This week, I played Hollow Knight, a PC platformer made by the independent Australian studio Team Cherry. In the game, I explored the Hallownest, a ruined underground bug civilization that collapsed after some kind of catastrophe. The game is suitable for those who like exploration-heavy platformers with darker themes and environmental storytelling. Hollow Knight invited me to care about its world through setting, theme, and character design, music, exploration, and environmental storytelling.
One of the first things that made me care about the world was the setting. Early in the game, I entered Dirtmouth, which the game nicknames “The Fading Town.” Before this moment, the game taught me combat mechanics like striking enemies, collecting resources, and surviving dangerous areas. However, when I entered Dirtmouth, the mood completely changed. The music shifted from suspenseful ambient sounds to sad violin music. Sound design immediately changed how I felt. Instead of preparing for danger, I felt like I had entered a lonely place that needed help.
I then met Elderbug, the first friendly character in the game. He calmly looked at me and reacted with a simple “huh?” instead of attacking me, so his body language and the sound effects immediately made me feel safe. The character design, which contrasted with the nameless enemy bugs, worked very well because I implicitly understood the emotional shift. I think this was a strong design choice because it taught me about the world through interaction rather than tutorials or exposition. In my own game, I could use music and character animations in a similar way to guide players emotionally through different environments.
The narrative element of plot also helped me care about the inhabitants of Hallownest. Elderbug implied that a once-great city existed below Dirtmouth, but something in the air caused its inhabitants to lose their memories and themselves. In just a few lines of dialogue, the game introduced themes of decay and loss and put us in the setting of the aftermath of a catastrophe. Before I even entered the underground city, I already felt sympathy for the creatures trapped there because they sounded like good civilians who met an unfortunate fate.
The game’s exploration-focused objectives connect closely to its environmental storytelling. Hollow Knight avoids giving players many direct written goals. Instead, I learned what to do through exploration and conversations with characters. One explorer mentioned that lost travellers in the Forgotten Crossroads still had tools and would appreciate handing them off to new travellers. This objective felt intentionally vague, but it fit the game’s focus on discovery. I felt like I was uncovering the world naturally, like someone walking into a foreign land. The game strengthened this feeling through environmental storytelling by scattering narrative clues throughout Hallownest instead of directly explaining its history. For example, when I read the line, “Higher beings, these words are for you alone,” I immediately started wondering about the religion and hierarchy.
The lighting also reinforced this mystery, as most areas stayed dark except for a small circle of light around my character, which made exploration feel isolated and uncertain. Overall, I think these were effective design choices because they encouraged curiosity and immersion without relying on direct exposition, although I would probably include optional hints in my own game so players would not feel directionally lost.
Later, the contrast between character design and plot made me feel deeply concerned for the people of this world. In the Forgotten Crossroads, I met a cartographer happily humming while drawing maps. The game used formal visual and sound design elements to immediately make him seem friendly. His glasses, papers, cheerful voice, and constant humming made him feel like an eccentric professor archetype. He also sold me my first map, which made him mechanically important to my gameplay. Elderbug had just explained that the underground air could make creatures go insane, but the cartographer, working underground, still acted peppy and carefree, and this contrast made this interaction very effective. I worried about him. I wondered, “Is he ignorant of the dangers? Will this helpful friend be okay?” This was a great design choice because it made NPCs feel like vulnerable people living inside a dangerous world instead of simple quest-givers. In my own games, I could connect important gameplay mechanics and plot points to memorable, contrasting characters in the same way.
Overall, Hollow Knight made me care about Hallownest by combining strong narrative elements with thoughtful formal game design choices. The setting, characters, music, exploration systems, and environmental storytelling all worked together to make the world feel tragic and real, and this is a game from which I’d love to model my own world-building.
Ethics:
In Hollow Knight, characters are bugs of different shapes and sizes inspired by real insects and humanoid forms. Friendly characters tend to look more humanoid (upright bodies, hands, expressive faces), while many enemies look more insect-like, such as beetles or mosquitoes. This can reinforce a subtle bias where humanoid forms feel “good” or intelligent, while more insect-like forms feel hostile or lesser, even if the game never states this directly. At the same time, the game complicates this idea because many enemies are infected or corrupted civilians rather than inherently evil, and even friendly characters are flawed or struggling, which suggests a shared world affected by collapse rather than a simple good-versus-bad divide. The game could push this further by more clearly breaking the link between appearance and morality. For example, if some insect-like characters were clearly wise or central to the story, it could create a more balanced sense of empathy across all characters, not just based on form.
