One of the best, most beautiful, most immersive, and most fun games I've ever played! I first picked it up when patch 1.5 was released. I've since did a playthrough for each of the 3 background stories, and I'm now doing a forth playthrough on occasion of 2.02 and the DLC. Even though it had a horrible release, this game has gotten to the point where it's extremely stable, refined and bug free. In over 600 hours of playtime I haven't had any stability issues whatsoever. I did ran into a bug which prevented a minor quest from progressing, but that bug has since been fixed. I'm running the game on windows 11, with a core i5-10400F, 16gb ram, and an RTX 3060.
Hollow Knight is an excelent addition to the Metroidvania genre. I greatly enjoyed exploring every nook and crany of it's gigantic map. The music and artstyle are amazing. The combat is fun. The story is cool. I'm only taking one star away for two reasons: 1. I understand the type of audience the developers have in mind, but I see no reason not to add an easier game mode to a single player game. Specially for older audiences, which might become extremely frustrated with the insanely difficult boss fights and with some platforming challenges, and which might not have the patience or the time to spend hours upon hours trying to beat a single boss. Also, not all Metroidvania fans are necessarily Dark Souls fans. 2. The story is great but it could have been delivered in a slightly less cryptic way. I understand Dark Souls games are like that, and I do like putting together a story like a detective solving a case, but this game takes it too far for my taste. I'd rather not have to turn to google just to understand a game's story.
I had such a wonderful time with this game! It's been years since I enjoyed a puzzle adventure game. Much less one of this scale, beauty and puzzle quality. I was hardly able to stop playing. Blasted through the whole thing in two days. The story, the graphics, the puzzles... it was all awesome! I'm only taking one star away because a couple of late-game puzzles require a lot of quick jumps between worlds, which means loading screens. Many, MANY loading screens with only a few seconds between them! So don't do my mistake. Install this game on an SSD and save yourself a whole lot of unnecessary waiting.
