Was having a conversation with a friend a couple months ago who said that Hollow Knight surpasses any Castlevania game by a significant margin. I had already been playing Hollow Knight on and off for a while but hadn’t gotten far enough, and being the Castlevania fangirl I am was highly skeptical of this claim. I mean Hollow Knight was a good game from what I had played but better than Aria of Sorrow? I didn’t start to really make progress in the game until the last few weeks or so and wow I think my friend was onto something. This game is immaculate in literally every single way. The story and atmosphere are incredible. Every single bit of flavor text serves the word-building in its own way. The game is full of so much hidden stuff that makes you want to scour the whole map because a room you’ve been to a hundred times can still have something you didn’t figure out until 20 hours in. The charm system adds an entire layer of strategy and has something for almost every style of play. Certain bosses and platforming puzzles can be very hard but in a way that makes you want to spend 40 minutes retrying the same thing out of stubbornness rather than saying “fuck it” and quitting for the day. If a Castlevania game had this level of storytelling and gameplay depth I think it would have an argument for being the greatest game ever along the same lines as Final Fantasy 6 or Chrono Trigger. I will definitely be replaying this one sometime in the future.