Castle Crashers laid the foundation. Rogue Legacy planted the garden. Ori and the Blind Forest painted everything with intention. Dark Souls left it all out to dry for a few millennia.
This game is not procedurally generated. It is hand carved. It is paced to your ability to understand how it should be broken. When you need a new ability to progress, it's obvious. What's not obvious is how much of the map is actually available with just the first few. Grinding is non-existent, and side quests require you to go so far from what could be called the main path that the game KNOWS you want them. The characters are distinct, funny, and show up along your way with enough frequency that you get their take on events without having to hear them loop dialogue endlessly. The art style is smooth and simple, not minimalistic, but not too worried about using 10 frames when 4 will do. However, the art and lighting go a long way to bringing depth to basic grey linework, and turning green or blue into a marvel worth stopping and staring at.
The plot is largely what you make of it. For the most part, the game answers small questions before you ask them, and chooses to let you in on the big questions only if you spend enough time looking for the answers. There's never confusion about your mission, or confirmation of your motives. Your goal is to plow inexorably onwards, but if you stop and think, there's almost no end to the detail you leave behind. This blends perfectly with the Metroidvania aspect of backtracking to those spots you remember, but using the abilities in the obvious places can sometimes get your brain working on how they might lead you... well I guess this is a brand new area to explore.
Combat is exactly what you'd expect. Where Shovel Knight had a more heavy platforming focus, this game delivers on the visceral, dodge or parry (good luck getting two of those in a row) Dark Souls crunch: making a dozen choices a second, watching your footing, and feeling out whether you have time to heal are background processes that run at all times, and two seconds of distraction will show you just how quickly you can lose control of the environment and whether you're being slammed against it. The enemy variety is something like 5 distinct enemy types for every 10 screens, and the Bestiary starts to fill in details and occasional tips as you gain surer footing against the new baddies. Any familiarity or mastery you feel you've built up in the first two areas goes out the window as the game changes the rules and forces you to work towards comfort and safety rather than venture carefully away from it.
Which is not to say you won't be platforming. There will be spikes on walls and under collapsing floors, and crawlers and flies that turn impatience into damage. But patience pays out, saving time, health, and "focus". All of these minor annoyances are lessons for later on, when the stakes for impatience or missed dashes are much higher. The game offers some quality of life improvements in charms, like faster movement or lower dash cooldowns, but these don't effect any jumping or timing puzzles significantly and jostle for space with more important charms like being marked on the map or gaining focus more rapidly. The game passes out upgrades like charm slots or just one more health point every few hours, so making due is less of a challenge and more of a way of life.
But in a game like this, the bosses have to be good or the rest of it is thrown into unsatisfying relief, and here the game doesn't falter for a moment. They're few and far between, and none of them feel like freebies or like they were designed by sadists. There are ways to fight harder versions of each, and those fights are where the game really shows off how good you are at it. Even the most absurdly quick attacks are appropriately telegraphed, and voice acted, so your brain has plenty of queues to pick up on if you're eating the same hit every time. The AI never fails to exploit mistakes, but anything is recoverable with an extra point of health and a bit of solid ground. The arena is particularly nightmarish for those who are overconfident, and goes out of its way to make fun of such people three or four different ways.
Hollow Knight is a game about curiosity, determination, and focus, It's a beautiful journey, and its never as desolate as it may seem (although it can be somewhat scary at times). From beginning to end, every step consistently brings new and enjoyable worlds to explore, enemies to master, caverns to traverse, skills to learn, and puzzles that will seem a lot more like puzzles once you realize that the developers were standing right where you were, wondering how they could get you to go where you are now without telling you a thing. About two hours in, anything that could be called a path has reached its conclusion, and you're left to your own devices for the next 10 hours. I have no idea what you'll find. I don't know how much of what I found was necessary, although I did just nick by above the cost of everything I needed and I felt like I had explored every tile I could from the first moment I could get there.
For $40, this game is worth every penny. For $15, it's closer to stealing than buying. The Halloween sale turned this from a Wishlist game into a Musthave game.
If Castlevania is the bar, this exceeds it. If Metroid Prime is the bar, it stands shoulder to shoulder on the corpses of those floating baby bastards. This game makes Dark Souls 2 look like RPG Maker. It rivals Undertale in its writing and themes, and defies comparison to anything but Symphony of the Night in terms of scope and mechanics.
This is a synthesis of everything that is good about its genre, and an improvement on the overcomplicated, bloated systems that linger in modern gaming. My only hesitation in recommending it is that it has entirely rubbed the Z X and C keys off my keyboard, and may do the same to others who do not first buy a gamepad.
10/10 its alright.
This game is not procedurally generated. It is hand carved. It is paced to your ability to understand how it should be broken. When you need a new ability to progress, it's obvious. What's not obvious is how much of the map is actually available with just the first few. Grinding is non-existent, and side quests require you to go so far from what could be called the main path that the game KNOWS you want them. The characters are distinct, funny, and show up along your way with enough frequency that you get their take on events without having to hear them loop dialogue endlessly. The art style is smooth and simple, not minimalistic, but not too worried about using 10 frames when 4 will do. However, the art and lighting go a long way to bringing depth to basic grey linework, and turning green or blue into a marvel worth stopping and staring at.
The plot is largely what you make of it. For the most part, the game answers small questions before you ask them, and chooses to let you in on the big questions only if you spend enough time looking for the answers. There's never confusion about your mission, or confirmation of your motives. Your goal is to plow inexorably onwards, but if you stop and think, there's almost no end to the detail you leave behind. This blends perfectly with the Metroidvania aspect of backtracking to those spots you remember, but using the abilities in the obvious places can sometimes get your brain working on how they might lead you... well I guess this is a brand new area to explore.
Combat is exactly what you'd expect. Where Shovel Knight had a more heavy platforming focus, this game delivers on the visceral, dodge or parry (good luck getting two of those in a row) Dark Souls crunch: making a dozen choices a second, watching your footing, and feeling out whether you have time to heal are background processes that run at all times, and two seconds of distraction will show you just how quickly you can lose control of the environment and whether you're being slammed against it. The enemy variety is something like 5 distinct enemy types for every 10 screens, and the Bestiary starts to fill in details and occasional tips as you gain surer footing against the new baddies. Any familiarity or mastery you feel you've built up in the first two areas goes out the window as the game changes the rules and forces you to work towards comfort and safety rather than venture carefully away from it.
Which is not to say you won't be platforming. There will be spikes on walls and under collapsing floors, and crawlers and flies that turn impatience into damage. But patience pays out, saving time, health, and "focus". All of these minor annoyances are lessons for later on, when the stakes for impatience or missed dashes are much higher. The game offers some quality of life improvements in charms, like faster movement or lower dash cooldowns, but these don't effect any jumping or timing puzzles significantly and jostle for space with more important charms like being marked on the map or gaining focus more rapidly. The game passes out upgrades like charm slots or just one more health point every few hours, so making due is less of a challenge and more of a way of life.
But in a game like this, the bosses have to be good or the rest of it is thrown into unsatisfying relief, and here the game doesn't falter for a moment. They're few and far between, and none of them feel like freebies or like they were designed by sadists. There are ways to fight harder versions of each, and those fights are where the game really shows off how good you are at it. Even the most absurdly quick attacks are appropriately telegraphed, and voice acted, so your brain has plenty of queues to pick up on if you're eating the same hit every time. The AI never fails to exploit mistakes, but anything is recoverable with an extra point of health and a bit of solid ground. The arena is particularly nightmarish for those who are overconfident, and goes out of its way to make fun of such people three or four different ways.
Hollow Knight is a game about curiosity, determination, and focus, It's a beautiful journey, and its never as desolate as it may seem (although it can be somewhat scary at times). From beginning to end, every step consistently brings new and enjoyable worlds to explore, enemies to master, caverns to traverse, skills to learn, and puzzles that will seem a lot more like puzzles once you realize that the developers were standing right where you were, wondering how they could get you to go where you are now without telling you a thing. About two hours in, anything that could be called a path has reached its conclusion, and you're left to your own devices for the next 10 hours. I have no idea what you'll find. I don't know how much of what I found was necessary, although I did just nick by above the cost of everything I needed and I felt like I had explored every tile I could from the first moment I could get there.
For $40, this game is worth every penny. For $15, it's closer to stealing than buying. The Halloween sale turned this from a Wishlist game into a Musthave game.
If Castlevania is the bar, this exceeds it. If Metroid Prime is the bar, it stands shoulder to shoulder on the corpses of those floating baby bastards. This game makes Dark Souls 2 look like RPG Maker. It rivals Undertale in its writing and themes, and defies comparison to anything but Symphony of the Night in terms of scope and mechanics.
This is a synthesis of everything that is good about its genre, and an improvement on the overcomplicated, bloated systems that linger in modern gaming. My only hesitation in recommending it is that it has entirely rubbed the Z X and C keys off my keyboard, and may do the same to others who do not first buy a gamepad.
10/10 its alright.
