Calling All Entomologists: Why You Should Play Hollow Knight
This game has been talked about to death, hasn’t it? Since its release in 2017, Team Cherry’s ambitious debut has taken the world of indie gaming by storm. We’ve all seen its moody, blue-purple tones and friendly bug-faces gracing our Steam homepages by now. Maybe you’ve already bought the game and wandered its misty hallways for a few hours before dropping it to play Slay the Spire again. It’s okay. I won’t blame you. I did the same at first. Let me tell you why you should give it a closer look.
You’ve probably noticed from countless other reviews by now that Hollow Knight is highly derivative. The names Metroid and Dark Souls will be thrown around a lot. It’s a Metroidvania game (Insectroid?), after all–a game of sprawling, branching corridors locked by sensational and empowering items that serve as de facto keycards for doors you’ve passed and doors you’ve yet to find. Metroidvania games share a common DNA, and Dark Souls takes already takes influence from them, so really it’s just imitating a long line of refined imitations, right? Hollow Knight is just an exemplar of a genre and nothing more?
I wouldn’t say so, illustrative rhetorical question. Hollow Knight does not just distill elements from other games; that would be reductive. Hollow Knight is additive: it takes the formula of a Souls-like-Metroidvania game and then adds to it. It adds all of its interwoven stories and interlocking mechanisms and interconnected levels and interspersed secrets liberally, and uses them to create something distinctly new. The un-restriction of the map and your freedom to explore in so many directions feels bold and unprecedented even for a genre whose primary characteristic is that very freedom because of just how far it takes it. The open-endedness of its levels feels overwhelming in just the right way to inspire curiosity, and sequence-breaking almost loses its meaning given how loose “sequence” already is in the conjoining labyrinths of Hollow Knight. It makes Super Metroid look linear by comparison.
Hollow Knight also learns from its predecessors, carrying both the carefully crafted polish of Metroid and the expansiveness, customizability, and extensive postgame content of Castlevania. It even takes structural cues from Dark Souls, making boss fights engaging challenges that leave you looking forward to the next. (Though only the optional bosses really reach the level of difficulty of a true Souls boss, that’s not a problem–Hollow Knight simply isn’t interested in being Dark Souls, just in learning from its successes. You can see more of this influence in its worldbuilding.) It oozes atmosphere all its own, despite evoking feelings similar to the lonely dread of Metroid, the bleak mystery of Dark Souls, and the Gothic spookiness of Castlevania in equal measure.
The game does not just timidly rehash the decisions of more talented designers; it confidently re-asserts every decision it makes. It’s liable to remind you why you loved those classics by showing you a new experience which rivals the quality of those that inspired it. Hollow Knight‘s design is not a success of repetition, but, much like its gameplay, a success of exploration, finding new opportunities in well-trodden places.