As someone who actively resists games as big and sprawling as Hollow Knight (I spent about 20-odd hours playing it if you wanted to, you could maybe double that number), I was pretty shocked at how willing I was to keep playing for hours at a time, how much I wanted to figure out the map of this underground world and solve the puzzle of its existence. A gothic tragedy enacted by charming-yet-creepy insects with a score that evokes sorrow, whimsy, and adventure in equal parts, Hollow Knight feels unique despite playing like a million other Metroid imitators. Australian developers Ari Gibson and William Pellen make up Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry, and with the help of composer/sound designer Christopher Larkin, Hollow Knight has an aesthetic that feels entirely its own. It's like a novel you can play through and construct at your own pace, where the twists and payoffs aren't delivered to you directly but instead come from the assemblage of puzzle pieces in your own time.Ī big reason for this is because the game is largely the product of two people. Hollow Knight gets at one of my favorite things in video games, where it takes a story and hides its bones in the walls of every corridor, the clues in the rhythm and meter of its words, quietly asking you to notice things about the creatures you're fighting the way they move and act and look. You can zip toward a conclusion, or take your time and notice that Hallownest isn't a place that has one mystery but many-and it has as many answers as you're willing to find. Hollow Knight is a game that is in love with its strange, macabre world and delights in whatever amount of time you decide to spend in it, rewarding you accordingly. There are characters I have not met and you might not either. There's a shopkeeper with a secret, a mask-maker whom I can't quite make sense of, an old bug who just wants to talk your ear off. There's Zote, a bug who swears he's a mighty warrior but alway seems to get his ass kicked. There's Cornifer, a map-maker so obsessed with his work he will willfully dive into places he probably shouldn't, only to admit he was too scared to complete his maps in full (leaving you to fill them out for him). They will talk to you, and you'll always be surprised by how colorful they are. They're also all slowly going mad, and most of them want to kill you. Hallownest is a kingdom full of bugs, and the bugs are kind of cute. It's not quite clear what you are, or why you're here, but you have a tiny sword in your hand and a large mystery to solve: What happened to the kingdom of Hallownest, the underground empire that lies beneath a well? You play as The Knight, a small, nimble little bug of mysterious origin. Hollow Knight, which debuted on Nintendo Switch this summer-where most people will likely encounter it for the first time after it came out on PC last year-is one of my favorite games I've played this year, a strange story that's both spooky and endearing and littered with bodies, so many bodies, and you can't help but wonder why. Over the past two weeks, I've been playing Hollow Knight, a game that I can only really describe as " A Bug's Life, but directed by Guillermo del Toro." That is, by the way, a ringing endorsement.
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