Hollow Knight
The game I explored this week is Hollow Knight, developed by Team Cherry and played on the Nintendo Switch (though there are also options to play on PC and console). Often when playing, I appreciated playing on the Switch due to the tactile response (vibrations) you feel during impactful movements or death, that I believe would be missing when playing on a PC. This haptic feedback absolutely added a level of immersion (and shock) to the game. In any case, Hollow Knight is a hand-drawn metroidvania that drops you wordlessly into the ruins of a fallen insect kingdom, Hallownest. With minimal exposition and no quest log, the game challenges you to explore, discover, and survive entirely on your own terms. While at first I found the game overwhelming, the absence of explicit guidance is what makes Hollow Knight so powerful. The game teaches you to care not through narration, but through design.
As such, Hollow Knight makes players care about its world by embedding emotional meaning into the player’s interaction loops, inviting curiosity through silence, and using environmental storytelling to reframe mechanics through emotional context. By using absence (of words, of direction, of living inhabitants), but hints at a past, the game creates a space that begs to be filled in by the player’s own curiosity, interpretation, and imagination. The result is a world that feels both mysterious and mournful, one that you want to protect, even if you can’t fully explain why (with the amount that I’ve played so far, I haven’t uncovered the lore yet. I still care, though!).
Loops of Exploration + Loneliness
One of the boldest choices the designers made was to strip away nearly all onboarding. There are no tutorials, no voiced lines, no internal monologue. You awaken with a sword, a jump, and a kingdom to descend into. This isn’t just minimalist design for its own sake, it’s an intentional invitation to feel as disoriented as the Knight, a small, silent figure trying to make sense of a vast and broken world.
According to Interaction Loops and Arcs, players develop mastery by iterating through interaction loops: building a mental model, taking action, receiving feedback, and adapting. Here, I believe the designers ask players to loop not just through platforming and combat, but through uncertainty. That emotional loop of trial, error, and slowly earned trust becomes central to the player’s connection with the world.
It works because the mechanics mirror the emotion, the struggle to survive reflects the Knight’s isolation. The empty space where a tutorial might have been is filled instead with quiet, ambient dread. As you learn to move confidently through Hallownest, your growing mastery reflects the Knight’s own resilience. For example, at this first drop-off starting point, if the player moves to the left wall instead of the right, you uncover a small hidden room where you can get your first geos (in-game money). Although at the time you don’t know what that weird rock is, you see numbers tick up and know that you earned something. There’s a spark of satisfaction, of discovery, of “I wasn’t supposed to go this way… but I’m glad I did.” This single loop- explore, observe, act, receive feedback- instantly builds a mental model: this is a world that rewards curiosity. Exploration isn’t optional; it’s the point, and to get the most out of the game every, nook should be explored.
That’s the intention: to make discovery feel earned, and solitude feel shared. And to me, it lands perfectly! I didn’t quite understand why it started out the way that it did, but I realized after playing for a few hours that the strange feeling of uncertainty and dread(?) that I felt at the start was by design.
Mapping as Meaning
In most games, a map is something you’re given, but in Hollow Knight, it’s something you earn. You don’t start with one, and with how many directions you have the option to go in, this reinforced my initial feeling of being overwhelmed and lost. You have to find Cornifer, the wandering cartographer, and even then, the map is incomplete. You must return to a bench (essentially a moment of rest) to update what you’ve discovered.
This mapping mechanic transforms navigation into an interaction loop in itself, as described in Interaction Loops and Arcs: one that builds a mental model of space through feedback and iteration. But it also serves a deeper narrative function. As described in The Psychology of World Building, the player-character is the filter through which we perceive the world. Here, the Knight’s incomplete understanding of Hallownest is mechanically mirrored in the incomplete map. You know what they (and, literally you) know.
The designers could have made this easier, but they intentionally chose not to. By slowing the process down, they reinforce the emotional themes of disorientation and learning through effort. The player’s map becomes a record of survival, not just a tool for orientation. And because you physically sit to reflect and update it, the process of exploration becomes emotional, not just spatial. It’s a small but effective mechanic that turns wandering into worldbuilding.
Narrative Told Through Place
Rather than relying on exposition, Hollow Knight asks you to read its world through environmental storytelling. As I walked around, the game was dripping with details hinting at a story such as a broken mask on a bench, a sealed door hiding an infected corpse, and dilapidated details that hint at once-great civilizations. The story isn’t told to you, it’s revealed through you, as you observe and interpret. I had fun along with the way guessing what the story of the game was.
Indicators of a previous civilization
This design choice directly channels the layered approach described in The Psychology of World Building, where setting is not just backdrop but active narrative force. Hallownest is constructed around decay, with each space contributing emotional context to the story. We as players feels the history of the world not because we’re told it, but because we move through it.
This storytelling method succeeds because it leverages evocative feedback. These are interactions designed not to teach mechanics, but to deliver emotional payloads. You see a weeping statue, and though it does nothing functionally, it tells you a hint about what kind of place this once was. It’s sole intention is to create environmental storytelling and ambiance. The designer’s intention here seems to be about trusting the player to fill in the gaps, to feel the quiet, and to participate in meaning-making. The result is a world that feels alive in its absence, not despite it ( the abundance of details help fill our interaction void).
Ethics: Who Gets to Be Whole?
As a note, I asked my partner to tell me a little bit about the lore for this. Hollow Knight presents a world where bodies are temporary and malleable. Your protagonist is a “vessel,” a literal shell, genderless and voiceless. You alter their capabilities not by leveling up, but by equipping charms, which shift how the body behaves. In this game, identity is not preordained, it is constructed moment to moment.
This design choice challenges conventional RPG tropes where traits like strength, magic, or race are biologically fixed (like we discussed in DnD in section). In Hollow Knight, there are no stats that define you, only modular tools that you shape based on your needs. As discussed in Interaction Loops and Arcs, this modularity empowers the player to build flexible mental models and encourages experimentation.
Yet there seems to be a darker side to to this vision of bodies as interchangeable parts. The enemies, once-sentient bugs reduced to hollow, attacking husks, represent a different kind of body, one that was overtaken (by something, still don’t know, I want to find out!). As you eventually fine out they aren’t villains, they’re victims. The designers statement here seems to be that the infection doesn’t mark them as evil; it marks them as lost.
This raises an unsettling ethical question, that if the enemies are victims, why are most designed to be disposable? Hollow Knight lets us mourn bosses, sometimes offering graves or pensive music, but regular enemies don’t get that dignity. Maybe this is explained later, but the idea relayed of some bodies being more valuable than others and deserving to be mourned doesn’t feel quite right. The bodies of common enemies, once individual, are now indistinct.
Despite all enemies being victims, the game doesn’t always ask us to sit with that. All of the common infected enemies are still obstacles (at least, to the point that I’ve played to), not characters. If I could mod the game at this point, I’d add very small glimpses of memory snippets of speech, brief moments of lucidity, to these enemies before battle (FNAF did something similar by adding unique distorted children scream with each jumpscare- something like that, maye). At the early point of the game, it could be ambiguous enough that players wouldn’t know what we’re experiencing on the screen, but as we explore more the pieces begin to make more sense. This way, the game could gradually reframe how we see those encounters, as we not only explore the space, but our interactions with the enemies.
All-in-All
Hollow Knight doesn’t guide you through its world, it lets you wander, and in doing so, it teaches you to care about the space. Its interaction loops are not just about skill, they’re also about emotion! The game aligns its mechanical systems with emotional storytelling, and by trusting players to find meaning in the quiet, Hollow Knight creates a world that feels lived-in, mourned, and worth saving. It doesn’t give you the story, it gives you the tools and trusts you to uncover it for yourself.
