Hollow Knight gets so many things right that the best thing I could say off the start is that if you like platformers, just go get it. If you even like a few of them, you should probably go play it. It does Metroidvania so well that it’s better than Metroid or Castlevania, and I don’t say that lightly. Unlike most platformers, it also adds unbelievable art, sound and story. If you played Hollow Knight when it first came out, you should be pleasantly surprised to know that Team Cherry has released several free updates and expansions that expand on the original content!
Right from the intro, the art and the sound draw you into Hollow Knight. It is dark, foreboding and utterly beautiful. The world has a cutesy gothic element to it, if that even makes sense, and is populated by anthropomorphic cartoon bugs. The good, the bad and even you are made of hand-drawn-looking insects based on various real-world creepers.
You wake up to this dark world in a very short and introspective introduction. From this moment on you will spend your days in a variety of noir biomes filled with colorful hues overlaying shadowy backgrounds shining with bursts of ambient lighting that react to your movements and actions.
So much of the charm of Hollow Knight resides in the wonderful storytelling that it does. You awaken with little knowledge of yourself or the world around you. Everything you will learn about the kingdom of Hollowrest will come to you through exploration and interaction. Â
Your first stop is the near-abandoned village of Dirtmouth where you will also encounter your first friendly NPC. They provide the first clues about what has gone wrong with this world, informing you that most of the villagers went mad and delved down into the well and the world below. The village has several abandoned hovels that are slowly repopulated as you find their inhabitants in the subterranean depths below, reopening shops with wares to help you unearth more of the story.
There are tons of amazing biomes to explore as you delve further and deeper into Hollowrest and encounter its many denizens who have all been either affected or infected by the Radiance that began appearing in their dreams. The Pale King has taken measures to stop the infection and throughout your journey you will slowly uncover its origin and how you, the Hollow Knight, fit into these machinations.
Hollow Knight may have been the very game that coined the term “Metroidvania,” which has become a rich genre of its own. It certainly helped spark the movement as a mainstream branch of platformers. It takes the Metroid and Castlevania inspired gameplay style of mapping and exploration from the confines of a creepy space station or haunted castle and blows it up into a whole kingdom.
Like all Metroidvania games, the mapping is a crucial part of the game, whether done manually (like many gamers apparently still do) by the user or through the in-game map. Hollow Knight doubles down on this feature requiring the hero to acquire items and skills to make the mapping more complex and useful. One of the first shops you will unluck is actually a cartography store that sells you relics to more easily annotate your exploration on the auto-map!
The other requirement of any Metroidvania worth it’s salt is that many parts of the world are inaccessible at first due to your lack of skills or equipment and require the hero to return at a later point when they have progressed and become more powerful. Hollow Knight nails this with your character initially only having a basic attack and jump for movement-based abilities as well as one special ability that allows you to heal yourself with the souls of your dead enemies. As you progress, you gain more abilities, spells and “Charms” (aka equipment) that will make combat more dynamic and allow you to access areas you previously could not get to.
Many of the upgrades you will find throughout the game are purchased with the game’s currency, Geo, which drops from enemies and nodes. Even the collection of Geo is gamified. At first I found it annoying that the Geo would sometimes fly from an enemy’s corpse into spikes or crevices I couldn’t access, only to find that, charmingly, a shopkeeper soon offered me a relic that would magnetically attract Geo to me from a distance. Geo is also essentially your reason to stay alive as death is not permanent (except in Steel Mode) but does cause you to drop all of your currently held wealth, and it’s heartbreaking, so try to avoid it!
