This week, I played Hollow Knight (hereafter HK) by Team Cherry. The game was released in 2017 on PC and then ported later to consoles. The game is targeted towards players (aged 10+) who enjoy exploring by diving head-first into a bizarre and magical world.
I have a strange opinion of HK. Time and time again, I hear that it’s a genre-defining metroidvania game. Evidently, from discussions online, many people regard it as one of their favorite games. I’ve tried to play the game time and time again, but I’ve always found myself bored. Funnily enough, I thoroughly enjoyed its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong. To figure out why, I wanted to use the critical play to look at HK through a more analytical lens.
From this experience, I concluded that HK builds a rich world by inviting slow and methodical exploration. It accomplishes this by embedding curious critters in a gorgeous world filled with interesting relics and structures. The player explores a deliberately complex branching tree of paths to find bits and pieces of the narrative behind the magical world. In fact, HK uses all 5 layers from Pereira’s “Psychology of Worldbuilding” to create an overall immersive experience.
One of HK’s biggest claims to fame is how vast the world is. Each screen diverges into multiple branching paths riddled with secrets. This directly exemplifies the idea that the architecture of the world should be designed with the goal of supporting the gameplay — the explorative gameplay loop is deeply enriched by how complex and interwoven the paths are. Having many branches also encourages the dynamic of building a mental image (particularly important before you unlock the map for each area), which adds to fun through exploration. For example, Figure 1 shows that breaking a hidden wall at a crossroads revealed a collectible grub. These grubs then also grant the player progress toward a underlying sub-storyline, which deepens fun through narrative.
The narrative of the game also unfolds as the player traverses through the world. Pieces of the narrative are embedded in different locations, which come together to form a more cohesive story as the game progresses. This is done in several ways. The first way is by showing a scene that probes the player to ask questions. Often this is done after some number of iterations of the main exploration loop, culminating in a boss fight. In Figure 2, the player stumbles across Hornet standing next to a husk of what looks like the Knight. This raises several immediate questions and creates an impression of Hornet that the player will refine later in future encounters. After fighting her, we get access to the dash, which progresses us along the arc of mechanics in the game and gives us tools to explore previously unreachable areas. Further, NPCs also give snippets of the narrative (see Fig. 3) through very brief snippets of dialogue, which simultaneously gives context for the world and raises further questions. This advances the narrative arc which runs parallel to the mechanics arc.
Pereira’s five layers are present in interesting ways in HK. Firstly, viewing the world through the main character’s lens takes on an interesting interpretation in the game. We play as the Knight, a voiceless and emotionless warrior. The main character doesn’t know anything about the world (even if he did, he couldn’t tell us), just like us, the players. This creates a completely transparent view of the world, which aligns spectacularly with the aesthetic of exploration. We are exploring the world vicariously through the vessel of the Knight, which shifts the emphasis onto the surroundings. Then, the supporting cast of NPCs like Hornet shake up the status quo for the player. The Knight and Hornet’s goals were never at odds, but there are still several interactions where they cross swords. The environmental details like stone pillars and structures are the immediate “surroundings”. Many players inevitably break the interactable objects in the surroundings, which creates a sensory connection through visuals and audio. The society of the world is something heavily hinted at as a major part of the plot. The NPCs and tablets talk about the long lost kingdom of Hallownest. Players gradually discover the beliefs and history of Hallownest as they play through the game. Finally, the landscape is created through the different main areas of the game. Each area has a different color scheme and feel, and the combination of all of them form a cohesive world.
As for why I found this game to be less enjoyable than Silksong — the gameplay is slow in the first few hours of the game. Since the world is vast, I didn’t jive with the amount of blind backtracking I had to do to find new unexplored areas. On top of that, the initial map before upgrades is poor (see Fig. 4), which creates a dynamic of me pausing every few steps to check the map and leads to the not-fun of boredom. I can appreciate the excellent worldbuilding, but I’d rather sit out and watch a playthrough.
Regarding the ethics of body depiction, the game depicts the Knight as a robust vessel capable of tanking hits, and Hornet as a nimble, slim assassin. This reinforces gender roles through their appearance, but the characters’ actions work to dispel these surface-level gender roles. The Knight, although created to be an emotionless machine, shows semblances of emotion throughout the game. This parallels a leading problem in male mental health where they are often scared to open up and share their emotions. Hornet also proves herself to be a strong warrior, taking the helm in many fights in the game. I think it makes her a fantastic role model for feminist empowerment.
