I bought this game 5 days ago, I'm 40 hours in.
The game has amazing visuals, the metroidvania style is managed perfectly, the story is really interesting and has a great difficulty.
The gameplay is really good, controlling your little knight feels amazing and you're always discovering new moves that completely change the ways that you can approach a zone/fight.
Totally worth the price, don't even hesitate to buy and play this masterpiece.
Hollow Knight is damn good and it is a hell of challenge.
A screen shot alone will show you the game art is stunning and well detailed. The game trailers show smooth game play but that is only true after you get a handle of how your character moves and after you have made enough progress to start getting charms (power-ups). The icing on this cake is the most excellent soundtrack.
You play a small insect warrior adventuring in the remnants of a fallen underground insect world. Choosing insects as characters in this game was an amazing artistic choice. Insects are, in an of themselves, fascinating creatures that have a wide variety of physical features and survival traits that are often unknown and unseen to most. The developers really incorporated that into the game design and play.
As I had mentioned, this game is difficult but it isn't an outright punishfest either. For example, there are sparse check points for your character to rest and swap power-ups. Sometimes, a boss may be far away from a check point so you have to dungeon crawl to the big fight. The travel alone may set you back so that you cannot fight the bosses effectively. Additionally, each time you die you loose your monies and your revived character is not as powerful. The remedy is to go back where you last died and fight the ghost of your dead self. So, if you have died in a particularly difficult area or lost the place where you died, you are in a bit of a pickle. The bosses attacks are pattern based, so each time you die you learn, and eventually you smash in the boss' carapace and dance a jig on his gooey innards.
I barely had the chops to beat this thing, but damn this game is good. 9.5/10
(Review transferred from my steam account; 89 hours of game play on record.)
Hollow Knight's game design borrows heavily from the Soulsborne titles and will, for the most part, scratch the same itch, if you are a fan of those games. Sadly, it doesn't combine the moving parts quite as elegantly as especially the later, more polished Soulsborne games did.
One big issue is the placement of fast travel points and shortcuts in relation to difficult sections of the game. You will often find savepoints in very easy areas, yet find yourself taking needlessly long and difficult routes to get back to a boss. There is a fine line between "challenging" and "wasting the player's time" and this game sadly often stumbles over to the latter side.
The second issue is that this being a Metroidvania title means shortcuts often require certain skills to open. You may often find yourself grinding through a hard part of a level, only to find the shortcut back locked by some blockade you cannot deal with yet.
Both issues on their own wouldn't be so bad, but together they combine to cause quite some frustration.
That being said, the rest of the game does make up for this. The art, music and setting are nothing but gorgeous, the combat and movement feel fluid and engaging. With just a few little tweaks to the level layout, this game could have been perfect.
