Hollow Knight

I'm glad GOG has a star system for reviews rather than the binary system that Steam has. This game is average at best with some shining moments that don't make up for the absolute slog it is in the midgame. Hollow Knight starts out quite charming, it has the bones to be something extraordinary but falls short due to amateur feeling design choices. The combat and controls are top notch but only utilized to their full potential during 2 or 3 of the games multitude of boss style battles and the difficulty is artificially inflated in too many instances to make certain challenges feel rewarding. Music is awesome but becomes tiring because of the limited number of tracks throughout the game. The artstyle is beautiful but that doesn't make up for a lack of interesting platforming and map traversal. The world feels very rigid and lacks any real fluidity to mask the tile-like way it is designed. Most of the best content was added after the initial release. People lauded this game from the beginning but I just don't get it. It is not really like Metroid, Castlevania, or Dark Souls, so don't let the genre associating terms fool you. What can be said is that Hollow Knight is an exceptional value at full or sale price. There is a lot of content to enjoy if this is your cup of tea. I put plenty of hours into the game to complete it, 80 or so, but did that for the sake of doing so more than fully enjoying myself. Like mentioned, I only felt truly satisfied after 2 or 3 or the games boss battles, which is a shame because those battles really excel in the fun department. Now that I'm seeing other reviews they use "flawed," "almost perfect," and other similarly weighted descriptors to describe the game yet still give it 5 stars. I guess the star system is bunk, too. This game is average at best but a great value like mentioned.

It is a well done platformer and you can see so many original influences in it. But: The map "system" is attrocious. Buy Quill to map where you, except that doesn't work until buy more map pieces from vendor in each area. And then your quill suddenly adds onto that map. Magically not working through the entire area you just went through to get to him. Then the map shows nothing. You have to pins to show energy statues, pins to show fast travel points, pins to show heal/save benches, etc. There is an entire shop thats only purpose is to buy a funcation map. Which still doesn't show things like locked doors so you can know where it was. You have to buy pins for you to place too. The hits / giant splash graphics feel off to me. I can't quite place it, but it is contact damage that I can't get a feel for or simply can't see a d*mn thing from all the impact graphics which leads to misses and further damage on me.

Nice visuals, music, interesting enemies and boss fights for the early parts anyway. It's a metroidvania at it's core, infused with Demon Souls gameplay elements. I loved the aesthetic, I hated the repetitiveness and grinding that the game seemed to require of me in the early stages, while in the later ones, the grinding goes completely away (and becomes pointless to accumulate "wealth") and at least the travelling is made easier. The storytelling felt broken. There's lots of lore, and the wiki provides much detail on that, but I didn't get a lot of it. It's not that I didn't interact with characters and other info sources, it's that the text on the lore is... not how normal people talk. Worst part by far is the controls. I played with a keyboard, reached about 103% of the game, after lots of frustrating parts which demand precision platforming and combos of moves during boss fights, that the game does not really support you to pull through. I'm not a master at platformer games, but I am decent enough. The controls felt too fluid, not registering moves I was trying to trigger. That includes jump directional attacks, wall jumps, spell casting, the works (tested with three different keyboards in case it was a hardware issue). Maybe with a controller it would play better? It felt like the game wanted fluidity with animations in expense of the controls feeling snappy and right. This does not matter much most of the time, because you can retry. It's frustrating, when you know what you need to do, you do it, but the game says no. Then there is a bonus near end-game area, which for some reason is required to go through for the special "good?" ending, which is way too much platforming and death traps and feels disconnected with the rest of the game. It's like a challenge that goes on for too long and the difficulty is ramped up beyond any logic, balance or consideration of player base. I went through two thirds of that area and decided that's it for me forever.

I'm sorry, I just don't feel the way most people do about this game. For me it's just boring and artificially lengthened. Hollow Knight is a game that looks and sounds like a Tim Burton movie. The music is great, the art has personality, but despite all the details it all looks the same, it's just a lot of black shades over a single color. That's especially bad because it's really hard to find your way in this game, every room looks the same to me. And that leads me to the worst aspect of the game: the map. It doesn't help at all. You can't just automatically add every room you visit to your map like in every other metroidvania. Nope, here you have to keep buying pieces of the map, A PENCIL if you want to update it - and even if you do, the map only gets updated when you save, and if you already bought the map piece of the area. Also, it's easy to lose your money, and to get it back you have to do a lot of tedious grinding. That wouldn't be that bad it you'd only use money to buy items, but in this game you need to buy a lot of items that are mandatory to make progress. Another thing I hate is that every time you hit an enemy YOU are knocked back a little. It's like the game is punishing you for doing things right! There are a lot of small platforms with the typical enemies that fly towards you and make you fall. But in this game if you manage to hit them, you will fall anyway because of said knockback. It's just super tedious and time consuming, I spent several hours in this game and barely felt like I made any significant progress, it just feels like a chore.

Game is mediocre, the quality isn't there and therefore doesn't justify the time to get good. The combat is laughably simple and the boss battles aren't hard. It's the dreadful map that makes this game difficult which is the wrong place to put the difficulty. Difficulty should be based on the challenge of the world/bosses. I also hate that if an enemy walks into me I take damage but if I walk into an enemy I still take damage. The enemy doesn't have thorns or isn't toxic just more crap from the dev. I am not being overly dramatic but Hollow Knight has the worst pacing of any game I have ever played. You unlock an ability then you go exploring and find you need another ability to make progress again. It completely takes the wind from your sails and completely deters you from launching the game ever again. The map system is probably the worst I have ever seen, purposely designed to be obscure and unhelpful in order to artificially make the game much harder than it actually is. The bosses are not hard I didn't die more than 5-6 times to the ones I fought. It's the lack of hand holding and the map that makes this game a complete chore to play. Just because it's popular doesn't make it good. Like Macdonald's for instance. I don't want a game to take control and play the game for me don't get me wrong. But just a general nudge in the right cardinal direction now and then would of done wonders for the pacing of this game. If the game was much deeper rather than just a jump, dodge, basic attack and three spells and it felt great to play I might of stuck with it but it isn't. What makes me angry about this game is the arrogance from the developer in how they think that their game is of such high quality that people will be happy to run back and forth in it's world. It isn't high quality it's mediocre. If someone is allowed to love something other people are equally allowed that same right to hate it.