Hollow Knight is as good as you've heard. The art and music are both incredible. The only issue I had is that the difficulty does get a bit punishing with some bosses.
I will add that this game would have worked much better as a dark-souls like game and not a roguelike. The roguelike elements distract from the atmosphere a lot, which is a shame as the art is pretty good. Gameplay wise, yes, it's a huge problem that it's possible to miss entire areas that give story critical items without realizing that there's anything to miss or being able to go back. Your weapons are toys that are unsatisfying and fiddly to use and barely scratch the enemies when they can hit. It's also annoying that interacting with the story items causes sanity damage that bends your screen and general has no good effects, since it discourages people from reading the writing or interacting with things, which has been a problem in Lovecraft related RPGs since the first edition of "Call of Cthulhu" pen and paper, still, a game should have some system around that. I keep thinking that if the gold and information worked like XP bars that unlocked more items over time and all the items worked off of cool-downs (like the estus flasks in dark souls) then the game would be less frustrating to play. The annoyance factor is the main thing in my opinion. If it were a smoother gameplay experience it would be much better.
From the reviews it sounds like a travelogue about being on the Transsiberian Railway. The main problems are that it's super depressing in the background, with the whole trip overshadowed by deaths in the family and a slightly tense relationship between the main characters. Then you're detained by police and threatened, which overshadows the whole trip. If it wasn't intentional then why have the story segway there? It had loads of potential as a an interesting travel story and historical exposition, but it's let down hard by the heavy focus on things that have nothing to do with the towns you're going through or the things you're seeing.
I love both the graphics and the idea of the game, but I have doubts about the execution. Among other things, the game tries to sell you very hard on "the folly of man", but everyone you hear about is so dense that the whole thing comes off as being ham-fisted. * The sub doesn't start with any weapons. If you're exploring down the street then it would be stupid to go armed, but the main character is exploring a hostile planet and didn't bring any self protection. That's just naive. This is something that I can understand for gameplay's sake, but it still really bugs me. * The weapons are horrible and unwieldy. Poor firing arcs, terrible range, need charge times. I've made this complaint about other games as well, in order for an action game to work, the weapons have to be fun to use. So far this isn't the case here. * Gameplay and story segregation to an extreme. Example: why does a submarine not have sonar? You're building a submarine to go under the water, but don't include a light source or any sort of sonar or other method of range-finding. This is such a tiny thing, but when you realize it, it makes everything in the story so much worse. The auto-map might count but I doubt that's intentional. Another thing, the submarine is tactically fragile, it can be dissolved by waste from a pipe, but can survive being dropped through an ice sheet from orbit. At that speed hitting water is like hitting the ground.. and the sub is fine with no issues. * Other reviewers have pointed out, the story is super-preachy. Not in a fun way either, but in an annoying and eye-rolling way, instead of inspiring meditative thoughts on humanity's place in the world, it just inspires annoyance with the unseen narrators. With the horrible weapons you won't get any relief from this by shooting things either. Each of these things might be petty, but the game had so much potential...
It tries to be a Rogue/Painkiller hybrid, but it's lacking in two main ways.. 1. In Painkiller the enemies always come from the front. They only spawn behind you in the completely hated fanmade expansion, that's because having enemies spawn behind you takes away the fun of positioning and strategy, it's just really annoying. 2. The enemies aren't satisfying to kill and the weapons aren't fun to shoot. The weapons in Painkiller were fun just to shoot and a solid hit with almost any weapon was an instant kill against most enemies. That's not the case here, the weapons fire slightly slowly, with unsatisfying animations and seem to just bounce ineffectually off the many small enemies. I feel the makers of Ziggurat missed the point a little bit.
I didn't have a chance to see the lack of optimization mentioned by the reviewers because on my gaming machine (Windows 8.1), it doesn't even start; crashing instantly after being run with a library error. The same machine runs Bioshock Infinite / Crysis perfectly, so it looks like something got skipped in the pre-release testing for this game.
It's crushingly average. It tries to honor the old staples by repeating them but it does so without any charm or all that much attention, taking only the boring surface bits and doing them over and over. For example, it does the Zelda overhead 2d fighting; but the hit detection is a bit questionable and other games, such as Terranigma did the overhead 2d thing with far more maneuvers like the diving jump kick. On that note, Terranigma also did the changing world as you unlock more dungeons with more competence too. The game is also exceptionally sparse. Most 2d games like Final Fantasy 4,5,6 looked way better than Evoland's top down mode. Even Zelda: Link's Awakening had more art and better handling on the GB than this game's top down sections. Another thing, did we really need a maze section? Just for the sake of having a maze?
