Also Note: I didn’t even try to avoid spoilers.
One more note: Follow me on Twitch maybe! www.twitch.tv/roosterjones
Zote the Mighty – in his final, tenth, mightiest (most enchanting!) form – landed right on my head. Eight masks of damage. I paused the game to agonize and explain on-stream my mistake, as I am wont to do: I am characteristically over-conservative with my SOUL, but here, had over-spent on fireballs (technically “shade souls” but I don’t love the name) and thus was left dry when I turned to clear an escape route. I fired a blank, and Zote’s invincible, fearless butt found its way onto my pointy head.
Despite the mistake, Zote was bested after just a few more hits. I didn’t even see it coming; was hard to remember how long that particular fight was, after trying so many. It felt great, though, because I didn’t just hack and mash my way there: I earned it, played well, and Hollow Knight once again proved to me how precisely orchestrated its balance of challenge and fairness really was.
Why does this matter? Well, for one, it’s how I finished the game. I had wrapped up 106% (total completion at the time of this writing) earlier in the day and had resolved to clear some bonus content: namely, Path of Pain and all ten Zote fights. But more importantly, the moment was so representative of what made the game great in the ~50 hours preceding it.
I love this game with few reservations. Below, I take a crack at explaining the plentiful strengths and scattered weaknesses of the best platformer of any sort I’ve played in quite some time.
One more note: Follow me on Twitch maybe! www.twitch.tv/roosterjones
TL;DR
Hollow Knight is great, and maybe amazing. 9/10. I seem to have more reservations with my praise (that is, more than 0) than many others, but they’re nearly irrelevant compared to the game’s achievements, the foremost among them being the crisp, balanced gameplay & difficulty, a striking and memorable setting (including incredible character design), and an innovative and fun game mechanic (Charms). Hollow Knight currently ranks as my 21st favorite game of all time.Zote the Mighty – in his final, tenth, mightiest (most enchanting!) form – landed right on my head. Eight masks of damage. I paused the game to agonize and explain on-stream my mistake, as I am wont to do: I am characteristically over-conservative with my SOUL, but here, had over-spent on fireballs (technically “shade souls” but I don’t love the name) and thus was left dry when I turned to clear an escape route. I fired a blank, and Zote’s invincible, fearless butt found its way onto my pointy head.
Despite the mistake, Zote was bested after just a few more hits. I didn’t even see it coming; was hard to remember how long that particular fight was, after trying so many. It felt great, though, because I didn’t just hack and mash my way there: I earned it, played well, and Hollow Knight once again proved to me how precisely orchestrated its balance of challenge and fairness really was.
Why does this matter? Well, for one, it’s how I finished the game. I had wrapped up 106% (total completion at the time of this writing) earlier in the day and had resolved to clear some bonus content: namely, Path of Pain and all ten Zote fights. But more importantly, the moment was so representative of what made the game great in the ~50 hours preceding it.
- Difficult, fair, rewarding boss fight? Check.
- Uninterruptive background humor, expertly relieving the depressing and oft-creepy setting? Yep.
- Using a near-full suite of my in-game skills and practiced strategies..? TAKE A GUESS!
I love this game with few reservations. Below, I take a crack at explaining the plentiful strengths and scattered weaknesses of the best platformer of any sort I’ve played in quite some time.
YOU HAD ME AT “POGO”
Woah, did I know it was love from the opening minutes. Setting and cute characters aside - more on that below - this puppy handles like you want it to handle. Short hops, lagless controls, sweet swooshy sword swipes: firing this game up for the first time is like when you’re on a first date, she looks better than her Tinder picture does, and she nonchalantly reveals that she’s got an Xbox and totally is going to be down with the fact that you still have some MTG cards in a shoebox.The audio gets, all, “you just dove underwater” like you’re getting a concussion when you get hit, and you get this neat little pause and visual darkening all to ensure that you really feel it. I didn’t realize how important the experience of getting hit truly was until the first time I walked into one of those grubby Goomba guys. This little detail winds up going a long way.
The hits you dish out, too, boy are just so chunky. The knockback is consistent and feels awesome. The sound effects are helpful and crisp. Swiping at doodads as you meander becomes a way of life, and *even if* Hollownest didn’t have a series of excellent ways to travel, walking around wouldn’t ever be too much of a chore. Team Cherry taps into the simple pleasure of breaking things to turn every commute into an adventure.
A bit more below on this, but I’d be remiss to not mention the suite of movement upgrades you collect along the way. The additional satisfaction you get from flinging the Hollow Boy to and fro as his agile arensal grows rivals that of some SNES platformer classics like Yoshi’s Island 2 and Donkey Kong Country 2. I’m starting to bore myself a bit with the unfettered praise, but fighting with pogos and Monarch Wings (double jumps) especially really make you feel like the undead badass ninja boy that you always knew you were deep down inside.
The charge attacks are pretty crappy, even with the charm. That’s, uh, the only bad thing I have about the gameplay. MOVING ON!
CHARMED (NOT OVERCHARMED)
It didn't take long for the charm system to prove itself to me as very carefully balanced, and in a low-key way as being a serious driver for why the gameplay was so god damn good. Much in the same way as you don't think much about your air conditioning when it's working well, I didn't think too much about it for the first couple of hours, simply switching in and out and experimenting to meet new challenges (in particular, boss fights).After replacing a couple rounds of charms for which I initially assessed as “auto-includes,” I started to appreciate just how relevant the vast majority of the game’s charms really are. Sure, a handful – namely, Fury of the Fallen, Glowing Womb, Sharp Shadow, and Nailmaster’s Glory, among a few others – didn’t frequently find spots. But the fact that I had a distinct setup for nearly every boss is no mean feat. The sheer variety of possible effects (a lot of which were effective, but more importantly, a lot of which were FUN) made me feel so often like a tactical genius (or, more often, thanking my chat for their recommendations, since they’re better at this than I am).
[ Favorites: Shaman, Thorns, Steady Body, Mark of Pride, Flukenest. ]
HOLLOWNEST, MY HOLLOWNEST
I could never decide, and still can’t, if the world of Hollownest is bigger or smaller than I would have thought. I was continually (eventually, naively) stunned by how distinct and entertaining each new world was. The Fungal Wastes feels gross, and makes sense near the Royal Waterways & City of Tears. I felt like I was terribly high up in the Howling Cliffs, and terribly alone in the abyss. For a game with such a pervasive theme of melancholy and undead crap, each area really does shine in its unique way – even thematically similar areas like Deepnest and the Abyss. Other games (Skyrim sticks out to me) typically aren’t able to at once maintain a macabre over-theme well still having the player experience be richly varied.My one major complaint is that the Hive, while cool in its own right, seems like a bit of a throwaway area. I discovered it very late – happening just to walk past it – and was excited by yet another area that felt like sort of an “endgame” or extra super-cool or super-difficult little experience (a la Kingdom’s Edge, far reaches of Deepnest). It’s not really any of that, and very disappointingly, didn’t even have a boss in the final, cavernous, final chamber?! I wouldn’t be surprised if future DLC rectified this shortcoming.
[ Favorite: Crystal Caves, but only by a tiny margin: essentially just to pick something. The world is so well intertwined, and so many areas so small, it does feel a bit strange of a question to evaluate. ]
Impressively, nearly impossibly, I never was at too deep a loss as far as what to do next. Of course, the extra movement abilities, once found, open up hours of content all at once. Even in between those times, however, there’s always at least one unexplored hallway to find your way down! I didn’t expect that at all in a game so big and so at-your-own-pace. I still don’t know how they did it...maybe I was just lucky.
NETWORKING AS A VESSEL + SWEET, SWEET BOSS FIGHTS
That does, however, lead pretty well into my next small criticism: the scattered and overly-missable nature of NPC interaction. It felt strange to me too frequently that I was expected to remember all of these similar-looking Nightmare Before Christmas looking fellows; while it was infrequently (maybe never) really all that crucial to the plot to do so, it was a little frustrating that my relationship to pretty much everything in the game was either violent or confusing. I will concede that the at-your-own-pace element is a core component, and a successful one, of the game in general, but IF there’s content to be enjoyed, I’d prefer to have it idiot-proof! I learned later that many of these characters - including some of those with the mini-quests built in - were kickstarter goals and backer-specific designs, which to me explains a lot about why so many of these folks left me confused.It goes without saying, so I almost decided not to say, that the character design and setting (including the atmospheric, low-key, snugly-fit soundtrack) is fantastic. LOOK AT IT. It’s obvious that these guys care about their game, and the few bugs (pun unavoidable) or inconsistencies I ran into were not at all frustrating (I had a few bosses freeze until I paused/unpaused, and once tricked some foreground into staying put when it should have disappeared.
Despite their aforementioned scatteredness, the game’s collective cast played a big part in driving the game’s compelling nature. Hornet, Fly and the other merchants, Zote, and later, Grimm, were entertaining, often comically relieving, and VERY frequently adorable. It’s a bit of a shame that we didn’t have the chance to get very connected to anyone, but in a game absolutely stuffed with content, I’m willing to bet that was a design choice, and I can’t honestly be too mad about it. Team Cherry had neatly decided on a vision for this game, and I suspect that adding too much dialogue and deep relationships might have been heavier than it was worth.
Speaking of Zote and Grimm, the game’s bosses were about as god damn good as I could have possibly hoped for. They were distinct, scaling in difficulty, frequently optional (which I find extremely cool), occasionally funny, but two things moreso than anything else: difficult and solvable (which in conjunction makes them satisfying). As most good platforming boss fights tend to be, these were rewarding exercises in puzzle-solving, reflexes, and discipline. Throw in the Charm strategy component, and you’ve got my single favorite element in the entire game. Except for...
[ Favorites: Nightmare King Grimm, Mantis Lords. ]
I GET GOOSEBUMPS WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE PATH OF PAIN
The Path of Pain though. There is nothing I love more than optional super-bosses or challenge areas, and the Path of Pain (in addition to having the runaway best music in the game) hit it out of the park. I would have preferred it to be a little less impossible to get to...still don’t think I understand the logic in breaking the rules of the game (i.e. slapping your nail against an unremarkable wall), challenge area or not. That said, your Hollow Boy truly becomes a Hollow Man when you beat those two Kingsmoulds.SORRY CAN YOU SAY THAT AGAIN
Well, the story winds up being cohesive enough by the time you’re done: there was some sort of animalistic Old Order, a relatively civilized New Order, a collapse of New Order, and then with True Ending Hollow Boy, the beginning of the Restoration of New Order. Great.This isn’t too hard of a story to get across, but the game seems insistent on having everyone and everything be profound and cryptic all the time.
(I am going to play some more and grab some examples I promise)
Bottom line, it was only mildly frustrating to not understand my own motivations, the motivations of the main NPCs, and any more specificity about the background than “the kingdom has fallen.” Given the game’s ample strengths, we can go ahead and give them a pass here.
I wonder how much of the design, or perhaps even more the reception, if affected by the fact that we live in an era where a wiki page check is but a few seconds away. Did Team Cherry just mail it in on the details knowing that your average gamer is going to not pay attention and look it up anyway? Did they do their best, fall short, and just have people not care? Am I simply either too stupid or too detail-oriented to be satisfied with plot clarity that isn’t actually that different from your average game these days? Is this the last rhetorical question in this section?
