Now Playing: Hollow Knight

I kind of love and hate Hollow Knight. I almost gave up on the title after only 40 minutes of play, not because it’s a bad game, but because it just wasn’t clicking with me. But I’m not one to give up so easily. I decided to persist, to see if Hollow Knight would improve and evolve as I progressed. And it did, in some ways. To say that Hollow Knight is a ‘slow burn’ would be an understatement. You have to be willing to put 2-3 hours into the title before it really begins to get good.

Good, not great. I feel like I spent the entire game waiting for Hollow Knight to take that extra step, to go from being a good but flawed experience, into an unforgettable classic. I wanted another Ori and the Blind Forest. But I didn’t get it. Not even close.

Hollow Knight is a 2D side scrolling action / platform game very much in the ‘metroidvania’ style. As you explore the world and defeat various bosses, you’ll gain new abilities which will, in turn, unlock new areas to explore and new bosses to fight. It’s a tried and tested cycle of progression, pushing the player through the world and regularly introducing new locations and challenges from beginning to end.

I don’t think Hollow Knight handles its progression particularly well, however. As I said, the opening few hours are a slow slog with little variety or challenge, and it takes a few hours before you unlock the necessary skills to really open up this fascinating world. But even then, progression feels needlessly slow.

Every new location should be a joy to explore but in Hollow Knight, they can feel like a tedious slog as you slowly exhaust all available routes until you find the ‘correct’ path. This is less of an issue as you advance through the game and unlock all of the various abilities and items, but during the early stages, when you’re very limited by where you can go, it results in a lot of ‘dead ends’ followed by an infuriating amount of backtracking.

Even with a new (if limited) fast travel system, Hollow Knight is a backtracking nightmare during the early to mid game. You might say that’s part of being a metroidvania title – but Ori used the same system of progression, so why did it work so well there and not here? The answer is – world design.

In Ori, previously explored areas could be traversed far more rapidly when you had gained the appropriate skills. There were multiple paths based around these skills and they made backtracking fast, easy and more importantly – forced the player to put their new abilities to the test. But in Hollow Knight, even when you’ve unlocked all of the different skills, alternate routes and fast travel stations, backtracking through old areas isn’t significantly faster than when you began.

That’s because your skills are primarily used to access and explore new areas, not to traverse existing areas. So when you have to backtrack through previously explored levels it’s rare that you’ll be able to use your new skills to speed up the process.

I don’t want to get too hung up on the backtracking issue because it’s not the only flaw holding Hollow Knight back and, as I’ve said, it becomes less of an issue towards the end game. Slow, methodical exploration and progression is encouraged and rewarded by Hollow Knight’s design. And that’s not a bad thing. But it is an issue when it comes to traversing previously explored areas.

It results in the game feeling padded with needless and unnecessary travel. There are far too many ‘redundant’ screens that seem to serve no purpose within the overall design. They seem to exist purely to slow the player down. It’s not all bad – because there are areas where they clearly thought of placing ‘short cuts’ within the design allowing you to bypass previous sections. So no, it doesn’t get it entirely wrong. But for everything it gets right, it seems to get something equally wrong. And that is particularly true when it comes to difficulty.

It’s always tricky talking about difficulty because it’s such a subjective topic. I’ve seen Hollow Knight referred to as a ‘2D Dark Souls’ and that’s actually a description that attracted me to the title, in addition to the wonderful visuals and music. Because if you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know I rated Dark Souls very highly.

Dark Souls got difficulty right. It offered what I considered to be a fair and balanced challenge. When I died in Dark Souls, I was never angry at the game. I knew I’d died because I’d made a mistake, or because I wasn’t yet prepared to face the challenge before me. Every death was a chance to learn and improve.

I can’t say the same for Hollow Knight. I was frequently irritated by the game because I was taking hits or getting killed in ways that felt beyond my control. Deaths that felt random and unavoidable. I’m not just talking about the extensive selection of boss characters. Even traversing the world could be a pain.

Hollow Knight has some lovely visuals and environments, but it also loves what you might call ‘foreground’ scenery which, at times, can obscure your view of enemies, hostile projectiles or even hazards like spikes and water. When you take a hit by something you couldn’t even see, it doesn’t feel very fair.

The game also takes great delight in punishing the player for trying to move quickly. As I said – slow, methodical exploration is encouraged. But when I’m passing through an area for the 4th or 5th time, I just want to hurry on my way. Hollow Knight makes that difficult with a lot of needless environmental hazards.

I’m talking about having to repeat a series of tedious precision jumps, or avoid falling rocks which, when you’re in a hurry, may catch you out and result in a cheap hit. And taking even simple hits like this can prove punishing due to what I call ‘chain damage’.

In Hollow Knight, taking one hit can lead to a chain of hits either due to enemy or level design. A basic example would be this – a falling rock hits you (1 hit), knocking you from a platform onto an enemy below (2 hits) which then knocks you onto some spikes (3 hits). I don’t want to over exaggerate the issue, but it is a problem, particularly in some of the boss fights, nearly all of which take place in enclosed arenas and a single slip can result in you getting ‘stuck’ in a corner, taking a chain of hits you simply can’t avoid.

Because hits can be very random. Sometimes they’ll knock you into trouble, and sometimes they won’t. It just feels that it’s luck, not skill, that sometimes determines the outcome of a fight. And that, I think, is really at the heart of Hollow Knight’s problems and why it never quite clicked for me. It’s not really a game of ‘skill’ but of slow, methodical trial and error gameplay.

Every piece of the game be it boss or world design is set up in an intentional way to slow and punish the player. Traversing and defeating these challenges isn’t a matter of using your abilities in a skilful way – it’s more about learning the patterns and responding accordingly.

But to me, that’s not very interesting or engaging gameplay. Once you know the patterns, it’s not hard to progress – it’s just slow. It’s a tedious game of trial and error be it finding the ‘correct’ path to go or the ‘correct’ way to defeat a boss.

Which wouldn’t bother me so much if the combat was a little more varied. The game has a fantastic variety of enemies to fight, but you have very limited combat abilities and nearly every enemy is dealt with in exactly the same manner – a basic repetition of strike and dodge. Your new skills never really come into play in the boss fights. Every fight is just a case of learning the pattern and knowing when to strike, when to dodge and when it’s safe to heal.

Oh yes, healing. Healing in Hollow Knight can take a few seconds even when regenerating a single life. This forces you to use your healing wisely. What I don’t like, however, is the unnecessary delay upon entering and exiting the heal animation. You’re effectively locked into place unable to move, dodge or strike. You can argue that you should also take this delay into account when choosing to heal, but there are times when it doesn’t feel entirely fair.

One boss, for example, would frequently and randomly spawn smaller enemies during the fight. And if one spawns right next to you as you’re entering a heal there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent the hit. If it happens, it’s just bad luck. But luck should never be the defining factor that can win or lose you fights.

Too many hits in Hollow Knight feel cheap, random and unavoidable – at least until you learn the patterns, and then it’s actually pretty easy to progress (aside from the aforementioned ‘bad luck’ moments). If you like that trial and error style of play, you’ll probably love this. I don’t. Which isn’t really a fault of the game, as such, but more of a personal preference.

The store page promises ‘tightly tuned controls’, but that wasn’t always my experience. I sometimes found the controls unresponsive, especially for precision jumps or fast dodges, which adds to the feeling that some hits are cheap. And hit detection could feel dodgy, both for enemy attacks and environmental threats – sometimes you’ll clip a spike and take a hit, and other times you won’t.

The positioning of save points is also a point of contention, as at times it may result in a 3-4 minute journey back to a boss fight. Not a major problem, but it slows you down. Hollow Knight doesn’t always value or respect your time which is a significant problem.

There’s just too many ways that Hollow Knight goes wrong for me to consider it a game as good as say, Ori or Dark Souls, two games that it shares much in common with both structurally and thematically. Ori got the balance between exploration and progression nearly perfect, whereas Dark Souls got the balance between difficulty, skill and luck just right.

Hollow Knight, on the other hand, is all over the place. Sometimes, it gets these things right, but many times, it doesn’t. It results in a very mixed, uneven and incredibly frustrating experience that I always felt was just a small step beyond being one of the best games I’ve played. It gets so much right, but is continually hampered by poor design choices that drag the experience down.

Hollow Knight never takes that step. It never truly opens up and lets the player enjoy their new skills or abilities. Everything has to be slow, methodical and punishing. Some may like it, but to me, it’s just not very fun. It’s a tedious slog of trial and error gameplay that I found as irritating as enjoyable. But I kept playing it because for every moment it annoyed me, it managed to hook me back in with something new.

It’s certainly not bad. It’s good, but sadly not great. You know when I write so much about a game it’s because I’m frustrated by it. Because I wanted to like it more than I did. Hollow Knight is good. There’s a lot I like about it. I just wanted it to be better.

7/10