My try at a review...

It's time to chat about how much I like Hollow Knight.

The first time I played hollow knight, I was alone. My fiance and her family were taking a vacation and I was watching their house for about a week. I picked up "Hollow Knight" on sale because of the art-style, which initially drew me to the game.

After I booted up the game, I could tell this was going to be a special one. Every inch of this title is made with love and care from the team that worked on it. It doesn't feel like you're playing a game from a small studio when you boot up this title, in terms of production value - it holds it's own with any game out there today.

A huge part in this, I feel. Is it's music. The soundtrack composed by Christopher Larkin is both soothing and mysterious. The songs fit the mood of each environment so well and really serve to alleviate the tension of exploring uncharted territory infested with undead insects with nothing to your name but a weak sword-like weapon simply known as the "nail".

As a matter of fact, when you start out playing this game, you feel fairly helpless against the enemies you fight. Almost every combat scenario you have to stay on your toes with. This reminds of me of Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild's beginning game, in terms of the daunting prospect of fighting enemies with no extra abilities or weapon buffs. The first portion of this journey with our unnamed hero is spent completely lost and under-powered. If you want to know where you're going, or become stronger to fight the enemies in this game, you're going to have to search for it.

The catacomb-like environments of Hollow Knight are easy to get lost in, especially if you haven't found the resident map maker who is also exploring this wasted ancient civilization. Even when you get your map, you have to purchase a small upgrade in order to see your position on that map. Hollow knight does not mess around, you have to work to make it further into the game. And it feels great.

It never feels too frustrating to find new abilities and upgrades within the world of Hollow Knight. The game gives you quite a lot of freedom to explore but never let's you become too overwhelmed with what's out there. You are able to set "pins"/markers on the map to mark areas to come back to later with a new ability, or a boss room that you want to attempt once you're stronger.

Hollow Knight handles player death in a very dark souls-like way. If you fall victim to a strong enemy or a challenging platforming segment, you leave behind a dark spirit of yourself and drop all of your in-game currency (geo) with it. In order to gain back your geo, you have to travel back to where you died and kill your new doppelganger. Usually, this is not a challenging fight, your past life slowly floats towards you and will sometimes make a small attempt at attacking you before you down it in a few strikes. This can become very challenging if you die to a very strong boss, as you may not be able to retreat once obtaining your geo and you'll have to kill the threat.

The abilities in this game are found strewn about the game world, which is extremely Metroid-esque. There are no set orders to obtain these abilities and some of them are entirely optional to progress, but help to strengthen your offensive output. The other ways of upgrading your stats come in the form of increasing your life bar by finding these soul fragments a la "Heart Pieces" and finding "Badges" to equip that can offer you alterations to your abilities or stat buffs. This reminds of the badge system in Paper Mario games the most, and is somewhat reminiscent of the upgrades/addons in The Binding of Issac. You have a limited amount of badges that you can equip - and some of them will break after you die carrying them. (These are more temporary attack power or defense buffs, that you can repair if you need to.)

The story within the game is sparse, and you learn more by reading murals within the world or encountering story points at certain times. You can speak with various NPCs in the "hub" area of the game and through small encounters with other explorers like you deeper within the realm. You even gain the ability to learn more about them through an upgrade that's fairly similar to Metroid Prime's scanning function, but I don't want to spoil that for you. All in all, the story's pacing is controlled more by your play style than it is anything else. I enjoy the quiet and sparse nature of the world, and find it enthralling to discover more details on my own and imagine more about the world-building than being thrown exposition down my throat.

I really enjoyed my time with Hollow Knight and am very excited to see where they go with the sequel "Silksong". I would highly recommend that anyone play this game, especially if you enjoy exploring lovely worlds and a little bit of a challenge.

If I had any complaints at all about the game, is that it can be a little difficult to figure out what you need to do to advance the game or where to find the next ability. This can lead to time spent on your maps and setting destinations to check out before you can find the next piece to advance. While usually, this can be really fun. If you don't use pins to remind yourself not to go to certain "unexplored" regions until you find something to help you advance, you can retrace a lot of steps without getting anywhere.

Submitted March 04, 2019 at 11:42PM by hidden_specter https://ift.tt/2EupeRo