These foes make you consider charting out alternative routes to avoid them entirely or entice you to formulate smart attacking options to reap monetary rewards from a successful takedown. Conversely, larger enemies that deal more damage to you will routinely appear in claustrophobic spaces, such as the heavily armored beetles in Deepnest or the grotesque leeches in the Royal Waterways. Mosquitoes are easy to swat away in small numbers, but swarms of the fast-moving devils can become problematic in areas with limited platforms to traverse between. There are hundreds of enemies waiting to knock you back to your last resting area, each with unique attack patterns and behaviors. Its multiple sections also fold over into themselves in ingenious ways, and uncovering useful shortcuts, hidden passageways, and crucial resting places are paramount to avoiding tedious backtracking.īacktracking itself is only dangerous because Hollow Knight is designed to make your travels as hard as possible. A dangerous acidic pool will prevent you from reaching clear pathways to new areas, for example, while a large stretch of thorny vines prevents you from crossing large chasms safely without something to aid you. It's immediately clear when you're not equipped for an area, which helps avoid any potential frustration. Another will let you fly across seemingly endless caverns of spikes without a care in the world. The Mantis Claw, for example, allows you to augment your regular jump with chained wall jumps. They're accompanied by wonderful musical scores that breathe an immense amount of personality into each area with fitting backdrops, but Hollow Knight also understands that silence is sometimes just as effective.Įxploration is governed by key items you'll find around the map, giving you new abilities to traverse previously inaccessible areas. Hollow Knight's spaces each tell a story, and you can engross yourself in the small tales its sparse inhabitants tell through text to piece together what befell this once regal society. The creaky and eerie waterways below the City of Tears sits comfortably next to the dark catacombs of a spider's nest, with webs obscuring your view to only increase the tension preceding a surprise attack. Honeycomb-laden halls stretch out over multiple screens in a rich, royal bee hive, contrasted by desolate and lonely caverns on the edges of the kingdom. The depth of their variations is what truly stands out. Each bears a striking aesthetic to make it clear where you are and what sorts of enemies you should expect to face. Hollow Knight's distinct spaces are a marvel in design. It's overwhelming before you get your bearings, but overcoming that initial hurdle provides you the skills and knowledge required to traverse the rest of Hollow Knight's intricate world. Purchasable maps help fill in the blanks, but even then, you'll need to equip a specific item just to see where you are at any given time. You'll become hopelessly lost in the labyrinths below Dirtmouth, unsure of whether you're heading towards progress or in the opposite direction entirely. None of it is filled in from the start, and Hollow Knight doesn't even present you with a way to track your travels until several hours in. There's peril in adventuring through Hollow Knight's world, but there's always something new to poke at to entice you to push further through.Ĭentral to Hollow Knight's compelling exploration is the large map itself. Its citizens-from harmless-looking beetles to aggressively violent bees-protect their spaces with ferocity. There's no hint as to your purpose within its curious bug kingdom, one that has seen better days and now lies rotting beneath the surface of the last standing settlement, Dirtmouth. Hollow Knight doesn't concern itself with exposition and very quickly lets you loose on a massive, sprawling world with little direction. Its demanding combat and smartly designed platforming puzzles made a strong debut on PC last year, but the more complete package on Nintendo Switch with every bit of DLC to date is a more robust challenge filled with excitement and dread-and one that you’ll struggle to pull yourself away from. Its rich 2D world is filled with tragic tales of a lost kingdom that unfurl during an expansive adventure that feels breathless from its humble beginnings to its climatic, emotional end. Hollow Knight routinely finds ways to surprise you and regularly delivers more than you might have bargained for.
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