"Hollow Knight" by Team Cherry

How do I even begin to review Hollow Knight?

I first learned of its existence from a book I got from the library. That book contained a two-page promotional thing for the sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong. I was struck by the concept of "wait, a game about bugs that have magic?" and the artstyle, so much so that I actually built an entire videogame (Failing Ward, it's on the programming website Scratch) inspired by it.

Then I finally bought the actual game in July of last year, and I was far from disappointed.

(Caveat lector: This game is not for the faint of heart. I don't mean because it's full of jumpscares or anything, it's just difficult as nouns. So if you're an easily frustrated sort of person, it might not be for you.)

The art is absolutely beautiful. Everything in the game is some combination of elegant, adorable, and/or horrifying (though admittedly that last is mostly in the part full of spiders). It has a hand-drawn aesthetic, probably because the people who made it actually drew the entire game, and it's full of unique areas with their own distinct looks. Some of my favorites:

-Greenpath (it would be a forest in a normal game, but these are bugs so it's just full of moss instead.)

-Crystal Peak (a mountain full of glowing pink crystals that occasionally shoot lasers.)

-The White Palace (a stupidly difficult parkour challenge, featuring far too many buzzsaws, but also one of the brightest places in the game.)

And a dishonorable mention to the Queen's Gardens (actually rivals the White Palace for sheer beauty, but an absolute pain to play), Deepnest (the part full of spiders), and the Forgotten Crossroads (which are... just kinda boring).

There's like 40 unique bosses in this game. Honestly, I could do individual posts on most of them... I might do that, actually. That'd be an interesting series (to me, at least).

The storyline of Hollow Knight is actually somewhat depressing, and I'm going to spoil it; don't highlight the next three paragraphs if you don't want lore and plot spoilers.

Basically, |some time in the far past, there was| this devastating plague that infected a lot of the bugs in Hallownest (the game world), turned them into zombies, and plastered orange goo everywhere. |The Pale King (the ruler of Hallownest)| tried to |stop the plague by trapping the angry moth goddess causing it inside a specially created soulless containment bug, which was then chained up and stuck inside a magically sealed vault. His plan seems to have worked, at least for a while, but then the containment bug sort of broke an indeterminate time later, releasing the plague again because the magic seals on the vault aren't enough to contain the plague by themselves.| And then pretty much everybody in the kingdom died, including |the Pale King|. This is the depressing part (well, most of it).

Into this mostly dead and zombified world steps your character, the Knight. (|Not the Hollow Knight, that title goes to the Pale King's soulless containment bug and the final and/or penultimate boss of the game depending on which ending you're doing|.) He's eventually revealed to be |one of the failed attempts at making the soulless containment bug|, called back to Hallownest by... something. The Knight wanders around for a while, doing quests and stuff and opening the seals on the vault, before finally confronting the plague at its source.

And |depending on the route you take through the game, that "source" can differ|. In the normal ending, titled "The Hollow Knight," you |kill the Hollow Knight and take its place as the soulless containment bug|. But if you |do a bunch of sidequests, including making your way through the White Palace area I mentioned earlier and stealing half a magic item off the Pale King's corpse|, you can get a different ending: |"Dream No More"|. That ending sees you |go inside the mind of the Hollow Knight and fight the real source of the infection: The Radiance, the aforementioned angry moth goddess. It's a ridiculously hard bossfight|, but the ending it gives is a much more hopeful one: |instead of replacing the Hollow Knight and eventually failing just like it did, you can actually stop the plague| once and for all.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+ for fantasy violence and mild blood.

5 stars. Despite the difficulty, I love this game. To the point that I've spent like three full days playing it, even through the ridiculous amounts of dying.

Favorite lines:

    "You can't eat them, and they don't make very good pillows. They hardly seem worth all the trouble to me."

    -Elderbug (the friendly guy in the town at the beginning of the game), describing the crystals from Crystal Peak

    "In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret,
    For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met,
    Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed,
    A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed."

    -"Elegy for Hallownest," a poem that plays during the opening cutscene right before the game starts

(Endnote: Today is the day that the sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, releases after like 7 years of development. I wasn't originally going to review this for quite a while, but then I realized my planned post schedule would drop a post directly onto the release day...)