When I first played Hollow Knight, what stood out to me was not just how large Hallownest felt, but how little the game directly explained about it. A ruined kingdom could tell me about itself through architecture, enemies, NPCs, and small pieces of dialogue without ever stopping to explain its history. Hollow Knight was developed by Team Cherry, an Australian indie studio based in Adelaide, with designers Ari Gibson and William Pellen and composer Christopher Larkin. It was first released for Windows in 2017 and later came to Mac, Linux, Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. I played it on PC. Its target audience is players who enjoy challenging Metroidvania exploration and piecing together lore from fragments rather than being given a straightforward narrative. Hallownest’s world-building is especially effective because it connects insect species to different cultures, while still allowing individual characters to challenge what their species seems to imply.
One of Hollow Knight‘s strongest world-building techniques is its use of species as a foundation for different regions and societies. The Mantis Village, for example, is organized around a culture of strength, combat, and honor. The Hive is structured around loyalty to its queen, reflecting the eusocial organization of real bees. Deepnest, meanwhile, uses spider-like creatures and a maze-like environment to create a society that feels predatory and hostile. These differences allow the player to understand entire cultures without being given lengthy explanations. This is an example of environmental storytelling, because the architecture, enemies, geography, and NPC interactions communicate information about the world. The player fills in the gaps and creates a coherent understanding from small pieces of evidence.
The connection to real entomology is one of Team Cherry’s cleverest choices, but it also creates an ethical complication. Mantises are predators, bees are eusocial, and spiders are associated with ambush and hunting. By transferring these characteristics into fictional cultures, Hollow Knight makes their societies feel almost biologically inevitable. The world can therefore risk suggesting that a species naturally determines its culture or behavior. However, the game complicates this idea through individual characters. Zote is a particularly obvious example of a character who fails to live up to the heroic warrior identity he claims for himself. Quirrel is a curious scholar and traveler, while Cornifer is a friendly cartographer who contrasts sharply with many of the dangers surrounding him. These characters demonstrate that species can establish a cultural pattern without completely determining an individual’s identity. One improvement would be to give some of the more species-defined regions another clearly dissenting or unusual character, making the game’s rejection of biological determinism even more explicit.
This approach also distinguishes Hollow Knight from other games in its genres. It shares similarities with Dark Souls, which also presents a fallen world through ruins, cryptic dialogue, item descriptions, and environmental details rather than direct exposition. However, Hollow Knight uses insects as the foundation of its societies instead of the humanoid races and monsters common in fantasy games. Compared with other Metroidvanias such as Metroid or Ori and the Blind Forest, Hollow Knight also places unusual emphasis on the social structure and history of each region. It provides not just different environments to explore, but different cultures to infer. This makes it an interesting contrast to Dungeons & Dragons, where species or races have historically been associated with inherent abilities and mechanical traits. Hollow Knight mostly communicates these differences through narrative and environment rather than statistics, and its individual characters can contradict their species’ expected traits.
This raises the question of whether the traits in Hollow Knight should be understood as cultural or biological. I think the game deliberately sits somewhere between the two, which creates both a strength and a weakness. The risk is that connecting real insect biology to fictional cultures can make essentialism feel natural: mantises behave like warriors because they are mantises, bees organize around a queen because they are bees, and spiders are frightening because they are predators. This can unintentionally make the relationship between biology and behavior seem more fixed than it actually is.
At the same time, Hollow Knight provides an important counterexample through the Vessels. The Pale King’s attempt to create beings that were inherently “hollow” is portrayed not as a normal biological trait, but as something deeply tragic. The Vessels were deliberately created and conditioned to possess a particular nature, and their existence is connected to suffering and sacrifice. This makes the game’s one major example of deliberately engineered inherent traits a criticism rather than an endorsement of the idea that identity can simply be designed into a being. More importantly, the individual characters throughout Hallownest demonstrate that species does not have to equal destiny.
Playing Hollow Knight challenged my assumption that species-based world-building is automatically essentialist. The game shows that using species as cultural shorthand can make a fictional world immediately understandable and immersive, but it becomes much more interesting when individuals are allowed to contradict the patterns established by their species. Hallownest works because its cultures give the player expectations while its characters give the player reasons to question those expectations.
Ultimately, Hollow Knight demonstrates that species can be a powerful foundation for world-building without necessarily becoming destiny. Its use of insect biology makes Hallownest feel coherent, but its individual characters complicate those categories. The broader lesson is that good world-building can establish patterns while still leaving room for characters who break them.
