Hollow Knight - A Tim Burton style Metroidvania

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Hello everyone! How is the street fighting going with River City Ransom Underground? I hope the “retro dose” of the last entries left you wanting more, because in this new entry I’m going to talk about yet another game that uses a classic style gameplay and adapts it to the current times. Do you like the Metroidvania games? Does the idea of insect knights in a world that seems to have come out straight from one of Tim Burton’s gothic style animation movies sound attractive to you? If the answer is yes, keep reading, for this game is definitely for you. If the answer is no, keep reading anyways, for this might be the game that makes you change your mind regarding this kind of games. The game is called Hollow Knight. Let’s see what this new indie gaming jewel founded thanks to the crowdfunding has to offer.

Developed by an Australian indie team that answers to the name of Team Cherry and published just a few weeks ago, Hollow Knight belongs to the recent wave of indie games founded via the Kickstarter website. Despite its charming (and gloomy) looks, Hollow Knight tells a much deeper and “abstract” story that it could seem at a first glance. The story of Hollow Knight puts us in the role of the Hollow Knight, a wandering knight that has arrived the city of Hollownest, but what once was a prosper city, has become now a place full of death and despair. Why has the protagonist come to such a place? What is his real identity? Was this his destiny? Hollow Knight’s enigmatic story will answer these and many other questions related to philosophical topics such as the eternal fight between good and evil or the value and meaning of life. However, just like we can see in FromSoftware’s Soul series, the story won’t be told just via de conversations between the characters, instead if that, the world itself and the items we will find in it will also tell us part of the story, and it will be up to the players to put all the pieces together, delivering a complex story rarely seen in this kind of games.

Regarding the gameplay, Hollow Knight is a purebred Metroidvania that can truly look face to face to Nintendo and Konami’s classics, and that is because of the perfect balance the team managed to reach between the combat, exploration and platforming elements. We will have to explore a huge map full of corridors that will take us to every corner of the haunting city of Hollownest. However, the team has managed to perfectly convey a constant sense of wonder and discovery that encourages exploration, and we will really need to explore the map fully if we are to obtain all the hidden items and we want to uncover all the secrets of its enigmatic story, although as it always happens with this kind of game, we won’t be able to access many of the areas till we obtain first the necessary skill in order to be able to do so. It is important to remark the huge and complex map of the game, till the point that it is possible we get lost at some moments, therefore, in it highly advisable to buy the maps that some of the bizarre characters that live in Hollownest will sell us. Another of Hollow Knight strong points resides in its fluid combat system. During the adventure we will face more than 130 types of enemies, each with their own attack patterns and that will put our skill with the sword to the test, as well as more than 30 challenging bosses, who will push us to the limit, although we will be able to obtain several combat skills that will make things a little bit easier. Another interesting system is the Soul Power system. Basically, every time we defeat an enemy we will charge our Soul Power indicator, and once we gather enough, we will be able to use it to heal ourselves or use some of our special powers. Learning how to manage our Soul Power will be essential if we want to be successful in the adventure. But the likeness between Hollow Knight and the Souls series does not reduce itself to the narrative style or some demanding combats, it will our extend to other features, such as the use of save points to which we will go back when we die, or the possibility to recover the rewards we will lose every time we bite the dust by visiting the place where we were defeated. In it impossible to deny the influence that FromSoftware’s series had over Hollow Knight, although that doesn’t mean the game it’s a cheap knock off, on the contrary, the Australian team managed to adopt these elements and give them their own personal touch, making them fit perfectly with the game’s world.

When it comes to the graphics, I think no one can deny that Hollow Knight has an extremely polished presentation with a great personality, including really unique character designs that somehow remind a lot of what you could find in a Tim Burton animated movie, and stages full of details that help us to plunge ourselves directly into the beautiful yet gloomy world of Hollownest, which provide endless clues about the city’s accursed destiny and glorious past with each of it statues, fortresses and temples, and all of it with gorgeous handmade graphics, something rarely seen these days.


It is really amazing to see what just four guys managed to accomplish with this game, a game that manages to unify exploration, platforming and combat like few titles in the genre managed to do, proving the great talent that this Australian indie team has. Maybe the fact that it was released on a month where several “heavy weight champions” of the industry such as Zelda Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier Automata or Mass Effect Andromeda have been released made it the receive less attention than it should, but that does not change the fact that Hollow Knight it’s an extremely polished title in which is easy to see the love and dedication of its creators, turning it into a game that no fan of the genre should miss. So far Hollow Knight is only available for PC via Steam, but the team has plans to bring it to other platforms such as the new Nintendo Switch (the Wii U seems to have been cancelled) or the PlayStation 4. If you like 2D action-adventure games, you should really give a chance to Hollow Knight, for there is no doubt it will be one of the indie games of the year, and will probably end up being a cult classic. Enjoy it!


GAMEPLAY VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UizgrfRF7l4

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