Higher beings, these words are for you alone. So begins the first inscription you discover in Hallownest, and then many others thereafter, a hint that its message is aimed not to characters in the world but the player. You might detect a touch of flattery here, then. And, in fairness, if you first read those words in early 2017, then you’d have every right to feel a little smug – because if you weren’t quite alone in playing Hollow Knight back then, you were certainly in a minority.
When Team Cherry took its debut to Kickstarter in 2014, the campaign attracted just over 2,000 backers, falling short of its loftier stretch goals (including a PS Vita port and the promise of a third playable character). When the game hit 65,000 sales in the first month after release, the small Australian studio was ecstatic. Now that seems rather parochial.
Eight years and millions of sales later, we live in a world where Nintendo and Sony broadcasts are assailed by cries of “Silksong when” in the live chat, and that sequel – originally conceived as an expansion to introduce that second playable character – has almost passed into myth. After another summer of announcements without any solid news on Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release, there’s a growing sense that all the hype could curdle. [GamesRadar+ note: it’s now been revealed to be incoming September 4, 2025]
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Just what was it about this game that caused such excitement to spread in the first place, and managed to sustain it for so long? We fire it up for the first time in years and begin a fresh save. Might its appeal have been blunted by the many imitators that have followed? Emerging a few days later with 30 hours and a completion rate of 95 per cent under our belt, we’re relieved to report that Hollow Knight has still got it.
It’s a common complaint that Hollow Knight gets off to a slow start. Your bag of tricks is all but empty, consisting of just a jump, a basic sword slash and a healing ability. Accordingly, the first threats you encounter are the game’s least dynamic – bugs that move slowly and predictably, rarely bothering to attack – and the arena in which they’re faced, the Forgotten Crossroads, the least visually appealing. Knowing what’s to come, though, even these monochromatic caves and creatures feel purposeful.
As you begin to edge into adjacent regions, there’s a striking change of palette. To the right: brittle pink light, given off by formations of crystal. Down and to the left: febrile green, with enemies that fizz bright orange. In those early hours of groping around in the dark, we rely on these associations to navigate. Even after acquiring our first map, it’s a skill we must return to, every time we enter a new area and have that luxury stripped away. Hollow Knight is ready to withhold the good stuff: visual splendour, core mechanics, or any obvious direction towards an objective. And that only makes you crave it all the more – the engine driving any good Metroidvania.
Indeed, given this genre’s recent ubiquity, it’s tempting to suggest that Hollow Knight succeeded simply because it got there first. True, It was immediately preceded by Axiom Verge, Guacamelee and the first Ori, but only afterwards did the floodgates truly open. Whether that’s a case of capitalising on an existing player appetite or creating one, you’d be hard pressed to argue that Team Cherry didn’t nail the genre fundamentals, search and action alike.
Hallownest is a world well worth exploring, densely packed with shortcuts and cavities, their discovery yielding a satisfying chime and most often a pocketful of the game’s currency, Geo. You learn to pay close attention, keeping both eyes and ears open, since the very best rewards are generally accompanied by a distinctive audio cue. Absentminded humming can be followed to Cornifer, Hallownest’s not-so-silent cartographer, while youthful squeaks indicate that there’s a caterpillar grub in need of rescue – just don’t be tricked by the wickedly similar sound of the explosive kamikaze Belfly.
Soon enough, you’ll come up against unbreakable barriers, and spot goodies in unreachable spots. (The way a grub’s excitable squeakings turn to a disappointed sigh as you miss the jump is brilliantly heartbreaking.) These teases are fuel to the trusty Metroidvania engine, pushing you deeper in search of the ability that will eventually grant you access. And so your movement options are expanded from a single jump to long chains of directional dashes, wall slides and mid-air hops. Not the most innovative abilities, perhaps, but they almost all pull double duty as tools for both traversal and combat.
While it’s the platforming that still accounts for the most deaths early on, over time Hollow Knight’s challenge increasingly shifts towards the swordplay, with progress gated behind multi-phase boss encounters. This being a game made in the mid-2010s, it’s all but impossible not to draw a parallel with the work of FromSoftware. The developers have since said they’d hardly played Dark Souls or its kin at the time; rather, both studios were working from a similar set of influences leading them towards similar design decisions, Soulslikes themselves being a weird offshoot of the Metroidvania family tree. It’d be easy, for example, to liken Hallownest’s benches to Lordran’s bonfires – both allow you to save progress and top up health and supplies, inspiring a similar relief when found – but in truth they share a common ancestor in Super Metroid’s Save Stations.
Hallownest and Lordran are both dark places which nonetheless interrogate the traditional notion of ‘light equals good’.
Elsewhere, though, this kind of convergent evolution can produce uncannily specific resemblances with no obvious forebear. Both FromSoft and Team Cherry build worlds in which Lovecraftian horrors rub shoulders with Arthurian chivalry, the latter’s code of honour and – in the case of an Onion Knight or Dung Defender – even jolly demeanours providing a rare spot of optimism in a land where not every NPC is quite so friendly. Hallownest and Lordran are both dark places which nonetheless interrogate the traditional notion of ‘light equals good’.
Beyond such narrative concerns, in terms of design it’s worth noting where the two diverge. Die, and you’ll drop your current supply of the game’s most valuable resource, be it Geo or Souls, necessitating a corpse run back to a dangerous spot lest they’re lost forever. But Team Cherry ratchets up the tension further still, by requiring you to defeat your own shadowy spectre in combat once you reach it – and to do the whole thing with restricted access to healing, due to the cracking of your Soul Vessel.
Rather than a limited supply of Estus Flasks topped up at save points, here you heal by drawing on this gauge, charged with each strike that lands. Thus, your Soul supply is likely to dwindle to nothing then rally multiple times over before you arrive at the next bench – and given how it is refilled, you have added motivation to engage rather than evade enemies en route. This feeds into combat that, à la Bloodborne, dares you to be aggressive. There’s no shield here, and the only way of parrying is by launching a well-timed attack, in the hope that your blades will ping harmlessly off one another.
This all makes for a perfectly solid example of the form – or rather the forms, Team Cherry having spliced together the Metroidvania and Soulslike, intentionally or otherwise, in a way that makes the appeal of each clearer to players coming from the other side of the genre tracks. But this alone, surely, can’t account for the staying power of this game? The real magic, we’d argue, comes in what is built atop those foundations.
Every single part of Hollow Knight oozes with personality. The maps are diegetically rooted by the physical presence of their maker, and the scrap of paper in the Knight’s hands as you study the menu. We collect grubs less for the Geo reward than the backstory implied by their father, sobbing, in an empty room. Later, when a collapsing floor drops you into the very nastiest corner of the map, the point is underlined by perverting these bright spots: Cornifer cowers in fear, while those cute little caterpillars transform into Cronenbergian horrors that rush for your throat.
The fundamental pleasures in which Team Cherry deals here – mastering a space or fight that once seemed impossible – provide a framework from which it can hang hundreds of these magic moments, ready to lodge in the memory. Returning to the Crossroads deep into the game, you’ll find it overtaken by infection, with old routes blocked off and the familiar enemies replaced by more fearsome variants, all of it hitting harder because those sombre greys and blues have been overwritten by sickly orange – a payoff that might take dozens of hours to arrive. It’s a similar story with NPCs: repeat encounters with Quirrel the Knight, Millibelle the Banker and Zote the Mighty each build to their own payoff, humorous or tragic or both at once.
Many of these moments were already present in Hollow Knight as it arrived back in 2017, while many more were added over the next 18 months in the shape of free updates. Taken as a whole today, the game feels impossibly huge, promising something new around every corner. Even with our completion stat at 95 per cent, we’re still a way off the final, post-DLC total of 120 per cent – and still have the appetite to get there. It’s a timely, encouraging reminder of why we’ve all been so hungry for more, and of what might be taking so long for it to be served up. If the higher beings at Team Cherry have spent all this time threading Silksong with as many memorable moments as its predecessor, it should be more than worth the wait.
Looking to explore more mazey maps? Check out our best Metroidvania games ranking to discover your next to play!
