Okay, I know I need to start talking about the games I've played for the past two years, but I really want to take a second and discuss Hollow Knight. This is a game that I've been pretty obsessively playing for the past week and a half or so and have racked up considerably more time in it than I initially expected. I've just recently finished the game and really enjoyed it.
Hollow Knight was initially available on PC which I don't really spend any time on anymore. Fortunately, it was recently released for consoles (including PS4, where I played it) including a whole pile of DLC bundled in. I picked it up in a sale with little in the way of expectation and was really blown away with how engrossed I became in it.
It's this really dark, dank world full of slightly anthropomorphized bug characters that chitter and chirp and skitter through a series of labyrinthine interconnected passageways. In true Metroidvania fashion, there are plenty of paths, secret areas, destructible walls, and treasures to find. The Knight, your white horned, soulless-eyed protagonist unlocks a series of different powers and abilities both for platforming and for combat. Skilled explorers are rewarded with a wide variety of different new tools that allow you to peel back layer after layer of the game's expansive world.
It's also an extremely difficult game featuring a series of extraordinarily difficult boss fights. Every time I reached a new boss it felt like I was playing Dark Souls and had hit a brick wall. Endlessly repeating these boss fights forced me to learn their patterns and to devise new strategies to defeat them. In cases where I simply wasn't up to the task of defeating a particular boss, I'd simply retreat and explore elsewhere. I might find a new health upgrade or a charm that would unlock new strategies that might help me to fight a boss in a different way. Although it was frustrating for me to "give up" on bosses sometimes, it felt refreshing to get a new perspective by trying new areas and then coming back later with new strategies.
There are a lot of cool gameplay elements in Hollow Knight. At its core its built around the Knight's melee combat with his weapon of choice, a nail. However, you do have access to a series of spells as well, useable by expending Soul which builds up over time during melee combat. I found that I typically used my Soul on healing, either in between melee encounters or during carefully timed lulls in boss fights. A lot of strategy in boss fights was finding just the right moment in a boss pattern to get just enough time to land a heal. Some bosses were tough enough that there was never any time for this to happen. Of course, the Quick Focus charm made it more likely this was possible, at the expense of three notches.
Just to clarify a bit, charms are these little trinkets the Knight can collect and equip that create a lot of interesting different effects. Some modify your damage output or defense outright, but most have effects that are entirely unique. The Defender's Crest causes you to "emit a heroic odor" for instance, which really only makes sense until you equip it and try it out. A lot of these charms have interesting interactions as well that don't really come into play unless you experiment. With 40 different charms to collect, there are a lot of different combinations and builds to try. I know I've tried dozens of different combinations when tackling a tough boss one thousand times in a row.
It's just a really exciting and interesting game. There's always something new to uncover around every corner and it's always impactful. Each charm you find unlocks new gameplay options and each spell or ability either enriches the combat or gives you access to a new area in Hallownest that was difficult or impossible to access before. Beyond that, the enemy variety is outstanding with each area featuring dozens of really memorable different types of bugs with cool gameplay patterns. Bugs leap at you, explode on you, shoot blobs of goo at you, fly wildly through the air with nail-lances, throw javelins, and in one particular case split into two entirely separate parts after death and start attacking you again! Most of these designs are wildly creative and really enrich what is a breathing and fully-realized world. It's all very aesthetically pleasing and well-designed and I just can't recommend it enough as a game.
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