I played the Nintendo Switch version on the Switch 2, over the course of about two weeks in November of 2025.
I have to be honest: I didn't expect to like Hollow Knight as much as I did. My impression of the game over the last 8 years has mostly been seeing rabid Silksong hype-ers online excited for the sequel, and from the few screenshots and videos I'd seen of the original Hollow Knight it looked to be just a basic indie metroidvania. Sure, I expected it would be quite charming and that I would at least enjoy my time with it, as is the case with most hyped-up indie games, but I don't think I ever expected to walk away from this game giving it a spot in my top 10 all-time games list.
For the first hour or so of gameplay, I felt like I had the right impression. The game is satisfying to play, right from the beginning. My first note in my notebook for this game is to recognize just how austere it feels. The knight only walks, and not particularly fast. When you attack, the visuals are beautifully stylized, and sound the effects are satisfying tinks or thumps or squish depending on what you hit. And when you get hit, the way the sounds and music cut out and the visuals darken with a vignette effect gives such an impactful feeling. Most of all, the controls are perfectly tuned - the knight instantly moves to full speed without acceleration, his jump is fast and aerial movement is clean, and his attacks come out instantaneously. Hollow Knight's reputation for difficulty certainly precedes it, but it was clear that the developers put a lot of care into ensuring that the difficulty doesn't come from fighting the controls.
However, in spite of all those positives, there were some general design issues that I found very apparent early in the game. It's hard not to compare any metroidvania to what is probably the most perfect game in the genre, Super Metroid. There's a great video on youtube by GDTK that dives into the map design of Super Metroid. In short, that game strategically blocks off non-critical paths in the early game using "locked doors" (i.e. the red doors that require missiles, or a narrow passage requiring the morph ball acting as a metaphorical lock), which ensures that the map can both feel large while also preventing the player from getting lost. Later, there's a few one-way passages which limit the explorable area again by preventing backtracking past a certain point, to ensure that it's clear to the player that they don't need to backtrack too far to find their next power-up. Eventually, the whole map does open up and you're free to explore, though there's still limits on how to go forward, such that there's only a few possible routes through the game without using sequence-breaking movement tech. One of the benefits of this is that the world is divided into chunks, each of which a player can thoroughly learn before having to return when backtracking or looking for ammunition upgrades.
Hollow Knight doesn't really do any of this. There's not a lot of exploration power-ups in this game in general, and the first one is actually fairly deep into the game compared to how early Metroid games tend to give the player their first item. So for the first hour or so of the game, the player doesn't really have any direction and has very little in the way of limits. There's nothing to do except to blindly explore and eventually stumble onto the main path (getting Vengeful Spirit; and later getting to Greenpath for the Mothwing Cloak). There's also no one-way latches in this game like in Super Metroid to put new limits on explorable area after getting a power-up. So, even after getting some of these upgrades, the accessible game area only gets larger, so finding the next upgrade can actually be quite difficult. There's some plot threads guiding the player down to the Mantis Village after beating Hornet, but once the Mantis Claw is acquired there's really nothing at all pointing towards a main critical path. Eventually you'll stumble upon the statues of the Dreamers and pick up the Dream Nail and finally get an understanding of the main quest, but it's remarkably open-ended to get to that point.
From the preceding paragraph it might sound that I just don't appreciate exploration - I do! My "issue" with all of this design is actually that it defied my expectations of the genre. On reflection, I now feel that this beginning sequence is perfect for the game. In the moment, I felt like it was "poorly designed as a metroidvania" (quote from my notebook entry written at the time), since I was instinctually comparing it to Super Metroid. I've long considered Super Metroid to be a "genre-killer", a game that so perfectly captures a genre that there's nothing that any other games can do better. But I think Hollow Knight took the genre in a different enough direction that I never expected metroidvanias to be able to go.
I think the moment for me where the game really turned around was the fight vs. the Mantis Lords, in which basically every excellent design decision in the game intersects. This actually happened later in my playthrough than it seems most players fight them, as on the way to the boss's chamber it's possible to talk to Quirrel who suggests seeking out the nailsmith in the City of Tears to upgrade the nail before fighting them, advice which I heeded and so I went on quite a journey before returning to the Mantis Village to push forward. But even this highlights what makes Hollow Knight so well-crafted: that there's no limits on the explorable area, means there's also not really a static sequence through the game. The fight itself is brilliant. It's one of the only bosses where you, the knight, initiate the battle. I think that little text pop-up saying "challenge" when standing in their room was like a lightbulb moment for me (the only other place it appears is against the Radiance). Then, the first Mantis Lord jumps down to fight you.
Most of the fights in this game went the same way for me - I'd fight and fail, but each attempt I'd get further in learning the telegraph for each of the attacks, I'd out the best response that allows me to avoid damage and get some hits in, and get more and more comfortable with executing my strategy. Every boss was satisfying, and the first Mantis Lord was no different. The attacks are fast, but very learnable, there's a few moments to get some healing in, there's only 4 attacks but that gives enough variation that quickly reacting to each one was fun. It took a few attempts and then I beat the first Mantis. I was looking forward for the second one to jump down so I could learn her attack routine, and keep progressing this fight until I could beat all 3. Then the second and third Lords jumped down together. Literally perfect encounter design.
The obvious reward for this fight is access to Deepnest. But later on, when I was doing some backtracking and exploration, I noticed that the mantises weren't attacking me anymore. Turns out, beating the Mantis Lords earns the Knight respect from the whole mantis tribe. This seemed like a little cherry on top, but again upon reflection it's so much cooler than that. It's one of those things that actually got me interested in the story and worldbuilding of the game. I'm not usually super into game "lore", preferring to focus on the story when it exists and purely on gameplay when it doesn't. Hollow Knight, however, manages to present its story almost entirely through gameplay and the environment, and this is one of those things that does it.
After I beat the game, I looked into some guides and other people's playthroughs of the game, and was really surprised at how many different routes you can take in this game. There's usually multiple paths to the same goal, depending on which item the player acquires first. I farmed Geo for the Lantern earlier than most players do, so I got Crystal Heart way earlier than most. And also, that there's so few power-ups means that incoming power ups aren't super telegraphed, so they are instead very pleasant surprises - I didn't actually expect the Mothwing Cloak until I was actually on my way into the Ancient Basin going towards the boss, and it was oddly enough the last "main powerup" (i.e. one that helps with exploration) that I got. I didn't have a huge mental map of "locks" where I considered the "key" would be a double-jump, so I was again pleasantly suprised when I found a ton of new paths leading to secret side bosses or upgrades like charms.
Speaking of charms, this was definitely one of those game design aspects that I had a love-hate relationship with. In principle, the charms system was really cool - there's a lot of unique upgrades and cool combos and builds to try, and often I would start fighting a boss and realize that I had a charm that was perfect for fighting them. In practice, being only able to change them at benches meant it wasn't usually possible to equip the ideal loadout for each fight. This was especially bad with the dream versions of e.g. Lost Kin, where losing doesn't send you back to a bench to swap charms out. Trekking all the way to a bench and back for the fight didn't feel good, but I had to do it as the loadout I had was actively harming me against the boss (I had Grimmchild equipped who would hit the Lost Kin out of stagger so I never had an opportunity to heal). Once I swapped charms, I beat it on my next try. I had an "exploration kit" as a standard loadout for exploring the world, but it wasn't great for most bosses. Towards the end of the game, I figured out a strategy I call "little guys" where I equipped Grimmchild, Weaversong, and the other charms that do passive damage, which was great for boss battles when I want to just learn the enemy attack pattern (I used it against dream Zote and Grimm, for example), but wasn't awesome for exploration. I can definitely see the dev's vision for this system, however, and unlike similar equipment systems in RPGs etc. it's not at all convoluted and was easy (other than the bench requirement) and fun to swap charms around to try different things out.
The bosses were brutally tough, and the game is super unforgiving. You don't have a lot of health, so even normal enemies hit hard; dying costs you all your geo unless you get back to your shade, but sometimes that's really difficult and I lost thousands of geo to double-dying in my playthough. There were times I loved this, times I hated it, but overall I think it's exactly what the game needed to be. I think the difficulty was perfect for what it is. I even loved the White Palace, despite the game not really being a "platformer" in the traditional sense. The knight controls well and the by the time I got there I was really at home with the pogo mechanic so progressing through the area was satisfying.
Map design was also sublime. My go-to example for this is probably the Fungal Wastes area. Early on, you can explore one section, and it's mostly just a throughway between two other areas. But once you get Isma's Tear and can go through the acid pool, another half the area opens up which links back to Queen's Gardens. I thought it was a really cool way to make one area important for two separate parts of the game. On a more fine-grained level, I loved the way that many traversal puzzles only need to be solved once, and then a shortcut opens up so you can skip it on the way back or for subsequent visits. This didn't happen 100% of the time, but it did often enough that I appreciated it as the player. These puzzles functionally act as bosses in the sense that they are obstacles that you only have to beat once.
The game is also visually beautiful, the art style is simple in principle, but I love what the devs did with using 3D tools to create 2D scenes (rather than just regular parallax). Many of the areas are dark and gray, yet everything is still somehow visually distinct. And the areas which are colorful are wonderfully alien, especially when creature design is taken into account. And the music in this game is an easy 10/10 for me. I don't normally listen to soundtracks outside of the game/film that they came from, but Hollow Knight is already an exception. The music makes great use of leitmotifs to signal its storytelling (shoutout to Hornet's battle theme). Every track is memorable and perfectly does what it needs to, as far as setting a mood for an area or boss. Sound design is also perfect. I love how oppressive the sounds in Deepnest area, how creepy the enemies can sound, how the various friendly NPCs sound to portray characterization.
One of my only actual gripes with this game that remained upon reflection is the map system. It's funny because it's only an issue for the first few hours, but the steep Geo costs for buying all the map tools and upgrades was just annoying in the early game. Later, an issue I was with the map is that a room would be colored in as "visited" regardless of how much of the room was actually explored. Later in the game when I was doing map cleanup to get 100%, it was difficult to tell where I actually had and hadn't yet been. Early on, the compass costing a whole charm notch felt extreme, but all that removing it really does is make looking at the map take a few seconds of focus to figure out.
Eventually, I was satisfied by my time with the game and chose to look up what I was missing in a guide before finishing up. In the end, I had to look up just a few things:
All I left incomplete was the Path of Pain and Godhome, though I do plan on going back to do both of these.
Boss battle highlights for me were Hornet (both), Mantis Lords (as described above), Dung Defender (both), Nosk, Grimm, Traitor Lord, and the Radiance. Area highlights for me were Greenpath, Kingdom's Edge, City of Tears, and the Abyss. Music highlights are Hornet's fight themes, White Palace, The Hollow Knight boss themes, and Dung Defender themes (though it's hard to only pick a few, there's 0 duds in this soundtrack).
What's especially odd about this game for me is that with most games, the more I think and write about them the lower my opinion gets. This game has been the opposite, and I think that's also really notable. I would go as far as to consider this game to belong to the "canon" of indie games, and I think it's the kind of game that all aspiring indie devs should play. Huge props to Team Cherry for what they have achieved.