A few words about Hollow Knight

While waiting for some big releases I've decided to dive back into Hollow Knight. This is a game that I have bought and played several hours of on the PC quite a long time ago but moved on to other games. That in itself is a warning sign, that I originally was not entrenched enough in the experience to keep going. Well it is also on Game Pass and I decided to give it another go starting from the very beginning.

Much has been said about the map system in Hollow Knight. This very much being a metroidvania, you would expect a classic map showing you where you've been, where you are at and what remains locked away from you - for the most part this is the case. The biggest point of contention has always been the rather odd decision to not have the player show up on the map unless you have a special badge equipped. These badges basically act as skill slots and you do have a finite amount to pin onto your bug-like character. So unless you have the Compass badge taking up a precious slot, you will see the map of the area but not have a player icon indicating where you actually are on the map which considering the twisty-and-turny nature of the maps in the game can become a problem. It's weird, but once you get the compass badge which is available from the very start of the game it's not a huge deal. What I do think is a big problem in Hollow Knight is direction.

In typical metroidvania fashion the game is very non-linear, but it does funnel you through your lack of abilities.. at the start. As you hit dead ends you tend to naturally gravitate towards the next logical location, but the map in the game is quite big so bouncing off areas can take a long time. Eventually you uncover many areas that go quite far in the "wrong" direction before you realize that this isn't the place where you should be going. The trial and error nature of finding out where to direct your adventure next is the biggest failing of this otherwise really well made game in my opinion. There was a point where I had defeated a boss and was shown a cutscene and given a cryptic clue on what to do next.. and I had no idea where to go. The map loomed giant in front of me. I explored far reaches of the bug kingdom, encountering locations and items that I was not yet prepared to handle because I had not unlocked skills and abilities found completely elsewhere. You see there is quite a lot of side content to explore. Plenty of passages will simply lead to health upgrades or new pins, bringing you trasure but ultimately ending in more dead progression-wise. Plenty of times I thought I was finally going in the right direction only to find that I was on an arduous errand of increasing my health all along. What doesn't help is the limited fast travel system.

In the bug kingdom you will encounter plenty of benches where you can save. You can never fast travel between these benches though. There is a Stag Station fast travel system, and these stations are not nearly plentiful enough to cover the entire kingdom. Plenty of times I had to make do with getting semi-close to where I needed to go and then have to hoof it on foot through multiple screens. For a game with such an incredibly vast map it is strange that your travel options are so limited. Then again, this is a complaint I've seen raised on forums only to get shouted down by numerous players stating that fast travel would "ruin" the experience. As I had recently posted a thread regarding the practice of boss run backs and learned that many people would rather suffer the inconvenience for the sake of immersion it is not all that surprising that the developers of Hollow Knight have not yielded to these complaints through the numerous patches and content updates over the years.

At this point in time I'm nearing the final boss fight and unlocked 90% of the map and it has becomes somewhat of a chore to finish out my remaining tasks. To do this I need to travel around the bug kingdom far and wide - mostly on foot. This, at this point in the game, is no longer as fun as it used to be. Traversing the dark, maze-like depths of Deepnest is quite frankly a pain. Having to go anywhere is a journey. I've enjoyed the game quite a bit and it is extremely well made but the travel has ceased to be exciting and is now busywork that I've begun to dread.

Hollow Knight is a great game that is a little too obscure for it's own good. When your main technique of signposting is simply letting players hit dead ends, you should present them with a faster way of getting around the map and trying new directions. When you're at the very bottom right corner of the kingdom, but you really need to be at the top left portion, it's a pain to travel there even with the use of the Stag Stations. I wish bench teleporting was a thing, but if it hasn't become a thing by now it never will. At the same time it is quite ironic that I'm complaining about travel time in this game, when I'm simultaneously anticipating Death Stranding knowing full well what type of experience I'm signing up for. I guess it's a matter of taste in the end.

Have you played Hollow Knight? What did you think of it?

The map system is a big part of why this game succeeds as an exploration game. There is not another game world in that whole genre that I know better than Hollow Knight, with all of it's labyrinthine twists and turns; that is in no small part due to not being able to just obsessively check my map (obviously you can via the badge like you wrote in your OP, but you're then depriving yourself of other much more vital badges) at every fork in the road.

I'm failing to find any common ground with you on the fast travel issue. Hollow Knight provides way more in terms of getting around it's environment than the majority of it's peers in the genre. There are like ten or twelve stations littered throughout the game. That's a hell of a lot more than most MV's. The next highest I can think of is the five or six in SOTN. Most Metroids don't have any fast travel at all (Prime 3 kind of has some with the different landing pads, but that's it, I think).

Sorry to hear it's wearing on you in it's final hours, but this seems like one of those situations where the reasons you don't like it happen to be a lot of the reasons I love it.

"Having to go anywhere is a journey."

I think the only truly fucked part about the map is that they make you pass through Fog Canyon (I think that's the name) early in the game, and you cannot reach the mapmaker in that zone until significantly later in the game. I just don't understand that one. Like, most of the pathways in Fog Canyon are a dead end the first time you go there, so just give the player the mapmaker in an accessible location and be done with it so players can catalog just how much of a dead end it is. It just gives the player the sense that "Oh, I must be missing something, surely I can get the map for this area," and no other zone misleads you like that. Between my own experience, and watching some streamers and GB staffers play through that section, nearly everyone spends unnecessary extra time thinking they've missed something in what is meant to be a "here's a taste, but come back here later" sort of zone. It just gives the player the wrong impression, when all previous mapmakers have been accessible once you poke around the zone a bit.

Other than that, I didn't mind the maps and limited fast travel points at all. Overall, when I was lost I feel like I found various corners of the map that kept me interested, so I didn't mind wandering. I also like how the wandering and flexible ability sequence can lead to people's playthroughs differing quite a bit. I found the crystal mine zone really early in the game, couldn't progress in it, and then proceeded to do basically every other available zone until I was roadblocked everywhere else and had to think "oh right, the mines." I think you're meant to fall into the graveyard zone from the crystal mines, but instead I had fought my way through a bunch of the City of Tears and came upwards to the graveyard through what I later realized was more of an elevator backdoor. Watching streamers play the game and end up doing different routes than I did is something I've enjoyed.

I think the map system just goes against modern gamer expectations in a really specific way. People kinda expect that if the game has a map at all, it automatically fills in constantly and is very user friendly. OR the game just doesn't have a map at all like a Dark Souls, and you just have to remember every single micro and macro element of the zones through rote memorization. Hollow Knight splits the difference by kinda forcing you to do the Dark Souls thing the first time you pass through an area and keep your wits about you, but as you reach checkpoints you fill in the map and have an actually usable visual map once you get into the Metroid backtracking phase of the gameplay. I think it's an interesting fusion of the two ideas that I was personally on board with, but holy shit does it rub some people the wrong way (e.g. it seemed to be the main thing GB staff members complained about with the game, and I think none of them gave it a fair shot).

However, when you're past exploring and just doing some late game cleanup, some of the fast travel points just seem intentionally dickish (for the love of god, put one right by the nail blacksmith in the City of Tears, you go back to that dude multiple times as you upgrade your weapon). But at least the main village has a fast travel station, and the...seer lady in the graveyard (whom you also return to many times) has one like 2 seconds from her. Some of the other ones just felt like they were equidistant from 3 significant locations, which on paper sounds like it isn't overly favouring any one destination but in practice felt like it was just trolling me no matter which of the 3 directions I meant to go to. Overall it's close to right, but I think one or two zones that had zero stations needed 1, or one or two zones that had 1 station needed 2. I honestly think it's really close, especially with them adding that one station near the white palace as a free update, but I think they're still a couple stations short of long distance travel feeling not annoying.

I played probably four hours of the game, liked it for the most part (particularly the sound design), unlocked some power that allowed me to shoot an orb of energy, then couldn't figure out where to go next and, determined to go without a strategy guide, eventually abandoned the game for clearer waters.

It's something I'll go back to some day.

The game could've done with a few extra stations as mentioned above but I think if you could fast travel between benches that would be going too far. I know people seem to be caring less and less about immersion and atmosphere and more about functionality these days (at GB at least) but even on an ease of use quality of life front I tend to lose my bearings when i'm able to just fast travel everywhere. I had this problem with the later Dark Souls games, I had no fucking clue where I was yet I know the first game like the back of my hand. Granted this is less of an issue when you have a detailed map but the game was designed in a way to discourage you from becoming over-reliant on it. I know when you've reached the point where you must explore every inch of the map this ceases to matter, and you just want to get somewhere fast and with little effort but it's just not that kind of game.

If I had to complain about one needlessly tedious aspect of the game (and many others) is that the corpse running/collection process sucks. Just deduct %50 of my souls or whatever, take them. Just dont make me back track to an area i've already been that I might not want to go back to until later.

@boozak: Yeah, the corpse running is kinda needless. I almost feel like having to backtrack from where you respawn is punishment enough. If your corpse is super deep into a zone you don’t feel like going back to, they technically do let you just retrieve your corpse if you give a rancid egg to the weird dude in the far, far right of the village, but I’m sure some percentage of players never understood this mechanic because it isn’t explained well.

I’ve seen the argument go both ways and really I think it’s two camps that will never see eye to eye. Personally I never had any real issues with the map system in the game. Having to explore a section blind before finding the Map Maker added a bit of thrill and mystique to the adventure. It was also funny to see this guy (err bug) just chilling off to the side while horrendous creatures where skulking about. I think their decision in obfuscating your location on the map is a step too far only because the map is not that accurate. If you want me to rely 100% on my own sense of direction then make the map a 1:1 representation of what is happening on the screen. It seems as if they wanted to have it both ways and it just adds an unnecessary layer of haze that seems more like a nuisance than anything else. That said I just kept the compass on at all times and it wasn’t really an issue.

As for fast travel I do think there is an argument made for it. As has been recognized above, most people tend to agree that once you fully explore the map, getting around can become a lengthy ordeal where you’re no longer seeing anything new and it boils down to running the same few twisting pathways. Much like Dark Souls 1 you could gain an item in the late game, possibly your final power up, that allows the fast travel between benches. Exploration is not ruined in any way because you’ve already uncovered it all and all your stag conversations and lore would also have come to a natural conclusion. In the way of most game systems it would be an upgrade to existing stag travel - like hey before you had to travel to a station and the s till good it those several screens but now you can just teleport to a bench instead. I don’t really see any argument against such a solution in the late-game apart from purists that want to walk everywhere, always, for the sake of immersion - something that those people could still do if they so desired.

Of course as I read through a dozen pages of the Steam thread asking devs to add this functionality I’ve seen that some players are very much into the whole “teleporting will ruin the game!” stance even if it’s an option added at a point where it wouldn’t actually ruin anything.

@bisonhero: I figured that out pretty late into the game but yeah it was nice option, a few other games have something similar. I just feel like the whole system doesnt ad much and prevents or at least delays exploration, which is my favourite part of souls and metroid style games.

@boozak: it’s also frustrating when your ghost gets placed inside the tail end of a boss room so you have to fight off your shade while the boss is activating and starting to attack you as well.

Although most of the time they place the shade in a convenient location. Once they did put it in the middle of one of those Meatboy platforming segments and that kinda sucked.

Nobody has mentioned the dream gate system yet... It is only one way, but it allows you to set up right outside a boss and eliminates those lengthy runs if you need multiple attempts.

I'm clearing endgame and side content currently, and some of the travel is wearing on me as well, but the discovery process was very fun to me, and I usually expect clean up before the finale to be a bit tedious anyway.

@redwing42: yah I’ve heard about it but didn’t read up too much into it so I didn’t know how it worked. From what I know you need quite a lot of essence to unlock it? I tried the dream version of the very first boss To get some of that sweet essence and boy he kicked my butt.

These complaints are fair, but they're also endemic to the genre. The great pleasure of a Metroidvania is exploration - the feeling of going to some strange place where you're not supposed to be. That and the lock-key system of powerups and obstacles is what makes a Metroidvania a Metroidvania. But this almost automatically means that players can get very, very stuck, as the lack of direction - which is so satisfying when it works - means that when you are unable to progress you just wander the whole world without unlocking any new areas. Hollow Knight is actually better about this than most, as it often will allow more than one way into a given area. Mark Brown has a great video on this.

I wonder what could be done better. Obviously you could put in more signposting, but to me this removes a lot of the fun. They could put in a character you could go to for occasional hints. Maybe it should cost money to discourage using it too often.

I loved pretty much every second of my time with Hollow Knight, but I understand the criticism. I did have times were I got lost and it can be a bit frustrating and the character map pointer being a charm is kind of a stubborn choice.

On the upside, I felt that when I got my map supplies I did feel like I had unlocked something meaningful and hearing the map seller humming his tune always came with a sense of relief. Same when I unlocked the first tram station (which wasn't the first one that's available to you), the feeling of acomplishment of finding a shortcut back home was very satisfying.

But in general, once you were on track, the game is pretty good. The platforming is great and the boss fights are fun and challenging. Some of the late game content is quite hard and eventually it wore me down. I managed to defeat the final final boss, but I gave up on most of the dlc bosses.

I wrote this blog in November 2019 and for whatever reason I had shortly thereafter put the game down only to return to it last week, more than a year later.

Part of the reason why I held off on finishing it is that with each passing week I remembered less of what I have done up to that point and it seemed incredibly daunting to dive back into this huge map. Also the idea of having zero muscle memory at the tail end of an already challenging game seemed like a recipe for disaster. So I had eventually resolved myself to simply not finishing it, having gotten my fill after all.

Then during this whole pandemic season I started watching Twitch while working from home to have some background noise on my second monitor. Lance McDonald, the guy responsible for the unofficial 60 FPS Bloodborne patch, started doing a first time playthrough of Hollow Knight and I really enjoyed his stream - especially his insistence on calling the white substance used for healing "milk" and how he is milking the bugs. The joke of "this game is full of bugs" also never got old. What I really liked about his stream was what a methodical person he is. He would approach fights and puzzles in a very calculated and analytical way. While I always winged everything, here he would learn the patterns, learn the safe spots, and patiently take down enemies by knowing how many times they swing and when he has the opening to swing back. This also came to play when it came time to solving a lot of the mysteries of Hollownest. Lance would methodically hit walls looking for secrets and explore every inch of the map in order to not miss anything. Watching him advance in the game made me realize just how far I had actually come before stopping and ironically just how much I also didn't see because of my more casual approach to the game.

Invigorated by his playthrough I decided to actually finish the game for myself. As I had expected it was like jumping into a pool of cold water. It was not a pleasant re-entry but I was also surprised how quickly I was able to adapt. That said it did feel like being an amnesiac, as I constantly came to places where I had already done something that I absolutely did not remember doing. The biggest challenge I set out for myself was not simply beating the boss which didn't require all that much effort, but getting the "true" ending which required a whole lot more work. When I finally did unlock the path to the true ending it became quite an ordeal to actually overcome as this meant I had to beat the first end boss, which then teleported me to the much more challenging "real" end boss. Both had to be beaten subsequently one after the other and both are fought in very different ways. Seeing as with getting older I'm no longer that great at this type of incredibly precise button work this was a hurdle for me. I was finally able to overcome it with a specific build of abilities that let me tank through the first boss quite quickly and get to the second one - something I attempted probably more than 20 times. I think the only way I finally made it was that I got fairly lucky with the RNG on the final bosses attack patterns. With spikes coming at you from every direction, half the floor becoming unusable and the boss shooting homing missiles and spikes while all this was going on - all while taking double the usual damage - you really do have to be almost perfect to make it through.

But make it through I did and I think it was a pretty satisfying if not exhausting experience. Having come back and finished basically all there was to do apart from optional tougher version of bosses I think this is definitely a great game and I completely understand why so many people bounce off it. Checking Xbox achievements, roughly 20% of people made it past the second boss. Only 3.27% of players actually beat the final Radiance boss. Half of this is due to the boss being difficult but I think a large part of it is that just getting to there is an extremely esoteric route that I would have never in a 100 years figured out on my own if it was not for YouTube videos. Hollow Knight is as exciting and unique as it is punishing and obscure. I'm looking forward to Silksong, the followup to Hollow Knight currently in the works, but I might have to give the internet sleuths some time to decode all the hidden messages first.

I still retain my previous complaints, which got only more amplified as I proceeded to do a lot of cleanup work for the endgame. Travelling can get tiring especially when you have to go between two places that are linked up by the more annoying areas of the map. I'm further confused by the lack of bench teleports after I unlocked the Dream Nail ability to set down a one way teleport point. This certainly helped but if they're letting me teleport at all then why not let me teleport between the benches? Alas I know I'm in the huge minority in this opinion so I guess it is what it is. I believe Ori had the right idea in that by the end you have all these abilities that let you freely move about the map because the devs knew that you'd just want to collect a lot of the missing upgrade points. I'm curious which direction Team Cherry will lean into for the next game - even more esoteric and punishing? Or will they introduce more "casual" quality of life changes to make the experience more palatable to a wider audience? Obviously the best answer is a balance of both but only time will tell. Hollow Knight is an exceptional game that sadly not a lot of people will experience fully because it is so uncompromising in it's vision and while I obviously respect that I also thinks it's a shame to see the game become more of a cult classic than an outright hit because of it.

I'm almost done with it myself (currently at ~104% I think?) and I'm definitely in the camp that absolutely adored it. I'm glad you were able to come back and see the rest of it and come to love it - I was in the camp of people who fell off on my first playthrough and had to restart it way down the line.

I definitely fall on the pro-map side as @relkin said. I feel like I learned the actual layout of the areas super well because I couldn't always rely on having the map (although I did keep the compass on for most of my general play). Even Deepnest feels fairly comfortably familiar at this point. Personally I enjoy the backtracking aspects too - the map is large, but it feels just small enough and has just enough Stag Stations that it's never more than a couple of minutes to get anywhere. There are a few notable places which are just sliiightly too far from a fast travel point, but that makes them specifically feel remote by design and making the decision to go there feels impactful (and it's still never so long as to be actually frustrating to me).

Overall I love the game. It definitely wears its influences on its sleeve, but I think it might execute on its ideas even better than the peers it's emulating. Despite not being a huge 2D platformer guy, I think I might end up even higher on the overall experience than the Souls trilogy, if not quite as high as Bloodborne & Sekiro. I also love how wildly varied they make the boss fights, the general overall difficulty curve (which feels incredibly smooth to me despite the game allowing you to branch out in some relatively non-linear ways and often not directing your hand too strongly), and the way abilities are meted out slowly and change your capacity for engaging with enemies quite dramatically as you progress. My only real gripe is that the story feels fairly heavily back-loaded, but there is still enough early intrigue that I wanted to push through.

@y2ken: It certainly is one of a kind with amazing attention to detail and so much content to unlock. During one of my trips I stumbled onto the Hive section of the map by pure accident having fired off a spell that broke open a false wall that I had passed by a hundred times before without second thought. I experienced this moment of discovery numerous times throughout my playthrough and was always surprised by how cleverly hidden it was. The fact that you can actively pass by so much of it is also amazing. The White Palace section tested my resolve as I simply never got that good at the pogo or the platforming in general but there was no other option than getting good in order to progress. What is even more amazing is pulling up videos of speedrunners going through those sections flawlessly. I also watched the world record speedrun which combined some very creative power usage to skip entire sections of the map. What is amazing is how high the skill ceiling goes.

@humanity: Yeah, agreed. I've been avoiding watching speedruns until I finish everything (though I'm basically at the point to do that now) but a friend of mine has been showing me some of the early sections where you use powers to skip chunks of the intended progression and it's very cool. I definitely want to see some of the pros at work once I wrap up. I really enjoyed the White Palace, which is testament to the game because precision platforming is actually the thing that I find toughest in general but I think just removing enemies and giving you this measured platforming sequence is a really interesting way to mix up the late-game pacing. Appreciate also that by the time you get there you likely have enough charms to give yourself functionally infinite attempts too, which makes it less frustrating than it'd otherwise be.