Hollow Knight: the limits of design

A short review of Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is, as of now, the only game published by Team Cherry, and a massive success in the videogame market, with overwhelming positive critique despite its sizeable player base. Does this correlate with the quality the game offers? In my opinion, it absolutely does.

The first thing the game hits you with comes right from the start, in the intro. Gorgeously drawn, with a powerful mood behind it, slick sound. It is to be expected that they put great effort in the part that all players will experience, but what completely surpassed my expectations was how that stylistic level was kept, reinforced and even surpassed as the game progressed. Especially exceptional is the audio design, an aspect many times barely polished in games, but that became an active motivational reinforcer as I progressed: from the grub's cheery chants of freedom, the effects applied when getting hit, doma, doma, doma doma doma, Hallownest's ambiance..., so many of the game's content is topped with evocative and emotionally clear auditive feedback that links every local experience with the next one. This is not to say that audio is the only aspect of presentation that is maintained; if one were to traverse all the map, it wouldn't surprise me if a screenshot for wallpapers could be made every five minutes. All in all it's an impressive feat, considering the variety of assets used to cover the vastness of the game map.

Despite how big it is, however, Hollow Knight doesn't suffer from over-repetition or stagnancy, as other game worlds that are too large do, neither sensorially nor gameplay-wise. In this second facet, the game's progression demonstrates a solid understanding of the craft, onboarding the player by organically teaching how to interact with the world: using the down attack to bounce off damaging obstacles, or cutting ropes to create platforms, in situations where that output is required, and where only the necessary elements are provided, to facilitate the player's emergent learning. Another key technique the games uses, both at the beginning and the game's mid-term, is the use of promises. From the Black Egg Temple, to the White Lady's chambers, locked doors and seemingly impossible-to-reach paths, the game complements memorable spaces with the promise of future awe at what those secrets hold.


Lookout into the White Queen's chambers

To reinforce the exploration, which spoilers, I think is very obviously one of the main pillar of the game, if not THE one, an interconnected level design was used, that forces the player to pay attention to their surroundings to know how to traverse the world, and where are the interesting spots to return to in the future. This is where my first negative criticism comes. While I adore that they took a similar approach to the first Dark Souls, and implemented actual world interconnectivity instead of local ones, the style they use, with short, self-contained, multi-exits rooms, difficults the memorization of how to reach a large amount of interesting content, and basically forces the player to use the map, generating something more akin to a todo list than exploration in the sense of "motivation to go out to find something stimulating, interesting, even meaningful". Such criticism doesn't intend to present the design decisions as "wrong", it is only to point out that, at a personal level, the eclipsing done to the current discoveries by the impatience to find out about the unknown outweighted the curiosity aroused by such promises. Most probably, this net negative was also a consequence of many rewards of exploration being currency-related, upgrades to already existing abilities, or more traversal options that prompted me to go clean the todo task I had accumulated in my hand drawn map (and yes, maybe having used the game's map system would have fixed this, we will never know).

A final layer to traversal was combat, whichs works very well. Without going too much into detail, there's a charm system to let players adopt a specialized playstyle, also serving as some of the most exciting rewards to be obtained; the moment to moment combat is quite simple, but has enough offensive and defensive variety to keep it interesting: parries, noticeable pushback (which many contexts take advantage of to make it into a relevant combat interaction) and a slow healing ability that can't be mindlessly spammed. Additionally, combat blends with exploration by regulating the player's survivability through their performance in fights, as each basic attack grants SOUL, which is used to heal and cast magic, adding a triangularity that gives access to higher damage in exchange for the possibility of regaining health.

Such dynamic of resource management, focused on exploration, is turned on its head by the many bosses of the game, which put the emphasis on combat instead, while sometimes also using the level's traversal as a way to reinforce, as a secondary pillar, the mastery progress of the player, as it is the case with Soul Master. I didn't find any of the bosses particularly difficult (albeit I haven't fought all of them, most prominently not having done The Radiance (I didn't feel like I needed further conclusion after beating the Hollow Knight first try (yes, I'm bragging about this here))), but I really appreciated that the development team gave to most bosses a "legitimate", obvious way to tackle them, and then a "cheesy", more out of the box approach to easily take advantage of their offensive weaknesses. And of course, returning to the presentation aspect, the feedback given every time a boss is killed is very satisfying, especially when there's some special event tied to it (False Knight, Soul Master, Gruz Mother, Mantis Lords..), which helps make them that much more memorable.

Finally, I wanted to praise the absolute dedication Hollow Knighthas been made with. I want to start with something I'm not sure they were aware of, but which if they did, chapeau: when the safe file is entered, it respawns the player to the last bench rested at, which can enable some very feel-smart moments to traverse the world effectively. In any case, let's go into the list of pleasent surprises this game gave me, well after having established what it was about:

  • The Delicate Flower quest, and how much more special does it feel by the Gray Mourner saying it is unique when it... really isn't (I did panic a bit)

  • The mantis tribe becoming friendly after defeating their lords

  • Going back to the bank thinking on how rich I was, then finding out I wasn't anymore, and swearing to have vengeance against capitalist greed

  • Forgotten Crossroads becoming infected to reflect the state of the narrative (which I didn't really have context for, at the time, but hey, appreciated nonetheless)

  • Nosk's introduction was an absolute shocker

  • Going to Dirtmouth to spend some money, getting curious about what was at the Resting Grounds station, falling down, seeing the cracked coffin, and somehow ending up at the end of Ancient Basin out of absolutely nowhere

  • Making the connection that, indeed, I could Dream Nail bosses whose bodies had not disappeared (and actually Dream Nailing the final boss, but I was missing half of the necessary charm to access Radiance)

  • White Palace, and the absolutely fantastic change of pace it was from the game's chill


So... I won't buy Silksong (when it comes out :')

Despite everything I've said, which I genuinely think, when I brought myself to write a Steam review about my opinions on the game... I couldn't think about what to say. When a game is flawed, it's easy to point out what elements caused friction in your experience, but in this case, my only real problem was that... this game was a game, and it felt like a game, instead of a "realistic" experience, which mind you, no fictional narrative is ever "realistic" anyway so... The only real conclusion I could reach was that I wasn't the right person to enjoy it (which is, in reality, the problem in most things we don't like, which we rationalize by pointing out insufficiencies in the development, when everything we like is also flawed). There was no "problem" that was "objectively" disruptive.

Whether it was the distinction between how I wanted exploration to be like, and what the metroidvania approach gave me, or the lack of difficulty I felt in all the non-DLC content, even if I liked the presentation, even if I loved the bugs theme (in fact, I wished they got more specific with weird species and so), even if it's a literal rabbit hole of exploration and interesting encounters, ideal for my obsessive brain, it just... Didn't hit.

There was a lot to appreciate about this game on a technical level, but what was more important to me was the unique position in which it put me in regards to videogames, traditional gamification systems, and my design philosophy, especially now that I'm making a definitive version of my design notes, putting everything together, and reformulating all the knowledge I acquired in and during my four-years videogame degree. Hollow Knight was a chance to, again, appreciate the importance of designing towards an experience, to see how great the results of a properly designed title can be, but also to be on the other side of the coin, to understand the importance of the player mindset. Not to just make a typology of them, to know the "proper" way to motivate them, to have a commercial appeal over a large target base, but to consider what is the videogame in itself. Not what the playable experience is about, but what is the purpose of the game, how it tries to address the player, or in other words, as a designer, not how to arrange a series of perfectly interconnected systems, but how to achieve an ideal experience.