I (finally) beat Hollow Knight! Here are my thoughts.

I actually tried to play Hollow Knight once before, but I got frustrated because I lost all my money at one point (I hadn't gotten too far). This time I decided I was going to actually beat the game.

I didn't use a guide through most of the game, except to look up strategies for some of the harder bosses I was dying to. I also looked up the remaining charms after I got the void heart.

Overall I really enjoyed Hollow Knight, much more than my first time through. It kind of took a while for everything to click, which is maybe why I got frustrated.

Here is what I think about the game's different components:

Combat

The combat in Hollow Knight is awesome. You start with the nail, which feels great to use. I really like that swinging the nail doesn't stop your movement, you can just wave it around if you like. But you can also use it to bounce off enemies and also for parries. I never got good at parries but it's great that your main weapon is so versatile.

On top of the nail there are loads of other things to do in combat. You can dash, double jump, and wall jump for mobility. Then there are the nail arts to do increased damage and hit a wider area. Bosses even can be staggered with good play. And the spells which can deal massive damage. Of course, you need to use SOUL for the spells, so you still need the nail. And you also need the SOUL for something else...

Healing. I think the healing system is really clever. First, you need SOUL to heal so you have to deal damage. But you also need to use the Focus move to heal, which immobilizes you. So you have to be very tactical about healing and patiently wait for an opening. If you panic and try to heal, you are lilely to get hit and lose another mask and also the SOUL you were focusing.

And let's not forget all the charms to enchance your moveset.

Overall I found the combat very satisfying. But this game is super hard. One of the (optional) bosses probably took me 50 tries. I don't mind hard games but boy some of these bosses.

There are a few complaints I have that are combat-related:

• It really sucked when there was a boss that was far from a bench. So if you died, you had to get all the way back! Now, I understand that you could look at getting to the boss as part of the challenge. But the problem is that most bosses in Hollow Knight are about learning all their moves and how to counter them. Which means, a new player is probably going to die several times on each boss until they can learn the patterns. So it stinks to have to walk/jump for several minutes just to fight the boss, see a few of its moves, and then die, over and over, until you finally figure out how to dodge all their attacks. It just struck me as unnecessary.

• I didn't like how when you die, you have to go back to the same spot to find your shade. There were a few times I wanted to go somewhere else because the area was too hard but I kepy having to go back to get my shade.

• Later in the game there are some bosses and enemies that hit for 2 damage. I kind of felt like this was unfair, because I had come to expect everything to do 1 damage. But the worst part is there wasn't a good way to tell what did double damage. It would have been nice for some sort of sign or color to indicate a double damage attack.

Exploration: I really enjoyed the world of Hallownest. There are lots of interesting and varied areas. I especially like that all the areas have their own enemies. It's amazing how quickly the map opens up, I felt like I had loads of places to explore. But, I have some issues that made exploration difficult for me:

• It takes too long to get around, even with the stag network and the trams. The world is huge and I often needed to get to another area once I got a new power. It could take many minutes to get from point A to point B. In the early game, it's not so bad, because you can't get everywhere and also there are a lot of goodies everywhere. But toward the end of the game it started to get annoying.

• The mapping system is unfriendly. Everything about the mapping system got on my nerves. So first, to even be able to tell where you are, you need to spend one charm notch on the compass charm. I found this incredibly annoying. Hallownest is huge and a lot of rooms look the same within their own areas (for example, the Royal Waterways, or the Hive, or the City of Tears). To me this is the worst offense Hollow Knight makes, for such a hige map I can't understand why the developers made a decision that makes exploration more difficult.

• The mapping itself is also annoying. You can't even mark off which rooms you've been in until you buy a (mostly empty) map from Cornifer. It doesn't make much sense, like you don't have paper or something? They could have made it that your map has none of the useful markers until you pay Cornifer or something. This was the worst in Fog Canyon, which I had to cross many times before actually being able to get the map.

• The devs did do one nice thing: they let you buy markers to place on your map. Since Hallownest is so big, it was very helpful to be able to plop markers down in places I couldn't reach yet. But I wish there were more available. There are 6 each in 4 colors. I ran out at one point. I wish there were 10 each in 8 colors.

Maybe some people remember the map better than me? I have a job and a baby so I only got to play intermittently and never really memorized much of the map.

Story: I found the story really fascinating. I guess it's more worldbuilding than story, but I found it really enjoyable. I just wish there was even more.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Overall I really enjoyed it even if there were a few design decisions I didn't really like. I beat The Radiance and Nightmare King Grimm, but I didn't do any of Godhome. I'm looking forward to the sequel!

Submitted December 02, 2019 at 06:26AM by rlbond86 https://ift.tt/2Y52NLS