Invisible

It’s not just locked doors, imposing bosses, and top-tier traversal. It’s a world, a sensation, a desperate and lonely feeling communicated through screen and pad. It’s chains and foliage obscuring the foreground, as imposingly huge bugs slink about in the background. The depth of parallax art and the grit of an impossible fight. The feeling of movement as you flap your wings or dash over pits or scramble up walls. The world is dying, but you feel alive and vital within it. From vanishingly small beginnings to power comparable to godhood, Hollow Knight isn’t just a good game: it’s one of the best ever made.

There’s been a wealth of incredible Metroidvania games from small dev teams over the past few generations – Axiom Verge, Guacamelee, Headlander, Ori and the Blind Forest to name just a few – but I don’t think any of them compare with Hollow Knight, really. Team Cherry’s 2017 debut is a masterpiece. And I am not using that word lightly. It represents a high tide for the genre that I think even surpasses the achievements of its progenitors, taking the foundational design philosophies of Metroid and Castlevania and sanding off all the rough edges to leave something elegant, perplexing and utterly moreish.

Here’s a bit of Silksong for you.Watch on YouTube

It all begins with its subtle tutorialisation. This is a Metroidvania, so the unwritten understanding is that you get power-ups, and they open up new areas. When you’re thrown into the world of Hallownest from the starting town of Dirtmouth with the vague instruction of ‘head on down’, you are instantly and subconsciously directed about where to go next: verdant green leaves tease the Green Path from the Forgotten Crossroads, and peculiar pink gems nod towards the Crystal Peak.

It’s the enticing greenery of the Path that typically grabs your attention first, though – the visual language of the game’s ‘second zone’ eating into the starting area in a small touch you’ll soon notice runs as a theme in the game. One screen in, and you’re barred; an armoured beetle-like thing impedes your progress. So you soldier on, going right instead of left, until you face your first boss and ingest your first upgrade, the Vengeful Spirit. In order to leave this area, an NPC instructs you to clear its temple, and what do you find at the exit? The very same armoured beetle, which you can now kill. Aha, you think, I know this guy.

So you backtrack, clear the doorway, and you’re on your way. That experience, a delicious example of early game not-quite-handholding that makes you feel like you’ve done all the work, sets a precedent. It’s easy, early on, to trick a player into thinking they’re smart for putting two and two together and coming out with four. But as the paths deviate, the 15 zones that make up Hallownest and its colonies begin to show themselves, and you start to gain a bit more independence, Team Cherry keeps finding ways to make you feel smart. It’s intoxicating, ego-boosting, and I even think at times it feels sublime. Really.

Image credit: Team Cherry / Eurogamer

You’re nudged along with barely perceptible cues that keep your brain itching whilst your fingers dance over the parabolic difficulty spikes in Hollow Knight’s combat. So many design decisions in this game are small, but mighty – fitting for a game about bugs, failing empires, and bitter godheads. Each area, be it the perpetually soggy City of Tears or the dusty dankness of the Ancient Basin, has its own specific colour. Colours are saturated, and props and set dressing is placed (with little repetition) to make each area feel distinct. In your head, you associate these areas with the map: left is green, right is pink, down is blue. It tugs at your cortex, so when you’re trying to navigate, you’ve always got an impression of what direction applies to what power.

But there’s more. The map itself hues its areas to match the world design, subconsciously gluing these colours to your spacial reasoning processes even more distinctly. Paired with more explicit progression cues – Silksong’s Hornet teasing you with which way to go by constantly dashing out of reach and out of view – Hollow Knight simultaneously baits you and makes you feel like you’re in control of your fate. It’s a dirty, delicious trick. And I cannot wait to see how this formula is expanded upon in the sequel.

Team Cherry’s approach to the map, too, cedes all power to the player. It’s not until you actually make it to the City of Tears that the game itself actually applies anything to your map – and even then, it’s a strange waypoint for a place we’ve already discovered. Otherwise, it’s all on you. You even need to choose between a power-up notch in your character screen and a marker to identify where you are on the map. Some may call this obtuse, or needlessly unhelpful, but I think it does wonders for the sense of place Hollow Knight dedicates so much effort to instilling in your head. You pull up the map a lot. Good. If you want to learn everything there is to know about Hallownest, you should know it inside out. The relationship between the knight and the world is a symbiotic relationship, technically and narratively, and all of these mechanics feed into that.

Image credit: Team Cherry

I think that’s where the real appeal of Hollow Knight lies. You have proper agency when it comes to progression and exploration – a sense of proper agency I have honestly only felt in the first Dark Souls in terms of ‘modern’ games. You’re let loose to discover your power on your terms, pluck at various locks and see which one comes undone, whilst also given the power to go and forge your own locks. You don’t even need to be a game design savant to understand the potential for sequence breaks (something Ori and the Blind Forest also understood very well), and by keeping a keen eye on the environment and the map, it feels like Team Cherry almost dares you to skip certain bosses or platforming challenges. The devs understand player ego, how to appeal to it, and how to challenge it. It makes the game’s difficulty more than just a combat or dexterity check, but an emotional one, too.

A lot of Metroidvania games also fall down when they design their critical paths: all too often, there will be one place you need to find and use your new power in order to progress. Some bits of Hollow Knight have four separate paths leading to the ‘next bit’ of the critical path. Chances are, you’ll happen upon one when casually exploring, or backtracking to farm currency or get a combat upgrade. The trail of breadcrumbs never runs out, and by letting you manually pin things to your map when resting at a bench, the sense of self-direction always feels natural and encouraged. The invisible hand of Team Cherry, it becomes clear from this first game alone, is one of the deftest in the business. And that insistent, impossibly light touch is so much of what makes Hollow Knight so special, so compelling, so intoxicating.

I’ve not even touched on the strength of the combat and the 160+ enemies here, or the build-crafting that’s integral to your journey through the game via pins and notches. I’ve not spoken about the game-changing spectral/dream mechanic you unlock about 50 percent of the way through, and how Team Cherry makes asset reuse into a genius portion of the game that anyone that’s played, say, Bravely Default would be agog over. I’ve not spoken about the subtle narrative craft that rivals FromSoft in its multi-layered complexity. I’ve not spoken about the music, the use of leitmotif, or how five twinkly piano notes can evoke such a distinct sense of loss, hopelessness, and desolation.

But that’s because it’s the design of Hollow Knight that sets it apart both from its contemporaries and its inspirations. Sure, the game wouldn’t be half as good if it didn’t have stellar combat or a surprisingly deep build-crafting system, but it’s in the irrepressible way the game keeps nudging you deeper, further down into its mystery that it truly shines. Hollow Knight is, indeed, a masterpiece, an exemplary manifestation of a developer understanding and leveraging player psychology. Is all this hype for Silksong really justified? Yes. And then some.

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