1. The term Metroidvania should only refer to the Castlevania games w/ Metroid-like structure but instead refers to all games w/ Metroid-like structure. This is proof that every last person who plays video games is stupid. Also, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania game.
2. There's some really clever hints of the Metroid influence early on. Little things like crawly enemies that stick to all sides of platforms like the zoomers in Metroid are abound. It makes Hollow Knight come off as a winking but sincere homage. I thought this was funny and cool but I play video games so I'm stupid.
3. Presumably, most people reading this will know the deal but here is how Hollow Knight works in brief: you are presented w/ what is theoretically an open world map with some pathways visible but tantalizingly unreachable. When you run into one of these pathways, you go off some other direction until you get an item that increases your mobility options then you go back. You repeat this process until you win. Go you!
4.Typically, this style of game is fairly short. Super Metroid, for example, is under ten hours and in no way feels short or incomplete. Hollow Knight is two or three times that easily. It is set in a sprawling world that takes a long time to traverse and that has some interesting effects on how the game plays.
5. I initially didn't like Hollow Knight's controls. The jumps seemed slippery and lacking impact but it all started to feel natural as my skill level built up and more of the moveset became available to me. This is pretty much what you want.
6. The Chirstopher Larkin composed score is a highlight . It combines orchestral elements w/ a touch of synth, giving it an expansive feel that suits the game's vast scope. The main theme is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music in all of gaming. Actually, a lot of these pieces are.
7. The graphics don't work nearly so well for me. Part of this is personal preference; I just don't find its cartoonish style terribly appealing. More so than that though, it fails from a gameplay standpoint. Specifically, it's often hard to tell harmless background objects from enemies and hazards and there's frequently enough action in the foreground and background to be distracting. It never breaks the game but it's enough to be annoying.
8. Hollow Knight is essentially a plotless game. There is a story there but everything notable happens before you show up to put the final pieces together. You see, videogames are typically much more about the world they build than exactly what happens while you play them.
9. Many of the items you find are straight-up upgrades and new moves but Hollow Knight adds an additional system of mix and match charms which grant different abilities but you can only equip so many at a time. This is cool on the surface--you can re-kit depending on what you are currently doing--but it kind of just winds up being a pain in the ass because you can only change them at save points. Most notably, the ability to see where you are on the map is a charm and it seems like you are forever swapping it out for boss battles then, once the boss is beaten, you can't tell where you are in the new area that opens up to you. I see that they were trying to add a layer of depth and strategy w/ this system but it just winds up feeling like a chore.
10. And speaking of maps, you cannot map areas yourself w/o purchasing a map for each new area you find. I understand making purchasing the map optional if you want the challenge but not having the area map fill in at all w/o purchasing the map is just cumbersome. This and the requirement to use a charm to tell your location on the map are the two design choices that strike me as the most strange in Hollow Knight. These are two abilities you'd typically have by default in most games removed for no real positive effect.
11. This gets us in to one effect Hollow Knight's massive scope creates. Little things that would be slightly annoying to deal w/ for ten hours get obnoxious when you have to deal w/ them twice that long. Things like long, dramatic walks before boss battles stop feeling tense and exciting and start to become busy work. Having relatively few fast travel locations goes from pushing you to re-explore previously visited areas w/ additional abilities to just having to walk past the same scenery again and again and again and again.
12. The other thing I noticed is that the giant world made things more open and created a sense of freedom in what you do next. You can really feel the opportunities to explore sprawl before you. It even reminded me a bit of playing an Elder Scrolls game at times though unfortunately sometimes to the point where the list of paths I wanted to visit or area bosses I had to defeat started to feel a bit like the Radient quests in those games.
13. If you took any ten hour stretch of Hollow Knight, you will have yourself a wonderful gameplay experience in that time. You will also have to have a couple additional and nearly identical gameplay experiences to finish the game. I will say though that I do appreciate the ambition behind Hollow Knight's scope. I appreciate how Team Cherry pushed boundaries and how pushing those boundaries changed the way the game played. I do think they made a few missteps but, ultimately, Hollow Knight is still a must-play game. Check it out, nerds.
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