There's a subset of video games that are quite prominent in the modern gamer's lexicon. Game that have hit such a massive threshold of players that they've become rather ubiquitous. You can divide this into AAA and indie games, despite these "indie" games often having publishers. But within this indie sphere, Hollow Knight seems to be one of the standout indie releases of the past decade. Aping off Dark Souls, which would be within the AAA division of games that have massive cultural pull from their massive playerbases.
Shockingly, I very much enjoy Dark Souls. Truly a wild an unexpected opinion. However despite enjoying Dark Souls, games that have taken the Souls franchise as a source of inspiration always seem to miss for me. Souls as a franchise is a game where you like the specific design choices in the game, you like the dressing on top of the structure. What Souls-inspired games misconstrue is that people what the core. Those games assume players want stamina bars and invulnerability frames on rolls, paired with high committal attacks, and a general high level of difficulty. None of those things are aspects I would say I enjoy a Souls game for. What I enjoy about Souls is the sense of exploration in a world that implies much more depth than it actually has.
I assumed Hollow Knight would be souls-inspired in the former way, and based on how I've seen people describe this game, my presumptions felt like they held merit. After playing Hollow Knight I'm genuinely shocked at how weird the experience was. What I played was the opposite of what I went in expecting.
Hollow Knight's difficulty is relatively low, and action is extremely noncommittal. You're put in the drivers seat and it's relatively fluid and straightforward. There's no i-frame dodging or parrying, just basic platformer combat that felt like it would've been right at home alongside Mega Man Zero, albeit with Hollow Knight at a much slower general game pace. Hollow Knight felt like it was made by people with an immense amount of respect for gaming in general, rather than made by people who have only experienced Dark Souls and other popular games.
The world design of Hollow Knight was very enjoyable, it's so massive with very little explained, but a lot implied. It gives you a jumping off point for your own assumptions to fill in the massive gaps, based on what I thought to be intriguing prompts from the context of this seemingly cursed old kingdom. The size of the map sprawl was truly impressive to me, it felt like the map just kept on expanding into brand new areas with very little sense of actual story progression. It was exploration and discovery purely for the sense of personal curiousity. I think part of what helped with this feeling was the lack of any kind of waypoint or explicit story-direction. The vast majority of bosses, items, and even areas in the game ended up being optional. But I only realized this after beating the game. It does lead to a minor feeling of "why am I even doing any of this, what purpose does this serve?" But that feeling is overpowered by curiousity of what new environment or enemies might be waiting up ahead. The lack of direction does lead and an exorbitant amount of time spent aimlessly wandering over previously-treaded ground, but I felt this to be a bit of the "point" of Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight wanted to give you a massive world to explore, give you things to be curious and wonder about, a game for you to get lost in. I think Hollow Knight immensely succeeded in this regard.
The combat I felt to be satisfactory, it got the job done but wasn't particularly fun or engaging. I feel like the game could've benefit from either being harder or easier, the current difficulty was a bit unsatisfying. The difficulty wasn't high enough to create a potential sense of threat and danger while exploring, but it also wasn't fun enough to feel like it was really adding anything to the experience. When the appeal of Hollow Knight is simply exploring a massive world, I feel like the combat could've been removed and the game would be just as good as it currently is. Creating more engaging combat would've required just creating more interesting enemy patterns and giving you more combat options. I don't think just making enemies hit harder or take more damage would've really enhanced the experience either, because it was very simple enemy patterns combined with limited combat options that were clearly designed around that just led to a simple and easy combat experience. Tweaking numbers in this scenario would've created just as easy of a game, just caused it to be more tedious from requiring you to do that same thing you already do, just for longer.
Hollow Knight to me feels like it's harkening back more to something akin to Myst, rather than trying to be Dark Souls in combat. It understands that the worldbuilding is the biggest appeal of Dark Souls. Hollow Knight very pleasantly surprised me, I'm very glad I played it, yet I'm almost left a little puzzled at how I still see people talk about this game as if it's 2D Dark Souls. I think Hollow Knight, despite its influences, stands as distinctly its own thing. It's not just Dark Souls, it's so many classic adventure games, it's metroidvanias, it's other 2D action-platformers. To single out only Dark Souls as a singular influence for the game feels very misguided, I would say this is an excellent game for people who just want to explore a huge world, and would lean towards recommending it to adventure game fans, not necessarily action game fans. The action is the worst part of the game.
— Juni - April 8th, 2025 —
