Riding the heels of games like Dark Souls and the endless wave of Metroid copycats that the indie game avalanche has brought in, Hollow Knight is one that's gotten a lot of acclaim. I honestly can't tell you why, though, as I didn't find much of interest or value here at all. Rather than delivering a dense, diverse and captivating environment to explore, Hollow Knight's world is painted entirely in bleary washed-out monochrome, enemies consist of about four repeating types for a huge portion of the game, backgrounds are mostly blurred out to the point of being indistinguishable from one another, and its characters are seemingly just predesigned with the inevitable (but more importantly, lucrative) Funko Pop licensing deal in mind. Exploration and combat lack any feeling of depth, variety or reward, giving you a set of equipment, abilities and environments less inspired by genre staples like Symphony of the Night or Super Metroid and more on level with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES, yet somehow lacking the intricacy of a game that came out nearly thirty years before it. For a huge chunk of the game all you get is a short-ranged nail to attack with and a very slow heal move that takes far too long to charge and activate, making it all but useless in battle, and in addition to just the requisite walking and jumping, that's also the sum of ways you're afforded to interact with your environment and solve puzzles. I thought perhaps the in-game shop could add some variety to the proceedings, but lo and behold, they've largely exhumed fun things like 'new abilities' and 'powerups' and 'equipment' and instead opted in to the Johnny Longtorso school of design, selling you standard things like keys and UI features one at a time for hundreds of coins apiece to artificially pad out the experience. And yes, having to grind money just to explore freely, mark key rooms and point out your own location on a minimap of an extremely samey-looking dungeon is asinine and not 'retro' in the slightest. I will not be swayed on this, particularly as I've played several games from the early 80's that know better than to force this brand of horsecrap on you. Dying, in true Souls fashion, also causes you to drop all your money and have to backtrack all the way to where you died to retrieve it, with a second death making it all vanish into the void forever. So that's just more tedious grinding, backtracking and pattern memorization to pad out runtime in what's already pretty bland and unsatisfying gameplay; lovely.
Hollow Knight's story, such as it is, follows the same formula as Dark Souls too, hiding meaningless text fragments in out-of-the-way, cleverly hidden locations and framing the tedium of hunting them down and trying to fit them together (filling in the remaining gaps with fan fiction) as "rewarding ingenuity and cleverness". Or to put it more bluntly, Team Cherry is selling a box of newspaper shreds labeled in crayon as 'the most important literary masterwork since the Iliad" and their marks are taking silence in response to their theories as some kind of confirmation that they're all absolutely correct and that they're a genius too; just one far less successful than their gods at Team Cherry because of all those awful [scapegoats of choice here] holding them back from the fame and fortune that's rightfully theirs. Basically, if you have something to prove about how much of an elite old-school gamer you are and how you're so much more intellectual and genetically superior to everyone else because of "your" choice in electronic toys, you'll happily make this game your entire personality, playing it through three or more times a day and bragging endlessly about how you're the 267,385th person to unlock every one of its cheevos and endlessly overanalyzing it on social media and gaming forums, putting hundreds of times more thought into every element of its design and writing than anyone who worked on it ever did while decrying anyone who doesn't share your high opinion of yourself for it as a "fake gamer" and probably a [scapegoat of choice here] too. Otherwise, Hollow Knight, like all "Soulslikes", is just more empty bombast sold by and to narcissistic bullies only interested in being put on a pedestal and worshipped rather than using their public platform or whatever irreplaceable gifts they imagine they possess to benefit anyone besides themselves; the worst kind of bullies, really.
Being smug and condescending over selling you basic game mechanics at premium prices is a feature!
Developer: Team Cherry
Publisher: Team Cherry
Released: 2017
Platforms: PC, MacOS, Linux, Switch, PS4, XBox One