Hollow Knight

I think about the first time I dropped into Dirtmouth's well and the game just let me stand there in silence, the wind above, the dark below, no waypoint arrow, no quest log pop-up. That restraint is Team Cherry's whole thesis: Hallownest does not want to be understood quickly. It wants to be felt first. What you are getting here is a Metroidvania built on the classic loop of locked doors and earned keys, but one that loosens the rails earlier than almost anything in its genre. Once you have the air dash and wall-jump, the underground kingdom opens up in ways that feel genuinely disorientating in the best sense. You carry a nail (the game's sword, plain and blunt as that sounds), a pool of Soul that doubles as both a healing resource and spell fuel, and a charm loadout that you assemble from equippable notch slots. The charm system is the game's quiet masterstroke: each piece nudges your playstyle rather than rewriting it, so a build focused on range with a healing accelerator still plays like Hollow Knight, just your Hollow Knight. The Geo economy adds real tension too. Dying means leaving a Shade behind at the spot where you fell, and you must fight that shadow to recover every coin you were carrying. Push on with full pockets, or bank at a bench? It is a small loop, but it puts weight behind every new corridor. The hand-drawn art still stops me mid-run. Each region, from the rain-soaked City of Tears to the bioluminescent fungal warrens of Fog Canyon, has its own palette and emotional register. Christopher Larkin's score sits somewhere between chamber music and lullaby, and it does something rare: it makes silence feel deliberate rather than absent. The lore is delivered in fragments through vendor chatter, enemy death descriptions, and carved inscriptions. You will piece it together or you won't, and the game is indifferent either way. Some players find that maddening. I find it respectful. Here is where honesty matters. Hollow Knight is not universally gentle. The map system, where you must buy a map from a cartographer for each region and then fill it in by resting at benches, creates genuine disorientation in the larger, more labyrinthine zones. Fast travel exists but is limited to stagecoach stops spread unevenly across the world, so long runs back to distant bosses are a real cost. Some difficulty spikes, particularly in the late-game White Palace platforming gauntlet and certain optional boss arenas, feel steeper than the surrounding content. New players who are not comfortable with repeated boss deaths and slow self-teaching will hit a wall before they reach the game's most extraordinary moments. For everyone else, Hollow Knight is one of the most complete things two people have ever shipped. The base game is substantial on its own, and the free content updates added after launch (Grimm Troupe, Godmaster, and others) layered in optional boss rushes and lore threads that serious players have spent hundreds of hours inside. It knows exactly what it is, it knows when to let the music breathe, and it knows, crucially, how to make a ruined insect kingdom feel like somewhere you genuinely mourn.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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