Over the last decade, indie games have blown the hell up. Game making software is affordable and accessible, social media has connected programmers and artists and composers, and the generation that grew up playing games is now leading the charge towards subversion and innovation. Some of the best games in recent memory have been made by three or four people in their apartments.
This explosion of indie games has, as a result, breathed new life into the Metroidvania genre, a style of game that is objectively “the best” and “not at all just my opinion.” Long live the Metroidvania!
One title in this field has stood out in recent years as the indie Metroidvania of choice. It’s the game you absolutely have to play if you love this type of game. It’s epitome of indie development, of artistic ingenuity, of the merging of new and old! Yes, I’m talking about Hollow Knight.
I finally bought Hollow Knight earlier this year when it was released, physically, for the Switch. Though I was tied up in a few other games when I first made the purchase, it was certainly on my shortlist. After wrapping up my Bloodborne adventure and a quick dip through A Link to the Past, I finally popped open the box and was swept up by a wave of admiration.
Mind you, I hadn’t even inserted the cartridge yet. I was admiring the inside of the box. Contained in the plastic case was a map of Hollownest, which was folded up to have the appearance of a worn out envelope, as well as an insert explaining the background of the game and some of the core mechanics.
Remember manuals?
Clearly the folks at Team Cherry wanted this game to be an experience for the player from the very start, and my respect for these developers was already through the roof. These guys get it. So, without further ado, I booted up the Switch and got to work.
The first thing one learns from playing Hollow Knight is that it takes its cues not just from games of old, but also from modern trends in gaming. It’s actually three-quarters Metroid, one quarter Dark Souls. Isn’t everything part Dark Souls these days?
Yes, while the world features the branching paths, unlockable upgrades, and detailed exploration that define a Metroidvania, Hollow Knight also borrows the “drop your resources when you die, you have one chance to pick it up next time” mechanic that has wormed its way into a variety of games these days. This time around, you’re collecting “Geo,” which, like Souls, is your currency in the game. And, like in Dark Souls, it adds weight and consequence to your every move.
I devoted a month or so of my time to Hollow Knight. It’s an absolutely beautiful game. The animation is gorgeous, the lore is mysterious, and the music is a wonderful blend of melancholy and inspirational. You could easily fall down the rabbit hole on the internet reading about the history of Hollownest, heroes and villains long gone, and the rich characters that cross your path. While I played the game, my girlfriend sat on the couch next to me, laptop at the ready, reading about Hornet and the Soul Sanctum and the kingdom at large. There’s a lot to love in this game.
Though the artistic presentation is excellent, it’s not the core appeal of Hollow Knight. It’s a game, after all, so you’re here for gameplay.
As a Metroidvania game, Hollow Knight absolutely excels. The map is full of fine details, intricately connecting one area to the next, begging the player to explore every nook and cranny to find new friends, items to power-up, and lore to read up on. Even on a surface level, the map (as in the actual “thing you look at to see where you are”) is excellent. You always know where you are, it’s easy to pin down where you want to go, and the ability to leave markers on the map make exploration user-friendly without being too easy. As much as I love Super Metroid, the map-reading aspect of that game hasn’t aged as well as the rest of the game.
Hollow Knight pretty much nails (Ha!) every element that defines a Metroidvania. There were several instances where I’d just utter under my breath: “Wow.” If the goal of Team Cherry was to create a long-lost Metroid sequel, they hit a home run. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do Metroidvania in the modern age.
But you read the title of this piece. You know it isn’t all praise.
While Hollow Knight masterfully exemplifies all the best aspects of a Metroidvania game, it fails in nearly every other way. The shortcomings in combat mechanics and player stats are so intensely frustrating that I ultimately never finished the game. Let me explain….
Your primary means of combat in Hollow Knight is through swordfighting. You get a few skills here or there that allow for ranged combat, but by and large you will be melee fighting. That means you need to get up-close and personal with your enemies. Normal grunt villains in main corridors are fine, but boss battles can be an absolute nightmare. Small arenas mean you don’t have much room to avoid enemy attacks, high speeds allow the bosses to close gaps quickly, and 2D combat severely limits your ability to make swordfighting a truly balanced experience.
When you play Dark Souls, you have seven options when an enemy attacks: run left, roll right, retreat backwards, dive forward, dodge under, jump over, or deflect with your shield. Hollow Knight eliminates nearly half of those options; what’s left is: up, down, left, and right. That doesn’t sound that bad, does it? After all, Super Metroid was also a 2D game, so those same limitations applied there, no? The difference, of course, is that Super Metroid allowed for ranged combat.
The necessity to get close to your enemy, when coupled with the limitations in dimensions, means that getting “trapped” in the arena is incredibly common. While you do have tools, like Monarch Wings (double-jump) and the Mothwing Cloak (dash), to give you increased movement, bosses are often ridiculously fast, and waste no time in chasing after you. Several bosses, on top of this, can summon additional enemies who move in unique ways, so patterns aren’t always reliable to track.
This is an issue I faced quite frequently, particularly against the Watcher Knights. Two Knights, out of six, would be fighting me at any given time. One would barrel forward at full speed, meaning I’d need to jump over him, but the other would begin to bounce, thereby eliminating the “safety” of the top half of the map. Knight #1 took away the left/right dimension, and Knight #2 took away the up/down dimension. In a 2D game, that’s all of the dimensions.
Is this, in and of itself, insurmountable? No, absolutely not. I’d gotten “trapped” in boss arenas of all types before. You either get really good at dodging, or you begin to learn how much damage you can afford to take from such attacks and factor healing into your combat strategy.
The problem is that healing is also ridiculously frustrating. Some games, like Metroid, allow you to build up a huge health bar throughout the game and, in combat, you'll find health drops when you hit enemy weak points or break environmental elements on the edge of the area. Other games allow the player to carry health packs of some kind that can be consumed in the battle that will heal large portions of the player’s health. Games like Zelda pause the game while you sort through your inventory to heal; others, like Dark Souls, don’t let you pause, but keep your health packs at the ready on a dedicated button.
Hollow Knight forces you to “focus” to heal. You have a big ol’ jar of “Soul” that you accumulate from successful attacks in the top left of the screen. When you need to heal, you hold the A button, slowly drain Soul, and heal one Mask at a time. You start the game with 5 Masks, and most enemy attacks do 1 to 2 “Masks” worth of damage per turn. A full Soul Vessel can heal about 3 Masks, but that can vary based on upgrades. All of this information boils down to this: healing is an incredibly time-consuming process in Hollow Knight. Since you generally aren’t protected when you heal, a quick enemy can still hurt you while you’re doing this.
Since there are Dark Souls comparisons abound on this score, let’s do some comparing, shall we? Time for some math!
In Dark Souls, you can’t pause to consume Estus, and you are vulnerable to attacks when you consume it. At 30 FPS, It takes 70 frames to consume one flask of Estus, and one flask heals, on average, 580 HP. Based on the leveling system in Dark Souls, players can expect an average HP of 1100, meaning it takes 140 frames to heal, approximately, 100% of your HP in Dark Souls. In Hollow Knight, however, it takes 85 frames to heal one Mask. Assuming an you had the average seven Masks, and somehow had enough Soul to restore them all, it would take you 595 frames to heal 100% of your HP. That's over four times as long to heal.
That’s math, baby.
The above calculations, of course, don’t take into consideration arena size, enemy speed, or “dimensional variety” that could also factor into the general “ease of healing.” Dark Souls, for all the talk of its difficulty, was rarely unwilling to let you get out of dodge for a moment to heal. Hollow Knight, by virtue of its style, doesn’t even give you the option.
Playing the game, I managed to get, uh, pretty far? That’s a subjective term, of course, given all the bonus objectives and secret content in the game, but the fact remains: I didn’t beat it. Bosses took hours to complete, advancing past certain enemies was an exercise in frustration, and the game was become less fun boss after boss. I just plain didn’t want to keep going. I hated fighting bosses.
But then I’d clear a boss and the game became fun again. With the power up I’d achieved from a boss, a new portion of the map was opened to me, and, hey, now the Metroidvania-ing could resume! I’d run, jump, dash, and smash my way through the Kingdom’s Edge, the Queen’s Garden, the City of Tears! I was falling in love with this game all over again!
But then I’d advance to a boss and the game because miserable again. I’d dread every step I took, I’d dread the doors locking behind me, and I’d dread the brutal defeat I’d face over and over again. I was hating this game all over again.
I stopped when I ran out of map to explore. Sure, there were several nooks and crannies left for me to find, but in the grand scheme of things, I’d seen, essentially, everything there was to see. I made it to the top of the Crystal Peaks and the bottom of Deepnest. I Metroidvania-ed my way through the map. All that remained was bosses…so why bother playing anymore.
Quitting a game, for me, is an absolutely despicable feeling. Of course I haven’t beaten every game I’ve played, but I give them all the old college try. If a game is “good” and can be beaten, I usually at least clear the main quest. The ones I really love, well, those get the 100% seal of approval.
Hollow Knight, though, is an oddity. Usually when people give things a 5/10 rating, a B- rating, or a generally “middle of the road” review, your gut is to think that the game is just plain mediocre. That’s not the best approach to criticism, though, and it’s one the main reasons I avoid “ratings” like the plague. I could have given Hollow Knight a resounding two thumbs-up recommendation, or a “stay away at all costs” warning, depending on when you asked me. Sure, those two ends average out to a general shrug, but that doesn’t capture the complexities of a month-long experience.
So what’s the takeaway from all this? That I liked Hollow Knight sometimes and I didn’t like Hollow Knight some other times? I’ll be honest, this post has been sitting in my “to complete” pile for months, because there is a lot to unpack.
Is this a warning not to form expectations around a genre label? Hey, just because it’s a Metroidvania doesn’t mean it’s going to be my kind of Metroidvania. Times change, tastes evolve, people experiment, and while “Metroidvania” is a label for Hollow Knight, it doesn’t mean it’s the label. Maybe that’s the lesson here?
Or maybe it’s a warning about the merging of ideas? Perhaps the thesis of this is that the Dark Souls-y “leave behind you lost items” mechanic and dense lore translate well to a 2D environment, but close-quarters combat and difficult melee battles don’t. Should we be more careful about the things we try to adapt?
Perhaps this is just me trying to justify my unwillingness to complete the game? Am I just really bad at this combat and I’m looking for a way to vent and complain and justify the fact that I can’t beat the damn game? After all, thousands upon thousands of other people enjoy the game, maybe I’m trying to find an excuse for my shortcomings?
What if the whole point of this was to publish a post and convince some skilled modder to go into the code of the game and swap out the main character for Samus, thus allowing me to live out the fantasy of this being a secret Metroid game? That has to be the reason!
No, it’s not. (Or is it?). You’ll never know. It’s not the reason, but if someone does it I’ll be very happy to play it.
I think the real takeaway, after mulling it over for so long, is that there isn’t one big one. There are a dozen little ones. When someone asks us “Oh, how was Hollow Knight,” it’s our natural response to want to give a concise answer. “It’s great!” Nay, “it sucks!” Since we’re big stupid monkeys with brains that are full of big stupid emotions, the desire to have clear thoughts and clean articulations runs deep.
But that’s not how it works.
Our brains are complex. They often don’t respond to stimuli the way we want them to and they can’t always relay their mushy, amorphous emotions into insightful, logical thoughts. So I play a game like Hollow Knight and, while I hope it hits me in a big, impactful way, it doesn’t. It hits me a dozen different times in a bunch of smaller ways. It’s a complicated piece that invokes complicated feelings. I am here, playing the game, in a sea of mixed emotions.
But that’s when it hits me: this is a good thing.
No, I don’t feel happy that I failed to complete the game. But I’ve beaten dozens of games and felt nothing. I, truly, have no idea how many games I’ve finished that I can’t write about because I just have nothing to say about them. But I have something to say about Hollow Knight, and that’s because Hollow Knight is memorable. It crafts an experience, which, as I’ve mentioned before, should be the primary goal of absolutely every game.
So I put the game back on my shelf. Will I ever take it off again? Maybe, maybe not. Who can say? Was it a wholly positive experience? No, absolutely not. Do I regret it? Not one bit.
I got things I wanted: an excellent Metroidvania adventure, a unique story to consider, and a new soundtrack to add to my playlist. I also got things I didn’t want: a system of combat that didn’t jive with my brain and forced me fight in a way I find counterintuitive. But through all of this, I played, I learned, and I felt. Obviously every game cannot be a perfect emotional masterpiece and often we will find ourselves in this mysterious emotions hodge-podge. But those experiences are sometimes just as educational and rewarding, and they are a hell of a lot more memorable than those that fail to invoke a feeling of anything.
Post Script
I mentioned the soundtrack up above, so hell yes I'm gonna list out some music! I loved this score so much I purchased it on vinyl and, let me tell you, tracking down a copy was not easy. Anyway, here are my favorite tracks from the game.
Crossroads – After a quick tutorial section and tour of the starting hub of the game, the Knight drops into the Forgotten Crossroads. This first "real" portion of the game teaches you a lot and the music perfectly captures that feeling of magic and wonder.
Hornet – This is a recurring character in the game and is set to be the star of the upcoming spin-off game Silksong that I might love or hate. You fight her a few times, but she eventually becomes an ally in your quest to save Hallownest. This is her theme and it's spot on for her personality.
Greenpath – This one is absolutely beautiful. This game isn't exactly a happy one, as it, like a Souls game, takes place in a civilization in decline. While the people of Hallownest are on the outs, seeing new life bloom in the form of natural greenery...I don't know, it kinda give you hope that this place might be okay after all.
Mantis Lords – Ah yes, the elegant warriors from the noble class of praying mantises. It's an exciting fight, hard as hell, and also rather funny since, well, how often do you associate praying mantises with the upper class? The use of harpsichord here is absolutely fantastic and really sets the mood for this fight that you're surely going to lose.
Sealed Vessel – This is the music to the final boss I didn't make it to, aptly named The Hollow Knight. It also contains the score to the final cinematic, which is haunting and beautiful when you eventually watch it on YouTube.
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