Hollow Knight invites the player into a ruined kingdom called Hallownest and then refuses to explain itself. There are no opening cutscenes or no tutorial NPC giving lore in convenient paragraphs. You drop into a dusty town called Dirtmouth, descend into an underground world, and slowly piece together the legend of a civilization that has already ended. The game targets young adult players interested in narrative games and the metroidvania genre. Hollow Knight was developed by Team Cherry and released in 2017 on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Hollow Knight invites players to care about the game through an ecological approach to world-building, one that, as Gabriela Pereira describes in her article, layers character outward into society, culture, and landscape to inspire the player to feel grief for what was destroyed.
Protagonist design
The protagonist, the Knight, is mute, as he only listens to our NPC and never responds.
This forms the foundation of how the game communicates. Because Knight offers no commentary or no inner monologue, the player’s imagination has to fill the gap. Pereira argues that the main character serves as “a filter for how the reader engages with the story’s world.” In Hollow Knight, that filter is deliberately unclear. The Knight becomes, ironically, a vessel for the player’s own emotional projection. When you find the grave of a warrior or encounter a bug humming a tune in an abandoned village, there is no character telling you how to feel. So the player can feel a more intimate connection to the world as you are not watching someone discover this world, but you are discovering it yourself.
Support characters design
While the Knight is silent, the NPCs of Hallownest are quite eloquent. Characters like Quirrel, Zote, and the Dreamers each tell a different side about the kingdom’s collapse. Pereira notes that supporting characters either establish the status quo or shake it up. Hollow Knight does both: every NPC you meet shows how Hallownest once was, and their current broken or deluded state shows what destroyed it. For example, Quirrel, a scholar that is now an amnesiac who slowly recovers his memories over the course of the game, mirrors the player’s own process of piecing the world together through navigating ruins, through accumulating context.
Comparing this to Dark Souls, a genre predecessor, we see that Dark Souls also uses environmental storytelling and a largely mute protagonist, but its world is built around cycles of inevitability that players can delay but never escape. Hollow Knight’s tragedy is more intimate and political. Hallownest did not fall to a cosmic force, but because of a king’s pride and a father’s love. This creates very different emotions in the player’s view of the game. Dark Souls inspires awe, while Hollow Knight incites something closer to sadness.
Landscape design
The landscape of Hollow Knight is where Pereira’s “Layer 5, “the grand setting, does very important work to get the player to feel sadness for the world. Each region of Hallownest is a historical document. The Forgotten Crossroads, fungal and overgrown, shows infrastructure that has been reclaimed by nature. The City of Tears, still raining even as its inhabitants have gone hollow, still has some of the grandeur that seems to be mourning itself with the rain.
What differentiates Hollow Knight from similar stories of dead worlds like Ori and the Blind Forest is that Ori’s world is still recoverable. Nature is dying, but the player heals it. Hollow Knight offers no consolation for the players. The world is past saving in most of its endings. This is a design decision that forces the player to feel sympathy for the lost instead of optimism.
Ethics
The ethics question of how games depict the body also exists in Hollow Knight, even though the characters are modeled from insets.The game’s mechanics reinforce the idea that what a character is determines what they can do. A vessel like our knight cannot speak, a grub cannot fight, and a shade cannot be trusted. If one were to mod this depiction, an intervention could be to decouple biological category from ability. This would shift the game’s ethics from biological determinism toward something closer to the modded D&D model where the body is a starting point and not a destiny.
