Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is such an oddball game to me in the sense that it's an incredible experience when the devs actually design it to challenge you but most of the game is painfully boring.

The spirit mechanic on paper is fine as a conventional meter system but I think the healing mechanic hurts it. I don't like the fact that it allows wreckless play because most enemies aren't actually capable of doing more than one piece of damage to you before they die and the amount of meter you build by attacking them alleviates it quickly. The few enemies that do are usually slow moving big bodies that either can be trivalized with an attack + dash away tactic or you can safely dash over their heads. This wouldn't be so bad if wasn't for the fact that in the moment to moment, enemies don't typically control much space or pose any threat to you through attrition in a way they can in other metroidvanias. It's way too easy to just ignore them 80% of the time. There's also the issue that since healing takes up the spirit meter you're typically discouraged from using any other ability that utilizes that system since the reward and cost of using any ability isn't worth it when keeping yourself alive is far more rewarding. It gets worse with the weird tuning where nail upgrades make bosses have more health which makes your abilities weaker.

The level design is a mix of mostly empty hallways with pits and areas that emphasize verticality. Enemy layouts are cookie cutter, usually 3-4 fodder enemies in a hallway or a few easily ignorable flying enemies in more vertical areas. On the rare occassion you may get an enemy that's good at covering space such as the Soul Twister's but the game rarely feels the need to make enemy encounters threatening. This is probably to make the travel between areas less tedious given how limited the fast travel mechanic is but it still feels like a chore especially with how much gating the game has. This may be a necessity given the scale of the game but it just results in a lot of boring back and forth between areas where you'll often end up ignoring enemies after a certain point.

Aside from this Hollow Knight does offer the occassional platforming setpiece. These are easily more interesting than most of the moment to moment in Hollow Knight but I feel their main issue is that they're usually overly reliant on one ability and are too easily solved. Even still, I'd much prefer this than the norm with Hollow Knight because it's at least making use of certian mechanics. These setpieces are too sparse and usually optional.

The way Hollow Knight presents its map system is pretty unique but I wish they'd commit to it. Very early you get upgrades to transform it into a conventional metroidvania map system when the initial premise is you have no map marker and had to read the layouts yourself. On some level I feel this would have been received poorly by a lot of players and you could make the case that it just adds drudgery to a simple concept, but it just comes off as cowardly to not make this the default experience. The caveat they make for this is not severe enough to matter and in any situation where you might not want the pin for tracking your part of the map is within areas that likely will have a seat for you to change it anyway.

Hollow Knight's progression is slower than most metroidvanias and that's to its detriment. The game has a lot of bosses but most function under the assumption you only have the dash ability and thus it's a slog to play through because these boss fights are so boring and one note. Too many bosses are overly generous in terms of how big their start up frames are for their attacks and arenas are usually fairly sizable to make dodging them easy. Usually the way bosses are designed in that they focus on one or two attacks and after being hit a number of times they do the attack another time sequentially and I find this boring because you're never changing your solution when engaging with these different phases. What worked the first time is going to work again the second time. It's not until where the game's boss fights finally acknowledges that you have more mobility options than just the dash and god I wish the game did this sooner.

Nothing about the plot or lore grabbed me. A lot of it is excessively cryptic and the game doesn't really give you much reason to care or ponder what any specific message means. I guess there's some lore heads who like piecing it together but with the bits I decided to invest in it all came off to me as so tepid and uninspired. The crypticness has a purpose in defining its overall vibe but the game didn't sell me enough on its vibe for me to care.

I completed the game within 20 hours and I was under the impression that the post-game wasn't inviting anything valuable to engage with. But my peers insisted I try it out and well... I gotta it admit it changed my perspective of the game.

The Trial of fools is a damn solid gauntlet that actually had me thinking about the utility of my arts and it's also a case where the specific point you decide to do it changes the experience. Not having the shade cloak; for example, has you thinking about enemies in a very different way. I also love that it tightens the space for certain enemies, making you far more thoughtful about your movement options. It can be a bit tiring to go through multiple attempts given that you might be only filtered by one part of the gauntlet and the rest of it ends up feeling tedious but I respect the game demanding that level of consistency from you.

The White Palace convinced me that Hollow Knight has merit as a platformer. This is the only case where I felt the game was making me utilize multiple different mechanics and also allowing for ways to approach challenges in unorthodox ways. I think what I like about it too is how it shows the flexibility of the dash button given that it's useful for both platforming and combat. Combining that with the double jump is such a satisfying way to get over obstacles. It was so cool seeing the boost ability be utilized here in the way it was as well, given that the main game only really uses it for gating. My only problem with this section is that there are some areas where it obscures sight of a saw hazard and you could get damaged due to lacking the knowledge that it exists in that area. But other than that, a surprisingly well-designed platform level.

The post-game/optional boss fights are so bizarre to me in the sense that they feel alien to how bosses are usually designed in the main game. They're a lot more varied in the type of attacks they use and they'll also utilize multiple attacks at once to cover space. is such a great example of this. But others like Lost Kin use spawning enemies to add challenge too, which they clearly didn't have the balls to do in the main game. I gotta say, when I started the Godhome boss gauntlet it highlighted to me how boring most of the game's bosses are and it made me lose all enthusiasm for doing it.

So it begs the question, why did I put this in "not recommended?" On a certain level, I think Hollow Knight is fantastic. But it's also a case where like... only 10% of the game is actually engaging to me, which is more egregious in how a lot of it is DLC. The game's highs are incredible, but I don't even think the game has lows. It's just consistently boring for most of its playtime. The game has such a strong foundation yet Team Cherry rarely feels compelled to push it, and that's what makes Hollow Knight so disappointing to me.