Hollow Knight (2017)

Ah, yes, I had forgotten this room but the memories came back as soon as I got onto it. The worst room into the whole game. Swarms of enemies with little contrast with the background, that appear from thin air, damaging you instantly, and 5 foreground elements that are large enough to completely or significantly obscure the character and enemies.

Pictured: not being able to see where I am.

On top of that, the fucking shade is placed inside the challenge room, in the middle of all that mess.

And it's not even fun. Just an endless barrage of common enemies.

I've just spent a flight playing Hollow Knight. The mantis fight is so fun.

I expected this second playthrough to be smoother than the first and end up with a more positive appreciation for some of the systems and design decisions that bugged me the first time around. But nope. The shade system is still dumb and the length bossruns are still annoying.

juego de mierda, me dejó temblando en el Sendero del Dolor, me costó 6 horas pasarlo, lloré de la felicidad cuando me di cuenta que se había terminado. Dejando de lado ese trauma, juegaso. Me costó mucho adaptarme y aprender a jugar, fue el primer (y probablemente último) metroidvania que jugué y que puedo decir orgullosamente que pasé al 100%. Al principio lo empecé a jugar y como ví que no llegaba a ningún lado lo dejé, meses después lo instalé de nuevo y ahí fue cuando se me pegó. No puedo explicar la cantidad de veces que tuve ganas de romper todo por no poder pasar ciertos bosses y mini bosses (el hollow knight fue el más fácil). Estuve meses jugándolo y se convirtió en uno de mis juegos favoritos, pero es uno de esos juegos que no me dan ganas de rejugarlo ni aunque me apuntaran con un arma, pagaría por no volver a jugarlo.

★★★★★ 5/5

The gaming club I'm in is going to play Hollow Knight for the November meetup and for some reason I decided to search if it was possible to play it on Android. Surprisingly, it is! A guy decompiled the game and compiled it back to a native Android app.

I installed it and tried it out just to see if it works, and boy, does this game play so good? The movement, the impacts of each hit, the big explosion when taking damage, how the environment responds to the player. I had forgotten how good of a gamefeel this game had.

Seems like I'm maybe wrapping up now. A couple of the sidequests I've found felt like busywork (collecting essence, fighting the same circus guys half a dozen times), but most of them I've really been enjoying!

After hearing about the Path of Pain in hushed whispers for so long, it was neat to finally see it myself and find a way through its buzzsaw hellscape. Loved how both that level and the Colosseum fights pushed pogo jumping more into the foreground, and the flower pilgrimage quest was deliciously tense.

I recently finished playing through Hollow Knight, and it was very fun. This is the gold standard in Indie Games for a lot of people, and while I agree that it's a very cool Metroidvania with lots of interesting ideas, the way some of these are implemented into the overall experience feels somewhat messy, like they don't fit together. I had a lot of fun completing this game, but in the end, I wouldn't say I was actually satisfied by it.

Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania released by Team Cherry in 2017, and probably the most important game in the entire Bug Genre of Indie Games. You play as The Knight, a tiny little critter on his quest to save the bug kingdom of Hallownest from an all-consuming infection.

While most Metroidvanias revolve around having an interconnected world players can explore and find secrets in, Hollow Knight takes a more grandiose approach to the genre by focusing on the story, worldbuilding, and boss fights rather than exploration. And while it makes for a very memorable and interesting experience, I do think the overall gameplay loop is compromised by this.

When it comes to exploring the world, I had a lot of issues with how you get your abilities, as they aren't given to you at a steady pace. For the first ten or so hours, you're playing a metroidvania with a very limited skillset, where traversing the map is frustrating and you spend most of your time wandering aimlessly looking for the next objective. And by the time yo uhave all your abilities, although moving around becomes really fun, exploration starts to feel somewhat meaningless.

Team Cherry was very clearly influenced by games in the Dark Souls series when working on this, and they did an amazing job at recreating that unique FromSoftware feeling, leading Hollow Knight to have one of the best atmospheres and worldbuilding I've seen on indie games. However, even though they did an amazing job at recreating the intricacies of soulslikes in their own game, I don't think they cared too much about adapting them to a new genre.

The Knights moveset is very limited. Aside from a couple spells, your attacks entirely consist of simple slashes with short range, and animations cannot be cancelled while you fight. It requires you to be slow and methodical in combat. But also, a good amount of boss fights are super fast, and revolve around you reacting to their attacks as quickly as possible, dodging out of the way and sneaking in a hit or two when you can. It requires you to be fast, precise and reactive... so which is it, then?

I think the game as a whole is held back by its influences. It's like the game wants to be played a certain way, but doesn't give you the right tools to do so, leaving Hollow Knight stuck in this middle ground that doesn't really commit to a style of play.

But enough about gameplay. Is the story good? Hell yeah, it's a tragic tale about two gods obsessed with themselves, doing everything in their power to best the other one, ultimately forgetting about the people they were supposed to protect and bringing their own kingdoms to ruin. Sounds cool, right? Well you better get ready for 10 hours of homework if you wanna know about it!

Compared to the huge amount of backstory for the game, it's like almost no relevant events happen as you play. Everything interesting happened before you started playing, and if you want to learn about it, you'll have to read through a book's worth of Zanzibart-like dialogue. And if you don't? Then you don't get to understand the few events you get to actually play through.

I do think this style of writing has its merits, and it helps give the world a more mysterious feeling, like you're stepping into the ruins of a kingdom that was destroyed a long time ago. However, it also makes the parts of the story you get to experience way less impactful and unsatisfying. Fighting a cool boss doesn't hit the same when you don't have to look into the backstories of 30 characters just to know who they are.

Finally, let's talk about the presentation. It's one of the best I've seen.

Visually speaking, Hollow Knight is absolutely gorgeous. It has a beautifully animated hand drawn style, and despite how cute it all looks, still manages to encapsulate how bleak the world of Hallownest is.

The soundtrack is also very good, although a bit too samey in some points. However, my favorite part about the game's audio has to be the voice acting, because oh my god it's perfect. Despite the fact that none of the bugs talk english, they're still dubbed by real people, and you'll get to hear them make silly bug sounds and talk gibberish all throughout the game. It's a very tiny detail, but it adds so much to the game's aesthetic and I love it so much.

Overall, I do think Hollow Knight is a good game, although one that's being held back by its influences from becoming the best version of itself. It may sound like a joke given the current state of the franchise, but I truly think that most issues in the game could be easily fixed if the developers took their time and made a sequel.

I hadn't watched any of the Silksong trailers before playing, but I checked them out once I was done and it does look like the developers are embracing a more agile and acrobatic approach for the sequel. They have finally committed to one style of play, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Looking back on it, I had a lot of fun playing through Hollow Knight, and I'd definitely say it was worth it. But as I was playing, I couldn't help but notice how flawed the game was, and for a game as universally acclaimed as this, it kinda left me wanting more from it. 8/10

At the core, I like this game. It moves beautifully, it looks gorgeous and sounds wonderful. Mechanically, clearly it's very deliberately designed with a lot of polished mechanics and interlocking systems that open up a ton of possibilities. But the game is clearly for people that are not me. This is my first metroidvania and my first soulslike and playing this made it clear that I will not be a fan of either genre.

In my mind, there were three distinct stages. The early stage is of discovery. The world is unexplored and everywhere you go you can find new things. New areas with a particular feel, new enemies with different attack patterns that need new strategies, and new abilities that open un the map. The complete lack of clear direction is not a problem. It's fun being lost and not knowing where to go next, because you're guaranteed to find something new if you just venture past the mapped areas, which is most of the map. That part is pretty much delightful from start to finish.

The midgame is of repetition. You've explored a lot of the map and discovered enough areas gated by new abilities that you forget where they were. Not knowing where to go next to advance means going through well-trodden territory to find that next step, which is made more annoying by the limited fast travel. You also get harder enemies and bosses that force you to repeat the same corpse and boss runs over and over again. The main culprit the shade mechanic that puts you in a diminished state when you die, which forces/encourages you to go directly to fetch your corpse combined with the paucity of checkpoints. This, for me, is a bummer; as I posted before, I work from home to avoid the commute.

The latter game and post end game is about tidying up. Eventually you realise exactly what you need to do and have clear objectives, so you go and finish them off and end the game with less than 70% completion and large inaccessible areas. So you go to the wiki and read that in order to explore further you actually need to go to some obscure corner of the map to get a thing so you can then go to another part of the map to get another thing that gives you the ability you need to then get another two things, which are deep in some cavern... you get the idea. It's not bad. It's fine. By now you're familiar enough with the map and combat, and upgraded enough to feel more confident running around. It also lets to to find cool characters and gives you more understanding of the world. Some of the challenges are cool (albeit weird) like the White Palace, or the Traitor Lord fight with Cloth.

There's a final (uncounted and short) stage stage of diminishing returns. Eventually the increasingly harder and sometimes more tedious steps for each new item or ability lead to increasingly smaller rewards. Like was getting Shape of Unn with it by this point just to tick the box and to see the character turn into a cute little worm once?

So, in summary, I loved the gameplay and the artstyle and the world, but hated the backtracking.

I had seen a few short clips of the gameplay of hollow knight a while back, and I thought it looked neat, but didn't bother looking into it more. Fast forward a few years later, my friend gifted it to me for Christmas, so I started playing during the holidays.

Oh boy.

I did not expect to fall in love with this game as fast and as hard as I did. Who knew you could get attached to bugs? Also the gameplay is so fun? Hard, obviously, but so crisp and pleasant. The soundtrack, the story and the lore you gotta dig for in-game, the ambiance, everything. When I tell you I couldn't shut up about this game to anyone who had the misfortune of being anywhere near me, I mean it.

I played for hours on end and loved every second of it (even the parts where I kept dying and could've thrown my controller out of frustration but didn't). I especially loved the writing of this game. I tend to gravitate more towards games that are strong story wise and I was pleasantly surprised that this was the case with Hollow Knight, which I mistakenly thought was merely a fun platformer with good mechanics. I absolutely adored how you got small tidbits of information about the lore sprinkled through the game, and had to pay attention to them and put them all together yourself. The mystery surrounding the underground world and what happened to it kept me hooked to the game.

I still need find all of the charms and finish the colosseum of fools, so will go back eventually (and obviously start from scratch again).

Just give it a try already.

Hollow Knight perfectly encapsulates the feeling of isolation and discovery in a metroidvania. It entreats players to wander deeper and deeper in an elaborate maze filled with boss fights and secrets. It tells its story with the environments, whether it’s the sparsely populated town of Dirtmouth, the luscious botanical gardens of Greenpath or the remnants of a great civilization in the City of Tears.

The game pulls no punches and requires players to master the art of combat, the platforming and even the navigation. Hollow Knight is one of the only metroidvania games that I know of, that does NOT fill in the map for you at the onset. In other games of its kind, it’s a given that even when you don’t have the map, when you visit a room, that room will be automatically filled out on your map, but not so with Hollow Knight.

In Hollow Knight, maps must be purchased either in Dirtmouth or encountering Cornifer the map scribe hidden somewhere in that specific region. These maps only highlight where the next ability can be found. Large sections of these purchased maps are still incomplete and must be manually explored. Exploring the world in Hollow Knight is thrilling because you never know what could be on the other side of the room. I often found myself unexpectedly venturing into new areas, completing platforming puzzles and fighting mini-bosses.

The platforming puzzles are challenging but fair. The early platforming sequences are fairly tame, but grow in complexity as you learn the ability to wall climb, dash and eventually double jump. The hardest platforming puzzles in Hollow Knight are almost reminiscent of Super Meat Boy, with an abundance of circular saw blades and spiked traps. Thankfully the most difficult platforming sequences are completely optional and only required to achieve the best ending.

Combat feels nice and weighty. When you strike an enemy or object, there is some recoil after each strike. It’s possible to deflect and parry attacks with proper timing, but otherwise it is often safer to dash or jump away. The hero eventually learns more complex abilities such as firing a Hadouken-like fireball and doing a Zelda inspired spin attack. Learning these abilities is one thing, but execution is a whole other story. Simple sword swipes and dodges are also completely viable, but I love how the game included these abilities whenever the case calls for them.

The boss fights are very Souls inspired especially in the latter half. In the beginning the boss fights are manageable. You’re allowed to make multiple mistakes, get hit multiple times and can still recover to put up a fight. However, once you’re about halfway into the game, the boss fights become episodes in pattern recognition that leave you little time to recover. If you don’t think you have the reflexes and combat chops required for a Souls-like game, Hollow Knight provides other ways to overcome bosses with clever use of charms.

Charms in Hollow Knight are slottable bonus perks for the hero. You can slot in a set number of charms and they can range from enhancing damage dealt with each strike, to granting you faster dashes or even allowing you to summon minions to fight alongside you. The game allows you to build your character how you want to play. Viable builds include a standard physical damage dealer with agile movement, spell caster builds and minion builds. Unfortunately this is where some parts of the game lost me.

While it is viable to have multiple charm builds to conquer Hollow Knight, many of the more useful charms are hidden away in secret passageways or available after difficult platforming puzzles. To truly take advantage of some of the aforementioned charm builds, it is often necessary to resort to a guide to locate these charms. This issue is especially accentuated in the end game where the right combination of charms can make a substantial difference in boss fights.

My journey with Hollow Knight began modestly. I expected to play a game that followed the typical metroidvania formula but was consistently surprised the longer I played. Yes, Hollow Knight still shares the metroidvania DNA of backtracking through the same areas over and over again, but it also features a substantially deep combat and movement system. There were few times that I felt the game was completely unfair (exception would be DLC boss fights like Nightmare King Grimm) and I always knew how to learn from my mistakes whether it was better pattern recognition or adjusting my charm build.

At the end, I am blown away with what Hollow Knight accomplishes. The game manages to mix metroidvania exploration, Souls-like combat and Super Meat Boy platforming without feeling impossible. Hollow Knight sets a new standard in what a metroidvania can accomplish. If I was ever in the mood to play yet another metroidvania, it better play like Hollow Knight.

This game has already gotten so much praise and here I am to give it more. Because it damn well deserves every word of positive feedback. And I can say with confidence it’s one of the best games I’ve ever had the joy to play.

I can talk about Hollow Knight all day and night, about its masterfully crafted world, boss battles, soundtrack and sound as a whole, huge variety of enemy and area designs, etc, etc. Honestly, just pick an aspect of this game – I have nothing else but pure adoration and enjoyment from experiencing it.

I can only speak of my personal opinion, as I’m sure it’s not for everyone and I’m no expert on how games get balanced, so yeah I just feel like I should talk about it as I do with every game I love to my core.

Others have said it before me and I can have to say it here, too – go do yourself a favor and get this game. Without watching any trailers or anything of sorts. The wonder of exploration all while not knowing what awaits is the best feeling you can get from Hollow Knight.

That said, I wish I could erase my memory of it and play it again for the first time. I jumped into it completely blind of what awaits me into the depths of the ruined and rotten kingdom of Hallownest. I didn’t even know how big the map was gonna turn out in the end. What I imagined to be mere 4 hours of jumping around, fighting stuff and finding some new areas, turned out to be 70+ hours of exploration, moments of calm and moments of frustration, facing challenges and overcoming them, tasting the sweet taste of well and fairly earned victory, uncovering secrets untold and let me tell you, it’s not going to be easy (I'm looking at you, Path of Pain). And it’s by no means unnecessarily long, no, every new encounter with an area, friendly character or foe is going to be well, new, diverse and crafted with care.

If you ask me how I would describe the overall difficulty – fair. Your main method of becoming better – and I’m not talking about mere numbers and levels and exp here, I mean your actual skill as a player, is through exploration and a fair share of patience. The world is at your mercy, you decide where to go first and next. Stumbled upon a too challenging boss and feel like you aren’t prepared enough? No worries, leave this jerk alone for a while, go explore some more, find new places and secret areas, maybe even another boss who you’ll find more suitable for your tastes, upgrade your nail, try out new charm selections to switch up your playstyle. And then go back to this incredibly hard enemy and show them who’s the boss.

You see, the thing I adore most here is that you essentially can’t grind levels and become OP with minimum effort and some time on hand. There is no number to determine at what rate you’re getting better and how much. You’ll find out yourself. For every single boss fight (and that’s where the game shines most) you have to put in some strategy of how you’re gonna approach the given circumstances. There’s no way to button mash in hopes the invisible heath bar of the foe to eventually reach 0 – that’s a sure guarantee for fast death. Not even one enemy is a recolor of previous ones. Every single one has its own moveset and attack pattern and you’ll have to learn and get used to them in order to win smartly, not by luck, because luck in unreliable to depend on, but by pure skill. The sense of satisfaction you get by defeating a particularly hard boss is divine. If you’ve played the game, you’ll know what I’m talking about and surely you’ll understand why my favorite boss is Nightmare King Grimm, who’s perceived by many as one of the hardest in the entire game. Gosh, took me 60+ disgraceful defeats and I was honest to god not even mad at dying because of how much fun I was having learning this peculiar dance of a fight.

Okay, enough of the gameplay, let’s bring the spotlight to the other stuff, too. All the NPCs are a wonderful addition to this dying world, still somehow full of life. The characters are lovable and will make you feel less alone in the vast kingdom. There are even charms you can equip that will give you tiny companions who may not be the best at helping in combat but they’re so gosh darn adorable you’ll wish to never remove them (Is my love for Grimmchild that apparent? Yes, yes it is). The dialogue is beautifully written, even though you’ll probably need the aid of the lore experts to piece together the whole picture if you’re not one yourself. I absolutely love the story; its parts are strewn across the land, like a puzzle what won’t simply assemble by itself. The music is a blessing to the ears and I can’t get enough of it. One particular piece nearly brings me to tears every time I hear it and one partiiiiiiicular “final” boss makes me so sad I have to fight them, yes I’m emotional leave me alone. Also as you can probably see, the art style is splendid and I find myself drawing characters of the game when I’m not playing it. Beauty in simplicity, yeah.

And oh, a word of advice – when you see the credits roll for the first time and you still haven’t reached at least 100% completion, keep going. There’s so much more that awaits you.

Note - this includes all DLC up through Godmaster.

Hollow Knight is a game that is brimming with content and exploration, and for an indie effort it's amazingly impressive in that regard. Playing the role of a little knight in a bug-like world out to stop the Hollow Knight and the infection...and the god Radiance and...alright, this story can get pretty confusing - it doesn't help that it takes a very limited approach to storytelling so that even players who get over 100% completion still don't quite understand their goals. The mechanical goal is to explore every nook and cranny and kill every little boss hiding there.

The boss count is staggering in this one, with fun fights, easy fights, and hair-tearing, frustrating monstrosities. There are a variety of upgrades, mostly for movement, but there also lies an equippable charm system that has a couple of strategies up their sleeve. It's not as robust as one would expect, but the right charms come in handy and an endgame charm set is mandatory. That said, with the DLC included the fights can get a little too painful. It wears a very Souls-like identity on its sleeve, right up to having to get your resources back after dying and learning a boss's movements down to every animation in order to survive.

This kind of works, but in a 2D game with a single weapon type, this can definitely get a little more frustrating. Movement and determining where the player is at all times is much more important than what combat style to use, and most of the harder battles come down to battles of attrition after getting all the upgrades available. This goes quadruple for the DLC, which can range from helpful and interesting content added to the base game but also includes a disgusting place that's filled to the brim with merciless and brain-numbing boss rushes.

The game itself is gorgeous. I haven't seen a game in such a long while that breathes so much life and variety into every of its many areas, making discovering them a joy in itself, even if you don't quite recognize what's going on. The music is melancholic and serviceable - some standout tunes include such things as the City of Tears, but there's nothing quite as memorable as a Souls track lying around.

Hollow Knight is a game with plenty of polish and design that at times hurts more than helps, but it's definitely worth playing through the base game once and seeing how much of the nonlinear world the player can explore.

The best Metroidvania I've ever played. I do not know how to describe Hollow Knight the way he deserves it, and not even the way I would like it. But I'll try to give you a summary of some aspects of the game.

Hollow Knight is the supermegapower implicit story of an insect and the world he explores. I find it very interesting the way the story is told, in that Dark Souls style, that everything is interpretive and in order to understand something, it really needs to be focused and pay attention. But whatever, history is not the high point of this game.

If you saw it somewhere and got interested, maybe it was by the graphics. It is one of the most beautiful artistic expressions I have ever seen in a video game and it maintains this standard of quality the ENTIRE game, and in reality, it only improves.

With one of the most gigantic worlds and full of things to do that I've seen on a Metroidvania, Hollow Knight nurtures and satisfies your will for exploration and mysteries all the time. It's incredible that you play 40/50 hours of this game just moved by the feeling of curiosity and exploration. And all this is balanced with platform challenges, new and very interesting areas, very well made enemies, VERY difficult but majestic bosses and overly polished and fluid combat.

This game is a masterpiece and I would recommend it to literally all the people and living things in the universe who have the ability to appreciate a good work. Definitely a must play and possibly one of the best games of all time. I look forward to the Silksong sequence.

Surprised how many people praise this game for being long. It takes about 30-40 hours to finish, but for me, that wasn't anything good. I wished this game would be 15 hours.

Most of the time you spend is on backtracking. There are save points and fast travel points, and fast travel points are rare, to the point there are entire areas without them. And then there's platforming and enemies. Bosses like Hive Knight are notorious for backtracking to them for 5 minutes of your real time. Wish I started playing this game with a guide, and then guide would tell me "first, get Dreamgate teleport".

And there are bosses. Some of them are well design. But some, like Watcher Knight or Radiance, are total mess of randomness. When beating them I didn't feel an achievement. I felt only relief. And the same I felt for finishing this game.

Thinking back to my feelings on this game when I first started playing, I'm surprised that I completed it. Compared to other modern "Metroidvania" games I've played, Hollow Knight is particularly punishing to new players. Upgrades are rare, save points must be uncovered through exploration, and one wrong turn will often result in a speedy demise.

Two aspects of Hollow Knight kept me playing. Its controls are responsive enough that I always felt I deserved a fair share of the blame for my demise. And I found the game's visuals very, very appealing... I loved the way these quirky characters look against the lush backgrounds, sort of like animation cels, and the world seemed original and unique.

Once I had upgraded a few times, uncovered more of the map, gathered (and practiced with) charms and became more well-versed in combat, I became hooked on the game's combination of exploration, collecting and combat. And each new area I discovered made me fall in love with the world Team Cherry created even more.

One other surprisingly enjoyable aspect of beating this game: The Hollow Knight fan community seems really dedicated and thorough. Although I love games, I'm not always the best at playing them, and the Hollow Knight wiki gave me warm, fuzzy feelings of playing with a strategy guide as a kid. Having to rely on walkthroughs and wikis would be a mark against a lot of games, but I found that it actually enhanced the experience for me, so I thought I'd mention it.

Hollow Knight is a 2D metroidvania set in a gigantic insect world, with some interesting rpg elements. It borrows a little bit from the Souls series, but the gameplay probably feels more like Castlevana: SotN more than anything.

PROS:

• Beautiful hand-drawn characters, enemies, locations, set pieces. This has restored my faith in the idea that 2D non-pixel art games can actually be beautiful. Definitely the most beautiful 2D platformer I've played.. ever. I can't think of any comparison. The character art is slightly old school cartoony, reminiscent of Felix the Cat or something. Spooky.
• RPG elements: as you progress through the game you unlock more abilities. You put these abilities into slots and this is how to "build" your character. The cool thing is you can always change your skills around whenever you rest, so you can change your character completely for each area or boss. This is intended, I think it would be very difficult to beat the game without constantly adjusting your build. Each enemy/boss has its own unique movement and attacks which you gradually learn how to dodge, avoid, counter, etc.
• Challenging: it's a tough game. It has things similar to bonfires and estus. You have unlimited respawns and you can expect to die a lot, especially when facing bosses. However, many areas and bosses are optional, so the game is friendly. It felt like just the right amount of difficulty in terms of both enemies, bosses and platforming. Difficulty increases as you progress, and you become more powerful as you gain more skills. Difficulty is present as both enemies, bosses and platforming, and there are some very tough platforming sections in the late game, especially as you unlock more skills (think Super Metroid).
• This game is gigantic: the game has a map, and thank god for that. Even with the map it's easy to get lost. There is fast travel (sort of) but really this game world is ridiculous. It really feels like it could be three or more different games stitched together. I finished it with 75% completion, and according to Steam it took me 68 hours (though I think I fell asleep while playing a couple times). And I skipped many of the hardest sections and bosses. There was an entire zone that I completely skipped. There is so much stuff in this game. 40 skills to collect and equip, maybe 10+ huge zones, I counted around 250 enemy types, maybe 30 bosses. Or more? It's huge. It's overwhelming. And I haven't even mentioned all the little secrets, storylines, NPCs, shops/merchants, items, etc.
• Very creative enemies. Each enemy behaves in its own unique way. Some of these enemies behaved/moved/attacked in ways that truly surprised me.. like, I had to pause the game and rub my eyes, really creative, I've never seen anything like it. This game can play with your mind, really really clever/unusual enemy encounters.
• Amazing atmosphere, very immersive. Jaw-dropping instrumental soundtrack. Fascinating lore. Just the overall feeling and atmosphere of the world is so dark, haunting, convincing. It's a delight to be in this strange world, it's never dull for a moment, and it'll keep you thinking and dreaming about it for weeks.

CONS:

• This game is gigantic: I will admit there were times when I felt that the game was too big. This can become an issue particularly in the late game when you're not sure where to go next. My pro tip is: listen to the old guy in town. He tells you where to go next.. I kinda forgot about him and ended up completely confused and wandering the world for many hours.
• Victim of Kickstarter: I came to a point in the game when I felt overwhelmed, and I had a sneaking suspicion. I went to Google and my suspicion was correct: this game was Kickstarted. It beat its goal and hit many stretch goals. I feel like the game was fleshed out a little more than necessary. It's great if you want a gigantic juicy game to sink your teeth into, but it doesn't make for a linear, streamlined experience. There are many sections/areas that would have probably landed on the cutting room floor in a normal development cycle, but I feel like many of these were "stretch goals" so the dev felt obligated to include everything.
• Victim of Kickstarter, Part 2: This is something small that has frustrated me in multiple games in recent years. Obduction was one particularly nasty offender. Basically there's a section in this game and it's a bit of a "hall of fame" thing, dedicated to the top tier Kickstarter backers. Playing the game and not even knowing it was a Kickstarter game, it really killed the immersion immediately and felt silly and overdone. But I can totally sympathise with the devs and why they did this.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I wanted this to be a really short, snappy review with a "pros and cons" list, but I got a little bit carried away, and my dot points turned into paragraphs. Either way, I've got to hand it to Hollow Knight. I think it retails at $15 or something, but there's so much content and it's all so well done. Every detail is finely, gorgeously crafted. There are so many places waiting to be explored: caves, cities, sewers, mountains, towns, burrows, mines, mansions, etc. etc. Each area has its own music theme, colour palette, atmosphere, enemies and bosses.

Really good game. Contender for my GotY2017, and you really get a lot of bang for your buck. My advice: get it, become immersed in this strange and magical world, meet all the weird insect people. It's a long and challenging journey, but it's very satisfying. I'm having a break for now while I recover my sanity, but I plan on coming back for the last 25% at some point.