Few games have stayed with me the way Hollow Knight has. Team Cherry's 2017 Metroidvania drops you into Hallownest, a vast underground kingdom of ruined beauty and quiet dread, and trusts you to find your way through it. If you're on the fence, here's my honest take: the atmosphere is stunning, the exploration is rewarding, the combat is precise, and the difficulty is real. This is absolutely worth your time.
From the moment you drop into Dirtmouth, a near-empty town above a collapsed kingdom, something feels genuinely off - in the best way. The silence is deliberate. Christopher Larkin's score drifts in and out like a half-remembered dream, and the hand-drawn art carries this quality where beauty and rot exist in the same frame.
Each biome tells its own quiet story. The Forgotten Crossroads feels oppressive and ancient. Greenpath surprises you with lush acid-green light before the underlying sadness of its inhabitants sets in. Team Cherry never dumps lore on you. Instead, scattered corpses, crumbling architecture, and the fragmented speech of dying bugs do the work. You piece the history of Hallownest together yourself.
Such an approach creates, for a change, an environment that feels much more lived in rather than well-ar- ranged and somewhat sterile. Before I knew all-around Trimeo, I found myself being turned into a setting enthusiast. That is the best commendation for an environmental design in any game.
Getting lost in Hallownest is half the experience, and I mean that genuinely. The map system drops you into each new area with almost no guidance - you buy a cartographer's map, then fill in the gaps yourself by purchasing pins and markers. It sounds frustrating. It isn't.
Every new ability I earned changed what the world meant. The Mantis Claw lets you wall-jump, suddenly making those sheer vertical shafts in Forgotten Crossroads accessible. Crystal Heart sends you blasting horizontally across gaps that once seemed decorative. These moments hit differently than in most Metroidvanias because the world is dense enough that returning to old areas almost always reveals something.
Every swing of the Nail feels deliberate. Movement is tight, healing requires you to stand still and risk taking a hit, and the charm system lets you meaningfully customize your build. That tension between aggression and patience is what kept the combat loop interesting across my 40-plus hours with the game.
Bosses are where it all comes together. Fights like Hornet and the Mantis Lords are genuinely brilliant design, teaching you patterns through repeated, punishing failure until the victory finally lands. That payoff is real.
Although the alternate features of this game will challenge even the most avid player, this one sees a difficulty wall. Harsh conditions, like losing all geo on death and then having to hike back to the last shade, really heighten the stake, which makes the awful struggle feel truly cruel. A good many players will reach that wall in the Deep Nest and never return.
If you enjoy precise, skill-testing combat with a real learning curve, this game rewards patience. Casual players should go in with adjusted expectations.
One cannot argue that patience is a condition to admission into this game - they (the bosses) will beat you a dozen times before something might click, and the map of Hallownest never really holds your hand. But take that statement for what it is, what you get back is a rarity: an atmosphere so thick with feel, a never-boring sense of exploration for the curious to uncover time and time again, and craftsmanship seldom seen at the indie level. Team Cherry developed something that respects your intelligence and your time, even when it really sucks at times. Anyone interested in atmospheric world-building, movement that feels good to control, and discovery as gameplay needn't concern themselves when it comes to being pulled away from Hallownest. This is still one of the best examples to emerge from the Metroidvania genre.