Hollow Knight is a quintessential metroidvania, oozing with its gloomy charm and strange cast of character, this nail-wielding bug-starring platformer is a game I really enjoyed. A bunch of smart systems working together with familiar tropes and design concepts make for a really well-playing responsive action game with a ton of places to discover and enemies to fight. If you haven’t played Hollow Knight, I really recommend it!
At its core, Hollow Knight is definitely a metroidvania. You run around a sprawling map, trying to accomplish different objectives, fighting enemies and collecting money and items along the way, either in chests or in small challenges of skill that you can overcome. At some spots of the map you’ll need something specific (climbing on walls, air-dashing, a projectile weapon) in order to defeat a specific enemy or clear an obstacle, so you go somewhere else in order to find the thing you need to progress. I feel like this game diverges a bit from the genre with its map - its got an hand-drawn quality to it and is not extremely precise or intuitive to use. I have to say that this bothered me for a bit, but then I learned how to deal with it. You can buy pins at some points to mark things on your map, and that helped greatly.
Besides swinging your sword in all directions - even downwards like a Zelda 2 pogo attack - you get ‘soul’ by attacking enemies and certain objects, which then you can use to heal yourself when you are damaged. This takes a little bit of time so there is some risk involved, but it’s a really smart move to allow the player to heal like that. Soul can also be used to do other things like shoot projectiles, so you have to choose what you’ll use it on. Whenever you die, you need to ‘corpse run’ in order to get back your money by defeating a shadowy version of yourself; this felt a bit unnecessary, but ultimately wasn’t much of a problem. The game also loves making you pay for basic things like save points and fast travel, but the money never was an issue in my case.
I don’t want to talk too much more about the game because Hollow Knight is something you’ll enjoy by playing. The controls are incredibly responsive and everything flows. The maps are well designed and you can’t deny the gloomy sad charm everything has as well. With all the available DLC there is a ton to do here, and it’s pretty great!
