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Pogo spades back door1/27/2024 Hallownest’s inhabitants are nearly all either dead or insane thanks to a virulent orange infection that has spread throughout the population, and the goal of the game is to find the source of the infection and stop it from spreading any further. Hollow Knight is the tale of an unnamed bug knight who drops into a desolate town called Dirtmouth, built atop the ruins of the bug kingdom of Hallownest. The model that Team Cherry have chosen for the combat and bossfights has frustration built into its very core, however, and while things start to click later on as you get more upgrades and abilities it’s still presented as a set of conspicuous rough edges on what is otherwise an astonishingly smooth experience. Hollow Knight is very, very good when it’s firing on all cylinders it’s about as good a game as I’ve played all year. This is a key part of Dark Souls, in that it wants you to have a more tangible stake in your success or failure by penalising you every time you die, but I have a limited amount of time to spend playing games these days and I’d really prefer that they not waste it the way Dark Souls seems to enjoy doing.Īnyway, we’re here to talk about Hollow Knight, not Dark Souls - unfortunately for me, however, Hollow Knight has imported both the punishing level of difficulty and the corpse run mechanic 2 from Dark Souls, so it’s impossible to get through a review without at least mentioning it, and pointing to it as one of the reasons why I’m going to call Hollow Knight a potential masterpiece that’s fallen just short of true greatness thanks to a couple of boneheaded design decisions. I just have a philosophical disagreement with games that intentionally go out of their way to make the process of playing them harder than it has to be I’m down with difficult enemies and bossfights that take time to master, but I’m far less enthusiastic about having to spend 5-10 minutes running back to my corpse past a bunch of respawned baddies every time I fail. The game mechanics are almost perfectly pitched to piss me off, but from the ten-odd hours of it that I played it appears to execute on them exceedingly well - or at any rate, well enough that the Dark Souls clones that have started to crop up in recent years have had extreme difficulty replicating them with any degree of success. Before you get the pitchforks ready, I do not think Dark Souls is bad. The Souls in this case refers to Dark Souls, and I cannot recall a popular game series I’ve bounced off harder in the last decade. These are all significant points in Hollow Knight’s favour, but counting against it is a word that is rather unfortunately all the rage these days: Soulslike. It came out at the start of last year, it costs almost nothing (thanks to Brexit any game priced at £10 or less counts as “almost nothing” these days), it looks absolutely gorgeous and it’s by far the most Metroidvania game I’ve played since Portrait of Ruin of my ancient DS. For someone who really likes the Metroidvania style of games 1 it’s possibly a little strange that it’s taken me this long to get around to playing Hollow Knight.
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