being able to dash out of divekick feels so good i cannot overstate how much little details like this improve my play experience
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The dash completely changed the game for me. It’s so much more fun when you get to be a glass canon because of move tech.
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About this—she moved to the starting camp, where she can be found slightly up and to the right from the shop and bell station. When you first talk to her, she says she’ll be relocating to the settlement soon; after she does, you’re intended to notice that her rings are now hanging in the area where you can jump up to meet with her again.
EDIT: oh, you were talking about in the Docs. Whoops, I can’t give you any info about that region; I’m not actually playing this myself yet, but I watched somebody else play through the opening area.
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Dark Souls feels like a playground. There are obtuse and annoying systems, but you often have a lot of flexibility outside of certain chokepoints (eg you must beat this boss to advance - but even then there are usually ways to cheat your way forward if you want).
Hollow Knight has a distinct way it wants you to play. The charms don’t give the expansive flexibility of play that they suggest. They want you to feel constrained.
I didn’t mind the original Hollow Knight, but it
like a lot of other modern metroidvanias felt like a very polished retelling of foundational texts (super metroid, SOTN). The new things it brought to the table like the bench system were sort of interesting, but they were more about constraining rather than freeing the player. I don’t mind the constraining philosophy - I honestly wished they leaned 100% into it, youre a small bug, you should feel weak. You get pretty powerful by the 1/3 point. People make bad comparisons of Hollow Knight to Rain World (they are very different games with different goals), but rain world did do a better job of expressing that feeling of being a weak creature in a hostile environment, and did without almost 4th wall barriers like the charm and map system in Hollow Knignt.
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you played a half hour of it
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Felix will never stop posting
we (oldest and me backseating) are doing fine. I don’t get the deal with beads, we have tonnes of the rolling stuff. partly because every enemy is defeated always despite my pleas to skip them while heading back to the Bell Beast fight
100% yes. the bell beast is a great example as my wife complains about backseating and I have to justify “they want you to stand her & divekick, then walk underneath, and stay about in the middle of the arena so the bell attack works” wow it was too long
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also I don’t get the complains about the hero voice noises needing to be turned off
hmm? the original Hornet fight? oh like 40-50 attempts
eh? besides giving dubious-useful advice? why it’s gotta be mimicking the noises of whatever thing we’re fighting. hup. rrin
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Hollow Knight is the best IGA style Castlevania and everyone here would have fucking loved it for that if it was released a decade earlier
It’s plays like Aria of Souls but way way better and also it’s about a cast of bespoke insectoid characters going through a not-quite Dark Souls -ish story with uniquely gorgeous animation and an also very beautiful soundtrack
it actually kinda drives me fuckin nuts that SB peeps are so not onboard with Hollow Knight it’s soooo up your fucking collective baby bird gullets you little shits hold still and let me feed you goddammit
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I have a lot of problems with the original hollow knight but at least it’s better than god hand.
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hmm…this video game released for the Macintosh? hmm…daddy did just get an m4 mini today for $300…do…do I have to know things about what happened to these bugs in the first one?
Nah, there wasn’t much plot in the first one and as far as I’ve gotten this new one doesn’t really tie back to the first one. You’re playing as a side character from the first game but that’s about it.
my previous criticisms of it actually included that comparison. i think the original hollow knight controls significantly worse than most IGA castlevanias and super metroid.
the castlevanias have varied weapons with different hitboxes and animation commitments, that can be cancelled in various interesting ways (cancelling by attacking right before landing feels so good). the movement abilities are more varied and interesting. having to turn backwards to dash is hilarious.
super metroid has very unique physics where you’re simultaneously floaty and weighty. her jump has a ton of vertical height but lacks in horizonal movement. neutral jumps have different arcs than spin jumps. walljumps are fiddly and nuanced.
i remember being just bored while moving in hollow knight. he has no momentum, there’s no high commitment animations. there’s nothing to practice getting better at while moving from place to place. there’s very little to “play” with. silksong has improved that aspect dramatically for me.
i need games that are about exploration to have interesting movement because so much of the playtime is just moving. i need something that i can’t immediately master. this is part of the reason outer wilds was so up my alley. the jetpack and ship are super stateful because of the physics model. there’s momentum to worry about, shifting gravity centers, etc. hollow knight controls basically like megaman, but without the tight linear obstacle-based level design that keeps you on your toes.
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Once again, Wizardry is the most important game for understanding From.
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i don’t quite understand why mega man seems to be so much more beloved and imitated by 2D indie devs than mario (or if they do copy mario it’s mario world)
Using the key from the first shop, I skipped the two bosses I had access to and explored several more areas. In doing so, I found where the mapmaker had gone.
I did beat a different boss (Fourth Chorus) and it wasn’t extremely difficult but it had a lot of health.
The Super Mario 2 hover ability is fun.
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God the map in the original Hollow Knight caused me such headaches. I mentioned it somewhere on SB at the time but I beat the game (regular beat, not super deluxe spend twice as much time on the game beat) without ever finding the bug that upgrades your weapon, which was at the end of a dead end that I only ever thought I saw as the game mapped the entire room when I only stepped into it for a sec before deciding to go the other way several hours earlier. Looked around a bunch several times but failed to check every single dead end, one of the very few map systems that’d make that possible. Makes a funny story, but that’s a rather severe penalty to absorb because of its idiosyncrasies.
It’s also why I have no idea what to make of talk that Silksong is harder as I’m not actually sure how hard the original was supposed to be >_>
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this is a good encapsulation of why hollow knight left me feeling bored
sleepy is right in that a straightforward description of hollow knight sounds like something right up my alley but everything about the game felt routine to me. I don’t even think I finished the game, its one of those games I set down because I found nothing interesting enough to continue playing
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