 Hollow Knight The first project from Australian developer Team Cherry is a strange and mysterious journey that will leave you with questions until the very end. It's a game similar to Castlevania, meaning it's primarily a 2D platformer with an open world style design, allowing for you to explore a large map with certain areas being locked off until you gain new abilities by defeating bosses or getting to a harder-to-reach area. You don't just run from point A to point B in Hollow Knight, you explore and discover new secrets by going in various directions and there's plenty of backtracking to be found. It's a gorgeous game with hand-drawn characters and environments that really work well with the tone of the game and often find yourself amazed at the art style at certain points. In Hollow Knight, you play as The Knight, a mysterious little creature with no voice armed with a weapon called a Nail. The game doesn't immediately explain who The Knight is or what his purpose is, it will gradually learn more about him towards the end of the game and even then things won't be entirely clear. The world of Hollow Knight is known as Hollow Nest, it's a ruined and desolate place inhabited by different kinds of bugs. The game's hub area is a small town called Dirtmouth which is populated by shopkeepers, an old bug named Elderbug who stands by the bench to give you hints whenever you're lost, and any other bugs you might meet across your journey. Venturing out of Dirtmouth, you'll start running into hostile bugs driven mad by some sort of mysterious infection and you have to navigate areas using platforming. In combat, the game allows players to strike enemies with their Nail in four directions. You can even aim your Nail downwards to do a sort of pogo jump attack on enemies that will prove useful at times. The combat seems simple at first, but it starts to develop more depth as you learn new moves and abilities and encounter enemies with more varied attack patterns. The platforming is also very tight and responsive, allowing for a really satisfying combat variety. At the beginning of the game, you start off rather weak, with only five masks the health points that you can take before dying. Instead of leveling up to get stronger, you explore areas to find mask shards to increase health and vessel fragments to increase soul, which is a sort of magic that allows you to heal and shoot spell attacks at enemies. You also start off with only one attack move, which is hitting people with your Nail, but you gradually learn new abilities and attack upgrades which will become necessary as the enemies get more difficult near the outer edges of the kingdom. Eventually, you'll become so tough from all of the upgrades and abilities that you collect that enemies who gave you a hard time near the beginning of the game can be easily finished off in a matter of seconds near the endgame. Resting adventures serve as save points that also heal your character and they can be found scattered all across Holonest. The world of Hollow Knight is also extremely well-designed. The in-game map is sectioned off by areas, and in order to navigate around properly, it's really important to look out for a bug named Cornifer who sells maps of the areas. He can be found in every new section of the map you unlock and it's important to find them, otherwise you can find yourself completely lost in a very unwelcoming place. The sections of the map get very deep and complex, with multiple branching paths, shortcuts, hidden areas, and secrets to unlock. Some areas will be impossibly reached initially, forcing you to leave a mental note to come back later wherein you can somehow get through, whether it be with a dash move or a double jump to reach higher places. The game design is extremely clever in this title and it does a good job of naturally pointing players towards areas they can currently explore, which often lead to new abilities guarded by a boss or platform or obstacle. Getting these new abilities prompts players to enter the previously locked-off area and the cycle repeats more or less, with some minor differences and optional branching pathways. The game is not linear in the slightest. It's a very faithful execution of the Castlevania-style game design and I found myself just getting lost exploring this world for hours. The bosses in the game are also very unforgiving at times, requiring extremely swift maneuvering and incorporating bullet-hell elements and precise dodging, making the dash move essential for combat. It's difficult, but not unfair, and with enough tries, you can learn a boss's pattern and eventually beat them. My first frustrating boss in the game that made me want to throw my controller out the window was the Watcher Knight boss, that had these giant rolling wrecking balls attack you from all directions and is beyond stressful. So what I did to overcome this was leave and explore more of the map, gain combat upgrades by finding a Nailsmith who made my sword more powerful, and I learned new attacks from different Nailmasters. After gathering my strength, I eventually returned to beat them. So this goes in hand with the non-linear nature of the game. The objectives, which are a vaguely expressed to the player, can be tackled in practically any order as long as you can reach them, meaning the bosses don't have to be fought in a strict order either, and many of them can be skipped over entirely. Also an essential for choosing your combat strategy are charms. Charms modify the knight's ability and take up charm notches, which can be expanded rarely and are limited, requiring players to really think about which charms to equip at a time, and this can only be done on benches. Some charms modify combat by increasing the range of your weapon or allowing you to swing your nail more rapidly, while others can focus on healing by allowing you to concentrate energy and heal faster. These various effects that charms have allow for different build types, some of which focus on spellcasting, combat, healing, or combination of these styles. There are dozens of these charms to find, and you'll want to collect as many as possible expenditure options for different combat situations. Without spoiling the story of Hollow Knight, I can say that I'm very impressed with the minimalistic and interpretive presentation it takes. The story starts off without explaining anything really. You only gradually understand the bigger picture by piecing together tidbits of lore from the various characters you interact with, and this leads to many different interpretations of the events surrounding Hollow Knight and their meaning. The one game that this actually reminds me of is The First Dark Souls, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a game reviewer and we compare everything remotely difficult to Dark Souls. The world's atmosphere, the style, the story, presentation, and many of the mechanics, including losing Geo, the great game's currency upon dying, seems to be very influenced by the game. Despite having a minimalist story, Hollow Knight's cast has a lot of charm to it. Dirtmouth starts off mostly empty, but as you meet more bugs throughout your journey, they'll gradually populate the town. Characters include the shopkeepers Izeldan Sly, a cocky venture named Zote, and a stag beetle that serves as fast straddle between different stations scattered across the map. The atmosphere of Hollow Knight is also very well-complimented by the choice of music, as well as the scenery, ranging from breathtaking environments to much more terrifying encounters. Certain areas of the game are very frightening, and the game really plays off of phobias of insects and arachnids, with many enemies and locations and bosses being terrifying and downright disturbing. This is very impressive for a two-dimensional game with a more cartoonish art style to pull off. Hollow Knight isn't just a metroidvania-style game. It also has elements of a collectathon, and you'll find yourself drawn towards finding items throughout the world, including charms, pale ores, and grubs that need to be freed from jars. Collecting these items feels immensely rewarding, as you get a sum of Geo or improved combat abilities for going off the trail to find new items and areas, and it incentivizes players to explore. I don't want to give away how the game ends, because it's a very good build-up to the ending, but I will tell you that there are multiple endings at Hollow Knight. In order to get the good ending or the best ending, you have to really go out of your way to fight many optional bosses that can be missed and perform a series of additional steps that reveal more about the game's lore and backstory in order to see this ending. These optional bosses are a way for main objectives, and they're often much more difficult than regular bosses in the game. Fighting a lot of the bosses at Hollow Knight, you'll feel a true sense of accomplishment about unbeating them, as they require a lot of precise timing and knowing the attack patterns of the enemies. This makes getting the true ending of the game a very difficult achievement in its own right, and ignoring this path of the game trimmed down the playtime dozens of hours considering how much is required to do in order to get it. It took me around 50 hours to get the true ending, so there was a ton of playtime included in this package, and even then I didn't 100% the game entirely. Hollow Knight also has free DLC that is added to the game through updates, and they add entire story elements to the core game, which is really great, and I've barely touched upon those, so we could be looking at even more playtime. In conclusion, Hollow Knight is more than I ever expected from a $15 indie game. It's really just so much to take in. The game had me playing for hours and hours, and the world almost felt like it would never end, with unique locations intriguing lore and excellent gameplay. It is hands down one of the best Metroidvania titles I've ever played. It's a challenging, rewarding game in an extremely well designed game world. Hollow Knight is not just a good game, it's a masterpiece, and is a must play title for everyone.