A pretty decent start for what could be a significantly better dev team once they pick up more experience. Thus, I'd recommend checking out any sequels this game has in the future (assuming they don't require you to have played this game first) and skipping this one. Well, as long as the sequel isn't bad (I'm no fortune teller).
Hollow Knight's got plenty of merit in how artsy-fartsy it tries to be (and its success means that hopefully we'll get more artistically-driven games like it in the future from other devs), and it's clearly a good base for sequels to build on top of. However, it also has some hilarious as hell design decisions like blocking basic genre conventions, like seeing yourself on the map, behind the equipment system. That isn't to say it's bad that it experimented with those things, but that's the sort of thing I don't think a game should sacrifice in favor of being more 'immersive' (as I'd assume they were trying to go for).
Personally I found the world dull and bog-standard for a grimdark piece of 2010s media, but I didn't get into the extremely deep lore so it could be better than I thought for all I know. Personally I'm a grouch who doesn't enjoy grimdark stuff in general, so it could very well just be that I'm biased against the conventions of that narrative/artistic style. I've felt similarly as I've played Dark Souls lately, although that game's got enough jank and meat to its gameplay that I've enjoyed it more thus far. The map is sort of another seemingly inferior part of HK in comparison to the game that spawned its genre, too. Yes, the artwork is pretty to stare at, and yes, the environments have plenty added to them with the sound effects and lighting effects the game offers. Yet, I found myself barely paying attention to them after the first run through a given room because the rooms themselves are often long, boring enemy corridors you have to walk through to get anywhere because of a weak quick travel system (which does get better in the lategame, mind you).
The map, as impressive in size as it is for an indie game, seems a bit too bloated. A bit of fat likely could have been trimmed from it, a room here or there, and the game would suffer less for it. The individual rooms and associated artwork are far less memorable than they could be because of how stretched thin the map sometimes is. The platforming challenges outside of optional secrets are minimal, and so getting through any given room is rather boring for how slow and big the game tries to be, especially since you're expected to go through said rooms several times in a run. I'm somewhere in the average range for patience when it comes to games, but this tedium got a bit too much for me by the time I got about 2/3 of the way through the game. Still, I pushed through and finished it - I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything major, and I was appreciating the work the devs put in. I wound up hitting around 98-99% by the time I went and faced the final boss. I normally try to get 100% in any of the games in the genre, but I couldn't quite do it in this one from lack of enjoyment. Still, I think I was close enough...
I'm really hoping that the sequel (prequel? I haven't done my homework, sorry) to this game will take a step back into gamifying itself further a la Mario Galaxy 2. I personally prefer when games either go to one end or another in terms of emphasizing quality of life. There are games like (from what I've played and heard) suda51's suite which are intentionally painful to go through at times, but that's more or less exactly what he was going for. On the other hand, something like Hollow Knight seems to be trying to straddle the line in order to have some sort of 'souls-like' feeling of difficulty and fairness. Personally I found that in doing so the game only really served to become tedious, part of which was described above. Part of the issue I perceived might be because I found the whole game particularly easy throughout the whole experience, so your mileage may vary there. If you've seen the game or have played a bit of it already and you think it seems difficult, it'll probably feel a lot better to you than it did to me.
The combat in general to me was about as bland and uninspired as any other generic Metroidvania, but honestly I don't think that's really a bad thing. The genre rarely specializes in combat. Me, I came off of a strange duo of vanias before this one - Order of Ecclesia and then Ori 1 - and so I got to experience some of the best combat the genre has to offer followed by some of the most simplistic and practically nonexistent. Hollow Knight, to me, felt somewhere in the middle, maybe closer to Ori than to another vania like Symphony of the Night. There's little variety (though more than I'd expect from an indie) even with the equipment system; it's your spells that really carry the weight of the experience there. Yet, I found myself only really needing to use them if I became too bored with a boss and wanted to just nuke them (or to heal if needed). This boss example happened a bit more often than I'd hoped.
Bosses in general tended to have far more HP than I'd like. Again, I assume that this would add to the difficulty if one already found bosses difficult, but at least in my run I just found myself getting bored as it was just a matter of repeating the same 2-3 responses to their patterns over and over again for several minutes until they eventually died. It was more a war of attrition every time than a boss fight once I got the hang of the combat system not long after Greenpath. I didn't play too terribly far into all the DLC (I believe I finished one and got halfway through another?), but the bosses I did face in it seemed leagues better than the ones in the vanilla game. If you found yourself challenged by the combat and enjoyed it too, I can definitely say they get even better once you reach the DLC content. I don't think it was enough to save the game from my personal judgment, but I'd be a complete liar if I said it didn't improve.
That's part of why I have hope in the future for these developers! As I said, I don't think the problems I had with this were enough to make this a bad game. I really didn't enjoy this game all that much, but I thought it'd be worth it to finish it just to give it as fair a chance as possible. I don't think it's a particularly good game - a good art piece (just not to my tastes) or an example of high indie potential would be far more fair of an assessment in my eyes. But the flaws it does have are things which could very, very easily be fixed up in a sequel. Just a couple basic things, like seeing yourself on the map and a reduced dash cooldown (the latter maybe as an unlockable in midgame?) would already help loads. Reducing boss health just by a pinch - like by ~1/8 of whatever they were on average in this game - would be great, too. Reducing the map size and scope by a bit, I think, would add to the game as well. It would take away some of the unnecessary tedium of backtracking while also making the smaller and more intimate areas all the more memorable in terms of their art and level design.
Hollow Knight is a good start, but not worthy of its hype. However, I'd be keen to watch the developers' next move, because I'm sure it'll truly be something that is. Maybe I'll replay it one day if the next one winds up being better. It'd be nice to look back on this and think about how much the devs improve.
Hollow Knight's got plenty of merit in how artsy-fartsy it tries to be (and its success means that hopefully we'll get more artistically-driven games like it in the future from other devs), and it's clearly a good base for sequels to build on top of. However, it also has some hilarious as hell design decisions like blocking basic genre conventions, like seeing yourself on the map, behind the equipment system. That isn't to say it's bad that it experimented with those things, but that's the sort of thing I don't think a game should sacrifice in favor of being more 'immersive' (as I'd assume they were trying to go for).
Personally I found the world dull and bog-standard for a grimdark piece of 2010s media, but I didn't get into the extremely deep lore so it could be better than I thought for all I know. Personally I'm a grouch who doesn't enjoy grimdark stuff in general, so it could very well just be that I'm biased against the conventions of that narrative/artistic style. I've felt similarly as I've played Dark Souls lately, although that game's got enough jank and meat to its gameplay that I've enjoyed it more thus far. The map is sort of another seemingly inferior part of HK in comparison to the game that spawned its genre, too. Yes, the artwork is pretty to stare at, and yes, the environments have plenty added to them with the sound effects and lighting effects the game offers. Yet, I found myself barely paying attention to them after the first run through a given room because the rooms themselves are often long, boring enemy corridors you have to walk through to get anywhere because of a weak quick travel system (which does get better in the lategame, mind you).
The map, as impressive in size as it is for an indie game, seems a bit too bloated. A bit of fat likely could have been trimmed from it, a room here or there, and the game would suffer less for it. The individual rooms and associated artwork are far less memorable than they could be because of how stretched thin the map sometimes is. The platforming challenges outside of optional secrets are minimal, and so getting through any given room is rather boring for how slow and big the game tries to be, especially since you're expected to go through said rooms several times in a run. I'm somewhere in the average range for patience when it comes to games, but this tedium got a bit too much for me by the time I got about 2/3 of the way through the game. Still, I pushed through and finished it - I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything major, and I was appreciating the work the devs put in. I wound up hitting around 98-99% by the time I went and faced the final boss. I normally try to get 100% in any of the games in the genre, but I couldn't quite do it in this one from lack of enjoyment. Still, I think I was close enough...
I'm really hoping that the sequel (prequel? I haven't done my homework, sorry) to this game will take a step back into gamifying itself further a la Mario Galaxy 2. I personally prefer when games either go to one end or another in terms of emphasizing quality of life. There are games like (from what I've played and heard) suda51's suite which are intentionally painful to go through at times, but that's more or less exactly what he was going for. On the other hand, something like Hollow Knight seems to be trying to straddle the line in order to have some sort of 'souls-like' feeling of difficulty and fairness. Personally I found that in doing so the game only really served to become tedious, part of which was described above. Part of the issue I perceived might be because I found the whole game particularly easy throughout the whole experience, so your mileage may vary there. If you've seen the game or have played a bit of it already and you think it seems difficult, it'll probably feel a lot better to you than it did to me.
The combat in general to me was about as bland and uninspired as any other generic Metroidvania, but honestly I don't think that's really a bad thing. The genre rarely specializes in combat. Me, I came off of a strange duo of vanias before this one - Order of Ecclesia and then Ori 1 - and so I got to experience some of the best combat the genre has to offer followed by some of the most simplistic and practically nonexistent. Hollow Knight, to me, felt somewhere in the middle, maybe closer to Ori than to another vania like Symphony of the Night. There's little variety (though more than I'd expect from an indie) even with the equipment system; it's your spells that really carry the weight of the experience there. Yet, I found myself only really needing to use them if I became too bored with a boss and wanted to just nuke them (or to heal if needed). This boss example happened a bit more often than I'd hoped.
Bosses in general tended to have far more HP than I'd like. Again, I assume that this would add to the difficulty if one already found bosses difficult, but at least in my run I just found myself getting bored as it was just a matter of repeating the same 2-3 responses to their patterns over and over again for several minutes until they eventually died. It was more a war of attrition every time than a boss fight once I got the hang of the combat system not long after Greenpath. I didn't play too terribly far into all the DLC (I believe I finished one and got halfway through another?), but the bosses I did face in it seemed leagues better than the ones in the vanilla game. If you found yourself challenged by the combat and enjoyed it too, I can definitely say they get even better once you reach the DLC content. I don't think it was enough to save the game from my personal judgment, but I'd be a complete liar if I said it didn't improve.
That's part of why I have hope in the future for these developers! As I said, I don't think the problems I had with this were enough to make this a bad game. I really didn't enjoy this game all that much, but I thought it'd be worth it to finish it just to give it as fair a chance as possible. I don't think it's a particularly good game - a good art piece (just not to my tastes) or an example of high indie potential would be far more fair of an assessment in my eyes. But the flaws it does have are things which could very, very easily be fixed up in a sequel. Just a couple basic things, like seeing yourself on the map and a reduced dash cooldown (the latter maybe as an unlockable in midgame?) would already help loads. Reducing boss health just by a pinch - like by ~1/8 of whatever they were on average in this game - would be great, too. Reducing the map size and scope by a bit, I think, would add to the game as well. It would take away some of the unnecessary tedium of backtracking while also making the smaller and more intimate areas all the more memorable in terms of their art and level design.
Hollow Knight is a good start, but not worthy of its hype. However, I'd be keen to watch the developers' next move, because I'm sure it'll truly be something that is. Maybe I'll replay it one day if the next one winds up being better. It'd be nice to look back on this and think about how much the devs improve.
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yeah, I really just want to see this industry improve cause of how much it means to me. At least right now I'm still trying to be an amateur developer myself, so making gaming the best it can be might as well be my goal too.
I still think there's plenty of potential for the sequel, but I've decided since writing the above review that I'll only play it if I get it for free and have nothing else to do. As I approach 1000 games played I've been trying to take a big step back and figure out my priorities for where to go before I get there... and the problem is that because this first game received such unanimous praise from the modern gaming world, its sequel will likely be considered somewhere in that ballpark of quality by that same enormous audience. This means I can't actually trust anyone's recommendations regarding it, like, at all. I clearly couldn't trust them for this game considering my middling response, and a follow-up will probably have even more polarized reception, at least that's how I figure.
When I'm told about the possibility of a "game for me", I don't even really know what that means. I guess it's cause I don't ever feel that way about anything I play, or maybe I just don't understand it enough as a concept. That's part of my drive to go through as wide a range of games as possible, really. I dunno, it's weird. Frustrating, too. Maybe I should write some weird pretentious Backloggd list about my feelings on that...
Anyway! Thanks for commenting here. I always appreciate seeing random comments and stuff on my older reviews since it gives an opportunity to engage more with a game even postmortem.
I still think there's plenty of potential for the sequel, but I've decided since writing the above review that I'll only play it if I get it for free and have nothing else to do. As I approach 1000 games played I've been trying to take a big step back and figure out my priorities for where to go before I get there... and the problem is that because this first game received such unanimous praise from the modern gaming world, its sequel will likely be considered somewhere in that ballpark of quality by that same enormous audience. This means I can't actually trust anyone's recommendations regarding it, like, at all. I clearly couldn't trust them for this game considering my middling response, and a follow-up will probably have even more polarized reception, at least that's how I figure.
When I'm told about the possibility of a "game for me", I don't even really know what that means. I guess it's cause I don't ever feel that way about anything I play, or maybe I just don't understand it enough as a concept. That's part of my drive to go through as wide a range of games as possible, really. I dunno, it's weird. Frustrating, too. Maybe I should write some weird pretentious Backloggd list about my feelings on that...
Anyway! Thanks for commenting here. I always appreciate seeing random comments and stuff on my older reviews since it gives an opportunity to engage more with a game even postmortem.
That's a fairly cynical view to have. I would argue that even if you decided that you can't trust other people's reviews, you can use your own judgement quite effectively. You mentioned in your review that you didn't like the "grimdark" atmosphere, thought the combat was bland, thought bosses had too much HP and didn't like the lack of platforming challenges. So apply those issues you had with Hollow Knight to Silksong and watch the demo or trailers. The sequel's world is incredibly bright and lively, the combat is much more complex and faster paced and platforming is a much clearer focus.
As for what a "game for you" is, I think it's really quite simple. Everyone has different tastes, and when it comes to an artform like game design it's hard to call anything objective. For example you said "Hollow knight isn't worthy of it's hype", but why is that? For a shockingly large amount of people it certainly was, and because it fit their particular tastes or interests. You certainly have your own subjective tastes, you mentioned not liking grimdark settings and wanting the game to be more difficult just to name a few. If a game satisfies your own personal interests, it's a "game for you".
As for what a "game for you" is, I think it's really quite simple. Everyone has different tastes, and when it comes to an artform like game design it's hard to call anything objective. For example you said "Hollow knight isn't worthy of it's hype", but why is that? For a shockingly large amount of people it certainly was, and because it fit their particular tastes or interests. You certainly have your own subjective tastes, you mentioned not liking grimdark settings and wanting the game to be more difficult just to name a few. If a game satisfies your own personal interests, it's a "game for you".
I think the amount of cynicism there is fair, too! It was helpful in focusing me on a clearer road toward the big 1000 when I was having trouble figuring it out.
If I'm being honest I don't really trust or value my own judgment enough with any media to be able to conclusively decide on how to take the sequel on my own, but that's more of just a general problem I've got. I've also had an awful track record when it comes to playing games off of recommendation alone... but then at the same time, I don't actually look at my own ideas without questioning them constantly to the grave. Even this game review is something I have less confidence in than I probably should, and the sheer size of the game's rabid audience makes it feel even more that I'm just incredibly dumb or something, lol
Oh yeah oops, I guess I could spare some time to look at the sequel. Your mention of that reminded me that there's probably new footage or info around. Hopefully it looks good when I check it out, dunno if I'll be able to judge much of anything though.
True! That's a pretty intuitive way to look at that concept, a "game for you". I usually think about it as being in terms of target audiences and peripheral ones. In that sense, I don't think I've ever seriously felt as if I'm actually part of any audiences in mind for or which pop up around the games I play. It's a feeling that pushes me more to create stuff, to fill up that void by putting forward my artwork.
But taking the phrase in the way you described makes sense. I don't think it changes my number of "games for me" from 0, but it makes it a lot less complicated to figure out whenever I do find one. Little guesswork would be involved, too. I guess it's at times like these that I remind myself that maybe this hobby in general might not be "for me", either. In all honesty, I'm made uncomfortable by/find it condescending with people using the phrase so much more nowadays which is part of why I'm using it a bunch here to reduce the friction. Whenever I hear people talk about particular games and things as being "for them"/"not for you" and such, it just sounds so easy for them that it makes me think that the past fifteen or so years could have just been a giant sunk-cost-fallacy moment LOL
Not a fan of that possibility since it'd mean a fuckton of wasted time and effort but uhhh yeah. Oh gosh this response was long
(random clarifying nitpick too but I'd want the game to be less "difficult", not more, since that'd mean it'd be less tedious to me with how shallow and easy it already seemed. if that wasn't clear in the review i'm sorry, i probably didn't get it across well)
If I'm being honest I don't really trust or value my own judgment enough with any media to be able to conclusively decide on how to take the sequel on my own, but that's more of just a general problem I've got. I've also had an awful track record when it comes to playing games off of recommendation alone... but then at the same time, I don't actually look at my own ideas without questioning them constantly to the grave. Even this game review is something I have less confidence in than I probably should, and the sheer size of the game's rabid audience makes it feel even more that I'm just incredibly dumb or something, lol
Oh yeah oops, I guess I could spare some time to look at the sequel. Your mention of that reminded me that there's probably new footage or info around. Hopefully it looks good when I check it out, dunno if I'll be able to judge much of anything though.
True! That's a pretty intuitive way to look at that concept, a "game for you". I usually think about it as being in terms of target audiences and peripheral ones. In that sense, I don't think I've ever seriously felt as if I'm actually part of any audiences in mind for or which pop up around the games I play. It's a feeling that pushes me more to create stuff, to fill up that void by putting forward my artwork.
But taking the phrase in the way you described makes sense. I don't think it changes my number of "games for me" from 0, but it makes it a lot less complicated to figure out whenever I do find one. Little guesswork would be involved, too. I guess it's at times like these that I remind myself that maybe this hobby in general might not be "for me", either. In all honesty, I'm made uncomfortable by/find it condescending with people using the phrase so much more nowadays which is part of why I'm using it a bunch here to reduce the friction. Whenever I hear people talk about particular games and things as being "for them"/"not for you" and such, it just sounds so easy for them that it makes me think that the past fifteen or so years could have just been a giant sunk-cost-fallacy moment LOL
Not a fan of that possibility since it'd mean a fuckton of wasted time and effort but uhhh yeah. Oh gosh this response was long
(random clarifying nitpick too but I'd want the game to be less "difficult", not more, since that'd mean it'd be less tedious to me with how shallow and easy it already seemed. if that wasn't clear in the review i'm sorry, i probably didn't get it across well)
Nezznerd
1 year ago