final boss of the game. After a few tries, I pulled it off, defeated the boss, and beat the game.

Any avid Hollow Knight fans are probably screaming at their screens right now: "That's not the end! There's more endings!" And yes, I know about that (and actually knew about it before fighting the Hollow Knight). But I figured a lot of that true ending stuff was above my skill level - I still felt terrible at bosses, probably because of my humbling at the start of the game, and severely underestimated my abilities. I did go for some true ending stuff, somehow entering the Abyss and defeating the Traitor Lord, but I discovered optional bosses would be necessary to enter the White Palace, and stopped playing, opting to instead watch videos about the game and the parts I never got to.

So that was the end of my Hollow Knight experience. How'd it go?

The critique

The game's good. Really good. I think the thing it has above all other metroidvanias is how open-ended it is. Most MVs follow a fairly linear progression - in Ori and the Blind Forest, you get your wall jump, then your explosion attack, then double jump, then bash, etc. Some games like Super Metroid follow this formula but allow you to sequence break if you're very skilled.

Hollow Knight has a ton of intended sequences. You'll usually first get the Vengeful Spirit, then a dash, then a wall jump, but after that the game opens up to you. You can go to the City of Tears and get a dive attack, you can face the Mantis Lords and head into Deepnest, you can save up geo and buy the lantern to go to Crystal Peak, etc. There's definitely progression gates - you can't really get the double jump without the Crystal Heart, for instance - but it's a lot more open-ended than your usual MV and it lends the game a sense of deep, personal exploration that not many games can claim to have. Everyone's playthrough is different.

Another clear standout is the combat. It took a lot of getting used to, but once it clicks there's not much else like it. You have very tight control of your character (to the point where instead of jumps being an arc, if you cut it short the Knight immediately starts going down), so once you get the hang of things any boss deaths don't feel unfair - you made a mistake, and if you learn from that mistake you'll do better next time.

Something that lots of folks complain about is the Dark Souls-esque boss runbacks. I was initially in the camp of hating them too, but I've found that in some scenarios, they can add a lot to the game. Some sub-areas, like Soul Sanctum, have lots of enemies that echo the attacks of their boss, and running through those every time you face the boss gives you an opportunity to train your skills in a lower-risk scenario before applying those skills in the boss fight. I will say that there are some boss runbacks that feel pointless though, such as Watcher Knight or Broken Vessel; they're so easy to get to from the bench that it feels like needless tedium, and it'd be less frustrating to just have the bench next to the boss arena.

The other really big complaint I have about the game is the shade mechanic. When you die, you leave behind a shade that you have to defeat to get your money back. The shade attacks you with all the same attacks you have, and until you defeat it, your soul is capped to 2/3 of its normal max amount. If you die before defeating the shade, all your money is lost. So it really encourages running directly back to your shade to kill it as soon as you die.

That sounds fine on paper, but I don't think it really works for a metroidvania experience. There's a very real element in metroidvanias of "oh, I'm underleveled for this fight, I should come back later when I'm more powerful" and I think the shade directly discourages this approach, semi-forcing you to ram your head against a wall repeatedly to defeat bosses instead of exploring more to find ways to improve your character. This problem is exacerbated by certain bosses where the shade spawns in the boss arena, so you need to defeat the boss to get out of the fight with all your money. (Enraged Guardian, I'm looking at you.) I think sending you back to the last bench is punishing enough in this game, and adding this corpse run mechanic just makes things more annoying.

Art and sound direction of the game is stunning. I don't need to elaborate on this one, just look at it! The hand-drawn artstyle is unique, and the music and ambience complements the game perfectly. Hats off to the devs.

I think that's all I've really got to say about the game itself. I dwelled a lot on the negatives here, mostly because those are the only negatives I can think of - the rest of the game is pretty much perfect, and for $15 it's an absolute steal.

The second playthrough

I said I stopped playing Hollow Knight. I lied.

With the hype of Silksong being just around the corner, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the game, since I knew it was hard and I assume Silksong will be similarly difficult. So I decided to replay the game, with all the knowledge I have now, and get back into the swing of things. My initial goal was to get the Mantis Claw before Silksong releases.

I powered through that goal in one day. Bosses that took me hours before, I defeated in a single try. As it turns out, my experience beating the harder bosses in my first playthrough has lasted, after all these years, and I'm actually pretty good at Hollow Knight.

My goal became to beat the game before Silksong releases. I just beat my last Dreamer the other night, and I've still got four days. I could probably knock the Hollow Knight out in an hour, maybe even less. And interestingly, now that I'm here, and can end the game if I want, I don't really want to.

It's been wonderful revisiting this masterpiece of a game. And I feel good at it! I can tackle bosses that used to induce extreme levels of salt in me no problem. It's forced me to reevaluate my skill at these kinds of games, and reckon with the fact that I'm probably capable of getting the true ending if I want to.

The big problem there is that I don't think I have time. I still need to get through Kingdom's Edge, fight Hornet again, go into the Abyss, get through Queen's Gardens, fight the Traitor Lord, get enough Essence to get into the White Palace, and then fight the true final boss. Honestly I kinda want to get all the charms and collectibles too (not quite 112% because boss rushes scare me) and I feel like if I had another week to do all of this I could.

I only have four days!!!

Fighting the Hollow Knight and getting the first ending is doable but I don't really want to do it, knowing that I have the skill to actually defeat the Radiance. I just don't have time, so I'm probably going to spend the next half a week collecting doodads. I don't like resuming playthroughs after a long absence, so realistically, I won't ever beat the game on this save file.

But unlike that first time I played the game, I don't feel beaten by it. I'll be back, probably to do a new playthrough in another few months, and finally get that true ending. Do I feel a little bad that I couldn't beat Radiance in time for Silksong? Yeah, a bit. But I still feel really accomplished; I've done everything I initially set out to do and more. And importantly, I feel ready for Silksong - I've sufficiently reacquainted myself with 2D platformers to the point where I'm at the peak of my abilities and don't have to get used to the controls again.

Hollow Knight is a damn good game, and I think mastering it has helped a lot with my confidence in my ability to take on genres of games I'm not really used to. I think that's the real takeaway from all this - for most folks, mastery of a game like Hollow Knight is something that you can do if you put your mind to it. Don't beat yourself up over failure. If you keep trying, eventually you'll get good at it. The time that takes varies person-to-person, but if you set your mind to it, you can do anything.

I can't wait to see what challenges Silksong brings me.