This game's designers were far too cavalier about wasting the player's time.


Exhibit A:

Bosses are far from save points, usually. So to defeat a boss, you need to either grasp the patterns necessary to beat it the first time around or engage in a "walk of shame" (usually several minutes of boring traversal) before you can try again, every time you fail to defeat it. This gets old, fast.

It is also a form of artificial difficulty. Now, the bosses are indeed difficult for us non-pro gamers, don't get me wrong. They require practice for sure. But forcing a player to endure tedium between every attempt makes them seem even more difficult. This is a meaningless, if not outright antagonistic, way to introduce additional difficulty into your game, in my opinion.

Annoyance and/or forced repetition is not the same thing as a well-designed challenge.


Exhibit B:

After you get a certain power-up, certain pathways become blocked off, making it more time consuming (not really challenging, mind you) to get to stations (= navigation QoL) and so forth. This is a minor annoyance, as it only applies to the first area, but it still illustrates my primary objection to one aspect of the game's design language.

Why would you do this? Why would you punish a player's accomplishment with a decreased QoL? Navigation in this game is already unnecessarily tedious (see above), so I am amazed that the designers decided it would be a good idea to double-down on that aspect of the game.

Annoyance and/or forced repetition is not the same thing as a well-designed challenge. I very strongly want game designers to grasp this distinction.


Exhibit C:

The White Palace. For those who haven't played the game, this is essentially a Super Meat Boy-inspired area, except, um... less inspired. Getting through it is more of an endurance test than a skill test, and completing it doesn't give you that "Wow, I really mastered this game's mechanics and leveraged them well" sense so much as a "Woo-hoo, I'm glad I'm finished with that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" sense. Having to calculate dash/jump distances in advance (and being punished for failing to do so successfully) gave me flashbacks to certain 80s games, and not the good ones.

Annoyance and/or forced repetition is not the same thing as a well-designed challenge.


Because so many rave about this game, I completed it with a 93% completion rate, despite my own reservations. I can certainly appreciate some of its artistic aspirations (with significant caveats, but this review is already too long).

As a video game, I think Hollow Knight fails. However, I wouldn't bother writing a full review if there hadn't been obvious flashes of brilliance, and I have high hopes that the game designers can learn from their mistakes and make an outstanding sequel. Based on what I saw in the first game, I am definitely interested in playing it, even if I can't recommend its predecessor.