Hollow Knight (2017)

Adoration of this game aside, The White Palace could use more benches. I’ve completed it multiple times, including the Path of Pain, but I agree with Mark Brown that this optional part of the game is one of the few downsides of Hollow Knight, or as he put it,

a nightmare hellscape void of misery that’s as hard as anything in Super Meat Boy or Celeste but like, without the super sharp platforming controls of either game.

I wonder how many people resigned themselves to only getting the “bad” ending because they simply didn’t enjoy The White Palace. I hope Team Cherry provides a more balanced challenge in Silksong if they include something like the White Palace again.

For those curious where the Mark Brown quote comes from it can be found at around 35:30 in the following Boss Keys video on Hollow Knight world design:

I'm really glad I saved a lot of stuff from the early parts of the game for later, once my nail's been upgraded twice and I have the Grimmchild to help. Beat The Collector and Mantis Lords in like two tries each, no problems, because I'm just so overpowered now lmao Also managed to finish the second Colosseum trail as well.

Nosk, on the other hand, is a son of a bitch and I'm genuinely unsure if I'll be capable of defeating him. Dude won't stop moving and never gives me the chance to heal. I may just farm Geo so I can upgrade all the Leg Eater's charms to unbreakable and really hammer home my overpoweredness lol

Still having a lot of fun, surprisingly even 25 hours in, and am already starting to run out of things to do aside from boss fights. There's some small things I need to do, like the Grey Mourner's quest and find all the grubs and do the Warrior Grave battles for the Dreamnail essence and whatnot, but yeah, I feel like I've done a good portion of the game already despite still having a handful of bosses left, not to mention the teachers.

Ya know, for 15 bucks, it's ridiculous the amount of content you get in this game.

The problem with the laundry list thing I mentioned in a previous status, is that it rarely works out the way you want it to. Sure, I can come up with a checklist of things I wanna accomplish today, but I might only wind up accomplishing one of those, if I'm lucky, because the way the game is designed, I'm just gonna run into stuff I didn't mean to and get sucked into that instead lol

It's a good idea, in theory, but it never seems to pan out the way I hope. Sure, I still make great progress, but rarely do I walk away with the satisfaction of achieving the few things I set out to achieve. It's an odd combination of annoyance and accomplishment. Today I hope to find The Hive and maybe beat a boss, but I guarantee you as soon as I go into the underground, I'm just gonna wind up finding things I didn't mean to and instead spend my whole gametime exploring that instead.

Yeah, progress will be made, just not the progress I set out to make.

I find myself, every time I load this up, going in with a laundry list of shit to do so I don't just wander aimlessly. At the beginning it was fine, when I needed to uncover things, specifically the map, but at this point, 20 hours in, I now just have a little litany of crap to do so I don't waste time. That being said, I'm still 30 hours ahead of my Steam run, so that's pretty good.

I will say though, the fact that like every achievement in this game is about 5 to 10 points is ridiculous lmao I have 15 achievements and only 95 gamerscore total in the game. Absolutely ludicrous.

My current experience with Hollow Knight is very different from my first. I've been playing it for a week now and I noticed something, I am much further ahead in the game in half the time it took the first time around. I've also noticed that the game feels much more relaxing and myself relaxed while playing than the first time. So I decided to dig up some of the things I felt or wrote during my first playthrough. In one of my first statuses I wrote:

As much as this is a gorgeous game, and that I enjoy lots of aspects of it, I’m at a point where I’m not sure I’m going to keep going with it. It’s beautiful and magical but it’s also flawed and punishing. I’m putting it down for a bit and we’ll see if I come back to it.

I remember feeling like this, and now I can't believe I did. This playthrough has been such a smooth ride that I can't imagine wanting to quit. Perhaps my skills are heightened, or I know what to expect, but something has made this a very chill time. I went on to say in a comment in that thread that

I was just grumpy about one of the challenge rooms with the, what feels like at the time, endless waves of enemies. I just couldn’t beat the room no matter how many times I tried. I took a break and then tried again and did it. I swear it was worse than all of the bosses combined.

I know which room this is, and this time I breezed through it (and every other one like it) without a second thought.

In another post I wrote:

When I am done this game, I'm really going to need something real relaxing to play on my Switch.

And now I'm of the mind that Hollow Knight is the relaxing game I'm playing to enjoy a stress free experience. I'm actually surprised I needed a Hollow Knight detox. At this point I want Sliksong to drop next week so I can move from directly from Hollow Knight to the sequel.

In one last post, I said:

I also don’t have the last nail upgrade because I still can’t pull myself through the Trial of the Conqueror. I’d say that I might not be the best gamer in the world, but I can usually handle a good challenge. But hell if I can beat some of these things in Hollow Knight.

I completed the Trial of the Conqueror the other night, soon after arriving. No shade toward my past self, but boy was it easy. It really didn't give me pause at any point and it felt like a fun invigorating time. Kids, don't let people tell you old age is only downhill. I'm apparently getting better with age, lol.

I also posted that I hated The Watcher Knights three years ago. They were giving me a hell of a time. This time around? One fight and they were down. They weren't even difficult. What three years difference makes I guess.

Well I’m neck deep in and fully committed to a replay of Hollow Knight now. It feels much easier this time around even though it’s been three years since I last played the game. It’s also beautiful on the OLED Switch. I know the Xbox version runs at 120fps, and even higher on Steam Deck if the information overlay is to be trusted but there’s something wonderful about playing it handheld on an OLED screen with rich full black areas. Hollow Knight looks amazing on any screen but especially beautiful on this one. And my newly modded d-pad joy-con really does make the game a joy to play handheld. I can’t recommend it enough.

It was also nice to see Hornet and I look forward to her game very soon 😉

i remember my first playthrough i did deepnest right after beating the mantis lords... this time i tried to put it off as long as possible, and wow! i knew this game was non-linear, but i didn't enter deepnest until finishing everything in every other area except kingdom's edge. cornifer even sold me the map for kingdom's edge before i'd ever entered it for the first time, i wonder what triggers that.

i do take enjoyment out of doing things as late as possible in games.

huh. i beat soul master on my first try. hell, i only got hit twice. i remember this being harder. have i gotten better at video games since... what, 2017? i remember having to make the trek from the bench many times, and how satisfying it felt to win.

crazy. and i think i did it earlier this time too, since I went to the Soul Sanctum immediately after getting the double jump. I think last time I went past the Mantis Lords and fell into the spider area? I vaguely recalled it being a split choice so i tried to do it different this time.

another thing i'm immediately struck by is how much better the map design is than in chasm. i'm trashing on chasm a lot, but backtracking was miserable in that game because the map was a bunch of long corridors that don't connect at all. in hollow knight, you can immediately see how all the passageways loop back around through each other, as opposed to all of them sprawling out in opposite directions.

exploring feels fun because you're like "ohhhh, i see, this part connects to this part..." "oh, so that's what was on the other side of this"... and each thing you explore leads to exciting new areas, as opposed to chasm which is like "okay, i traversed this massive corridor, but there was a dirt block at the end of it with a chest underneath it... i'll come back when i have the shovel and get it"

started a replay of this, because chasm was so underwhelming and made me want a better metroidvania. i think it's been long enough that i've forgotten enough for it to feel fresh.

was immediately shocked the first time an enemy hit me and i saw how intense the damage animation was. i forgot it was like this!

but this is such great design. i love mechanics that communicate things to the player without using words: the damage animation communicates "getting hit is a big deal. this isn't the type of game where you should just button mash the enemies to death and then heal yourself"