Hollow Knight Review | Green Ornstein’s Bucket List of Games

You know those games you always heard were ground-breaking and era-defining but you never got round to playing? The ones you know, as a devout gamer, you must experience at some point in your life? 

Have you piled up 50 or so of these games over the years and need an excuse to play through them? 

...No? 

Well I do!

Welcome to Green Ornstein’s Bucket List of Games! Where we go through the classics, the gems, and the hyped to which we all went “Wow, I should play that...if I have time and it goes on sale”. 

Will these games ring true to their reputations or will all those recommendations have been for nothing? Either way, let’s have some fun.

Let's sharpen those nails, gather some soul and start exploring.

Special thanks to Curmudgeon Film Talk for drawing me all small and cute(r).

I’m certainly grateful to video games during this time. What a privilege it is to have some escapism from the plagues and crazy people. Anyway, Hollow Knight (2017) has you venturing into a plague-infested world full of crazy pe...

For fuck sake. 

Plagues and infestations are a default format for video games, but now it feels like an art-imitating-life situation. Despite that, beauty can be found if you look in the right places. Through any epidemic, there will come serenity and a sense of adventure as we progress through it, though that’s no excuse for driving to Barnard Castle. This leads me to Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight.

Hollow Knight follows the adventures of an unnamed Knight (not the titular Hollow Knight, just a fan) who ventures through the labyrinthine kingdom of Hollownest - a world plagued by a disease, corrupting the inhabitants. That’s all the story you’re getting upfront. As far as you’re concerned, your goal is to explore and kill everything that looks at you funny.

I’ve heard it referred to as chibi Dark Souls (2011) which is fairly accurate. I said in my NieR: Automata (2017) review that you’d have a harder time finding a game that doesn't incorporate dark souls than finding one that does. Regardless, Hollow Knight makes more of a direct attempt to emulate its atmosphere, method of storytelling, and of course, difficulty. 

While it’s not a bad thing per se, it does make it harder to give a full overview of all mechanics as I could just say “It’s Dark Souls but…” However, it appears more to be homaging DS rather than trying to rip it off, and it succeeds at the story depth and atmosphere. So it’s less about what DS mechanics it uses but rather, does Hollow Knight make them work for itself?

Yeah I’d say so.

The crucial difference is that it’s a 2D metroidvania instead of an open world. While the expected theme of entropy is present in a Souls-style game, it bolsters more of a serenity through its music and hand-drawn-looking characters and enemies, all of which are bugs. You come across beetles, maggots, mantids and arachnids, all with desire to completely eviscerate you with their lovely, fluid animations. 

Similarly to DS, you’re told very little from the offset. You know the drill - a quick, vague cutscene then it’s off down the hole. However, it's effective in that it throws you into the gameplay quicker and lends itself naturally to the explorative aspect of a metroidvania. Other familiar mechanics include losing your currency upon death and having to reclaim it. The main change this time is that the thing you must reclaim is now a ghost of you that actively fights back. It’s like even your previous life hates you.

It's certainly a tranquil and hauntingly wondrous world to explore. The music lends an air of mysticism as if you’re venturing through the relics of a forgotten city. Many characters you meet are not nihilistic or tortured souls, but rather explorers or seekers of adventure. This gives them a relatively chipper vibe and even bouts of humour and likeability thrown into the mix.

Cornifer the map man is a standout. You have to track him down in each subsection to get the latest map for the newest area, and he quickly becomes one of those guys that you warm to as the game progresses and becomes more labyrinthine.

Aw look at him, scribbling away all jolly. 

Though considering the map only fills in bits you’ve actually been to, one wonders why we needed to buy them rather than just get a piece of paper and fill it in ourselves. 

Though I guess there’s nothing else to spend money on. Since you’re at risk of losing it, you are very cautious to save up your Geo (in-game currency) to purchase items from the above ground town of Dirtmouth. However, at around the midway point (provided you’ve done a little bit of grinding) there’s nothing else to buy. So you’re left venturing through enemy territory with 5 grand on you, which ironically raises tension way more than any threat to life.

Which leads naturally onto the difficulty.

Being 2D means the bosses are simpler, and there are less mechanics to keep track of - e.g. camera and dodge rolling - but the downside is that the overall speed of the fight is far greater. You end up pressing every button in a panic, and more often than you’d care to admit, you’ll dash right into the boss you’re trying to avoid. There’s also not much in the way of tactics, or having types of attacks that do the most damage to individual bosses. Your best bet is to hit and dash away like it's a murderous slap-fight.

Or just run...

Similar to bonfires in DS, in-game benches serve as save points and recovery areas. However, unlike DS, it is rare to have them placed near the boss that last killed you, so it's very likely you can’t just keep throwing yourself at them.

Also make note, you’ll respawn at the last bench you rested at, not the nearest. So if you died on the East side of the map but you last rested on the West side, then have fun journeying all the way back just to die again.

So, as for advice: A) stop at every bench you pass on your journey, you never know when you might need it, and B) If you're just trying to get to a bench to rest and then take a break, just quit the main menu and open your file again. The game saves your progress anyway and you’ll appear right at a bench.

Additionally, you’re equipped with a soul vessel which fills up by attacking enemies, and you can use it to either heal yourself or cast spells. 

A good idea in theory, forcing you to make snap decisions to prioritise health or power. It also means you can’t cheese bosses from a distance and you have to attack to gain enough energy to restore health. However, it’s flawed in that a spell costs the same amount of energy as restoring a heart (they’re called masks in this game but they’re basically hearts). 

And believe me, in a boss fight, having enough energy to restore a heart is more of a priority than any spell. Dark Souls III (2016) had a comparable mechanic whereby you have your healing items for health or power/magic. Nevertheless, that game allowed you to set your own ratio depending on your play style. I feel Hollow Knight could have benefitted from a similar idea, but then again, it seems rather unfair at this stage. I can hear it screaming at me “we have unique ideas too!” while I take a baseball bat engraved with “be MORE like DS” straight to their hopes and dreams.

Also the spells don’t do significantly more damage than basic attacks unless you have specific charms equipped. For this reason, I bypassed the spells entirely. You unlock a form of ground pound that I only ever used for getting down pits incredibly quickly, as opposed to actual fighting.

Not only have you got spells, you’ve got charms up the wazoo to find. These work similarly to the rings in DS, giving you passive buffs that you can swap out, e.g. faster dashing, longer range, more health etc. Since you’re not forced into 1 of many set builds, you can completely change your approach to certain enemies and bosses by swapping out charms. 

There are certainly useful ones, but you will get fooled into thinking having a correct assortment of charms will make you somehow invincible. 

It won’t. But it won’t stop you from going out of your way to find the things. 

There are also some that I feel were last second decisions as they substitute for features the game should have had anyway. For instance, one charm tells you where you actually are when you look at the map. As someone with the memory of a goldfish swimming in a tub of Baileys Irish cream, I can’t imagine ever unequipping that.

It succeeds where many games - especially metroidvanias - should, in that the abilities you unlock allow you to traverse around the world quicker and more efficiently. This is totally indispensable, especially since you’ll be backtracking through the same regions time and time again and going into the little nooks and crannies you missed the first time around. We’re talking double jumping, wall climbing, invulnerability to acid, and a crystal burst that flings you across the map like a melancholic road runner.

He’s too stoic to admit he’s having fun.

Its lack of clear direction, aside from the map which you basically fill in yourself, encourages blind exploration and at times venturing down random paths just to see what happens. While you do backtrack, it rarely feels stale as you can make notes and place markers on small areas you know you must come back to later with your new abilities. Though there are times when there is absolutely no shame in watching playthroughs to figure out where the hell you’re supposed to go next. 

One aspect I must also praise Team Cherry for (aside from being named like the campiest evil gang from Pokémon (1996-)) is having the DLC packs come free, included in the now complete “Voidheart edition”. 

They are small and mainly optional, but they give enough new content to still feel like a contribution. Even without them though, you’ll certainly get your money’s worth with Hollow Knight. For a kickstarter-backed indie metroidvania, there’s countless hours of gaming to be had, whether that be through exploration or the countless attempts to kill the same boss over and over again.

You can use all that time to get all the different endings. There’s the ending where you play normally and get little resolution, then there’s the 3 or so other endings where you’ll have to do so much exploration and go through the most treacherous boss fights, and still get little resolution.

Though in fairness, that’s not a new complaint to the Souls-like template. There’s always an element of ambiguity, but it also means you’re not sure what you achieved until you watch the mandatory YouTube dissection video. Still, if you’re a completionist, this’ll certainly butter your obsessive-compulsive bread.

In any case, if you want something cheap to keep you entertained for many hours, you could certainly give Hollow Knight a go. At the very least, it’ll give you some little glimpses of hope, right before you turn on the news again.

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If dark fantasy's not your thing and you're more of a cyberpunk person, then check out Living Prose's True Names: Fantasy and Cyberspace piece.

There's also lots more of Green Ornstein's content to view.

Also, excitingly, we've started a podcast. Check out our pilot/experiment episode Everything and Nothing.