Hollow Knight is Team Cherry’s first purchasable indie game (an independently developed game, free of any funding from publishers) and is a statement to the power and rise of indie games recently as opposed to the the AAA (triple-a games) market where developers do not necessarily need high development budgets to make a terrific game. The game can be found and purchased on Steam (PC), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4.
Team Cherry’s indie game hit is a Metroidvania (similar to Metroid, and Castlevania), and dystopian 2d platformer. The game is based in a series of underground mazes, similar to ant colonies, as the player controls the knight that uses a “nail” to fight. The overarching theme of Hollow Knight is battling your way through an insect world, encountering many insectoids (most being aggressive) as the “knight” with some moments of hope, such as freeing many caterpillars, or encountering a hot spring to rest. The dark underground aesthetic prevails the entire time throughout the game and the atmosphere changes with each area of the map.
Hollow Knight is a game that has exploration perfected to a T, with the perfect amount of challenging areas, that are rewarded after completion with more “charms” or little items that help different aspects of the game in a minor way. Exploration is most emphasized with a old insectoid that you encounter throughout the game that sells you blank maps for Geo the in game currency of the areas for the player to wander and survey themselves. Benches are also rewards that serve as checkpoints in the players journey where they can rest up to full health and save only at these locations that have a perfect spacing between them as intervals, resulting in challenging areas to clear, but satisfying checkpoints. There are also Stag Stations, which the player may find and encounter that act as “fast travel” locations that allow the character to travel back and forth between large areas. All those features mentioned above can only be found through exploration and are only given access to those patient enough to look for them, (sometimes directed with signs near the area) and are all designed for the purpose of backtracking.
While Hollow Knight does justice for all those aspects in gameplay, it unfortunately lacks in the backtracking and seems to pack too much in the lore (or storytelling) aspect. While the exploration is rewarding, returning to previous areas is quite the opposite, with newer gameplay mechanics introduced, oftentimes the player is required to backtrack to an area they already explored for a specific obscure location to use their new power. Whether it is implemented for padding the game or not, it is almost always tedious, and feels like a chore to explore an area you have already thoroughly investigated, let alone multiple areas just to advance in the game. Another minor problem is that while the lore is engaging, it sometimes overcompensates and makes the story too confusing and convoluted, making it difficult to follow at times.
Yet with all of those issues, Hollow Knight is a hidden treasure amongst games in this day and age. With many products in the AAA market costing $60 and even sometimes shipped to market riddled with bugs (and not in a charming way); Team Cherry presents a game that is a relief for your geo, costing $20 and even occasionally going on sale for even less. However the quality for what you pay for is priceless, and is one of the best single player experiences anyone can ask for; providing justice for atmospheric exploration gameplay, a wide variety of insectoid creatures, and a wide array of boss fights that maintain the balance between being challenging and rewarding. Hollow Knight is a game that entertains its players with a fully fleshed out backstory to the fictional area of Hollownest, that will be sure to charm anyone playing, whether they have entomophobia or not.
8.5/10