A Cool Grotto Full of Bugs: Hollow Knight

Do we need to ask a mod to do the split?

@Felix show us that famous Mod Split that’s taking the world by storm!!

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I played a little more of this tonight and I got to an area that was pretty much overgrown Brinstar and already I’m feeling a lot better about this game’s aesthetics. It was extremely refreshing to see the color green. Nice music too! I also found a kinda pinkish area full of bubbles that also felt like a Super Metroid homage. Fuck it, if you’re gonna ape another game’s environments, Super Metroid is a damn good choice.

OK, this game really gets a lot better as it goes. I just got to this absolutely gorgeous abandoned rainswept metropolis with a pretty astonishing sense of place. I acquired the dash and wall jump abilities, which are perfectly tuned and feel really empowering to use. Returning to old areas with new abilities yields more than usual for a metroidvania – I encountered a fun and challenging hidden boss when I went back to the first area. All the NPCs have great, cute character designs and voices, and you get to populate your home village with them, like Majula in Dark Souls 2.

I’m totally on board at this point, this game grew on me in a big way.

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I just picked this up today and gosh these buggos are too cute

The map shop lady’s body language screaming ‘bored cashier’ while also being a giant bug is particularly charming

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Surely ‘hallo knight’?

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Holo Knight

Holy Night

Resident Weevil

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I played this for an hour. The art is better than it seems in screenshots: in context and animated, the variations in the color palette pop out more. I like the approach to the map – particularly the idea that I can unequip the compass in favor of something better when I’m better oriented. I’m a bit bored by the second zone with the greenery, but I gather that’s a temporary lull.

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I fought the three Mantis Lords last night and had a pretty great time with it. It seriously felt like a Dark Souls boss fight. You’re expected to die a decent number of times while slowly improving and learning the fight. They use a small set of attacks that are subtly but readably telegraphed. There’s a cinematic transition to a surprising second stage of the fight that really ups the ante while remaining fair (and only a slight bit more difficult than the first stage). It’s a delicious, nourishing meal of a boss fight.

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Tonight I fell into a horrible survival horror area that I couldn’t climb back out of. It was a dark set of narrow tunnels full of spikes, creepy parasites, and enormous burrowing centipedes. Totally hostile to the player. I couldn’t leave the way I came, so I explored for a while. I had accumulated a huge amount of money that I was terrified to lose. It took me hours, but I finally found and activated a tram car to escape this oppressive area. I thought that this was my ticket back home where I could rest and spend the money that was burdening me. I’d seen another tram back in a safe area so I assumed I could ride back to that stop.

It turned out that the tram line didn’t connect to the stop I’d seen before. Both stops I could reach via this tram were other huge, totally new areas. I was still disconnected from my home base. I chose one of the two areas arbitrarily and kept on exploring. I had a few close calls where I died deep into an unmapped area and just barely recovered my bloodstain. Finally, I came upon a passageway to yet another new area that contained a stag beetle I could ride home. Yes, this game is so big it has two different fast travel lines.

That was a real odyssey, what a time!

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What an adventure! But if you’re ever feeling too out of your league again, pause and return to the title screen. Your progress saves, but you’ll reload at the last bench you rested at.

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Also, I think I know where you may have fallen from, and there’s a hidden path back up.

Ended up in a dream area that I presume to be a DLC thing. Seems nice enough. I like how psychedelic and new-agey it gets.

Still haven’t figured out what to do with shaky ground.

Note that the Switch pro controller is an excellent input for this game, mainly because the ZR button feels amazing when dashing. It’s like hitting the pedal on a car.

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I was going to share a video of this boss before, but thought I’d see if anyone playing now’d share their impression from it! While there’s far crazier challenges to come, the Mantis Lords are one of the most elegantly executed.

The area you fell into, I discovered an entirely different entrance for (and later in general progress wise), a ways to the lower right. Those spider-types that fade in from the foreground are really cool, good at keepin’ your Nail a twitchin’

Always save grumpy Zote, the end of his questline is just great.

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I’ve got 80% completion in this after playing most of the weekend, a few thoughts:

With respect to exploration and orientation, this game is really opinionated and even innovative:

  • it deliberately does rather little in the way of telling you where to go next. Long, main progression paths aren’t well-distinguished from brief detours. Whenever you set off into an unknown room there’s no way to know how far it goes, and when you gain a powerup it’s unclear which of the usually 3-5 new unlocked directions will bear real fruit. The main concession it makes to signposting is the empty doors left open on your map.
  • The map UI is designed to be a little disorienting instead of being maximally helpful. At a certain point filling in squares in the automapped grid started to feel like mowing the lawn, so this game tries to deroutinize exploration. There’s no minimap so that you’re always a little bit disoriented and need to rely on your memory more. And when you explore a new area the area remains blank on your map until you sit at a bench, so retracing back or systematically traversing all alternate paths on your first visit is not easy.
  • Fast travel options exist, but are carefully constrained. There are also several kinds with different limitations. Much like with real public transit, you can usually get pretty quickly from one spot to another but only if you plan your itinerary in advance. Some parts of the world are always a bit more of a hassle to reach or return from, and you also want to batch several activities when you make a trip there.

The part of the game design I’m not a fan of is the Metrovania powerup selection:

  • The philosophy of it seems to be to start you off with really weak and shitty controlling character and by the endgame you have a totally normal game character of the kind you start with in a typical modern melee platformer. My reaction to powerups is always relief, never glee.
  • There is very little thematic support for the powerup model. It took the genre conventions too much for granted here. In Metroid you’re a powersuit installing additional modules, in Castlevania you’re the relative/reincarnation of Dracula gradually absorbing your castle’s power. But why would a bug knight in a bug warren gain powerups?
  • There are unusual and very annoying drawbacks like the short nail length and bounceback that seem to be there purely so that you can get a powerup that removes them. And having to fight 75% of the bosses in the game super defensively because my dash had no iframes (which never felt right in the first place) just because the dash-iframe powerup was chosen to be a late-game gating mechanism is especially grating.
  • I think on the whole this aspect is far worse than the state of the art like Aria of Sorrow (where your character starts the game feeling smooth, and ends the game rocketing around at breakneck speed) and Super Metroid (where your powersuit has a thematically appropriate balance of clunkiness and extreme speed/power under skilled hands).
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Boy, the White Palace is pretty nuts, isn’t it? Didn’t expect an optional masocore level in this. I equipped the hive charm though, which allowed me to get through it without worrying about dying and having to start over.

I’m at 105% completion right now and I aim to max out. This is the first time I’ve 100%ed a metroidvania (or “lockmaze”, the new much better term I have just invented). It speaks to just how good this thing is. The optional side stuff is pretty fun, if extremely difficult.

My favorite ultra-tough side bit was the Trial of Fools. It’s punishing, but going through a gauntlet of regular enemy fights laid out in such an inventive pattern… I loved it. It’s a test of skill that makes you feel like you’re dancing through it with elegance, a feeling further enhanced by the cheering of the crowd during the most difficult bits.

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Story/lore-wise, this game has really grown on me as well. The starting point is Dark Souls, there’s no doubt about that, and in the early game it does appear to be purely “Dark Souls with insects”. But over time, even though the basic structural elements never diverge, a different sensibility reveals itself and I realized they meaningfully evolved it. The key difference is that Hollow Knight brings a life-affirming attitude – put alongside Celeste, it looks like part of an emerging positivity and earnesty movement.

Some NPC quest arcs end in them finding love or friendship, and when they die, it tends to be equated with closure. As for the main quest – Dark Souls brought a darkly comic critique of the videogame hero narrative, pointing out how absurd it is to save the world via relentless destruction and accumulation of power. Hollow Knight discovers a bittersweet, tragic side in the same savior paradox.

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Anyway, I didn’t really feel like doing the remaining stuff like hunter log and Nightmare King Grimm after reaching the nominal 100% mark, so I thought I’d try a casual speedrun on another save yesterday. 1 hour and a half in I got to the superdash powerup, at what I felt was a reasonably brisk pace. I wasn’t sure how best to route after that so I looked up what people do on speedrun.com, and I found out that the good ending record is already faster than where I was 25% of the way through the game.

Not sure whether I should just ignore the state of the art completely and define my own casual route. The thing about the WR routes is that it seems like learning to play that way is a lot of memorizing and practicing tricks and underleveled boss fights which I’m not up for, but at the same time now I know where the skips are and my initial routing ideas seem meaningless. So I feel like I spoilered myself and it’s somehow too late to define my own casual speedrunning plan, hmm.

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