Topic: Hollow Knight

Is anyone else disappointed with this game? I'm finding it extremely frustrating, and I love this type of game generally. I thought Axiom Verge was excellent and never frustrating like Hollow Knight. Super Metroid is probably still the gold standard.

Hollow Knight I find a chore and I'm seriously considering giving up. The game doesn't bother teaching you key mechanics which are needed to access certain things (bouncing on spikes for example). If I have to look up a guide to know how to advance in a game because the game doesn't do anything to teach the player it's mechanics, that's a serious design flaw that's hard to look past. With a game this non-linear and open, if you don't know what you can or can't do you end up wandering around and it becomes frustrating trial and error, not fun imo.

Yet everyone is raving about this game so I feel like I should stick with it, but I just don't get the hype. I do think it looks pretty at first but after a while it just seems drab and dull and the backtracking just gets tedious. What am I missing here?

Serious question: how many of you who say you absolutely love this game have played it without consulting any kind of guide at all?

@LilVoidBoy Thanks for the reply. Maybe it's a case of expecting something else based on all the reviews, rather than just approaching the game without expectations and seeing what it has to offer.

I always prefer to play through a game without using a guide if I can. On the other hand, I still enjoyed La Mulana for example, once I accepted that I would never get through it without a guide, since some of the puzzles in that game were just unfair, quite frankly.

I used a guide after 32 h in to get everything I missed. I am currently 37 h 10 min in and have 99% completion rate. I mainly used the guide at the end to get the last 10 missing charms. But in order to progress - I only used it once (see above - I didn't know what to do with the king's brand).

Now, I don't know if it is better to fight the final boss and its true form or fight against the Grimm Troupe (hope that this is the name ) first.

I still love that game. Didn't want to do 100% it but I always told myself "okay - only that and I am done and fight the boss" repeatedly.

The game explicitly tells you how to do the vast majority of the stuff you'll need to go in the game. A few minor things you just learn by doing. That was an important thing to me, actually, as I detest games that are obtuse about their own mechanics like Dark Souls, but this game explains almost everything relevant to the experience. The level design is open, but fantastic at leading you with an invisible hand: the layout of the dungeons will naturally guide you on a mostly linear path through early parts of the dungeon until you find key upgrades.

I've only looked at a guide recently, 28 hours in, and only to find the locations of some optional bosses and grubs, because I have very little patience for "secret" content once I feel like I've combed an area fairly thoroughly. But I do the same for Metroid games and their missile upgrades. I've not had any issue actually progressing through the main game at all without a guide.

We're just not going to see eye-to-eye on this, I think. Some people just don't like some games. I found Axiom Verge to be mediocre and not have much of an identity apart from its Metroid influences, and I know some people really love that game. I'm actually not horribly infatuated with Super Metroid either, which people keep calling the "gold standard" of the genre. It's certainly a groundbreaking game, but I didn't play it when it first released and I think, retrospectively, that Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion are both stronger games. I feel the same way about SOTN, which I feel has a lazily designed second half and is overall inferior to sequels like Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia.

While at the first 6 hours or so I just explore and stuff, by now I kinda... look at the map online for having it kinda easier for me (Considering at all times I have Gathering Swarm + Wayward Compass equipped...)

Still have things pretty tough, and I hate ANY of the platforming challenges (Gave up Crystallised Mound because of it, and lost around 1k Geo... urgh). Nonetheless I think I'm progressing kinda well, but I'm giving up on the game for a while when my JRPG games came, I have easier time on them (especially with some help through difficulty settings).

I don't mind having some of those challenges, but man, wish there's a way to lower them

@Tsurii I actually just fought that boss last night before going to bed. Had no idea about that map, and I was initially only intending to find enough of them to get the last piece of Pale Ore I need to fully upgrade my weapon, but I'll probably go for all of them after fighting the final boss now that they're marked on my map.

After climbing over many walls, I ran right into the Traitor Lord yesterday. What a miserable fight. Even with the NPC assist, it is unpleasant.

I lost an embarrassing amount of time son the Crystal Guardian Mk. II. Looks like I'm going to top my lose rate with the Traitor Lord.

@Ralizah Oh hell yeah, Order of Ecclesia is fantastic and that's my favorite Castlevania game ever. But I still love Symphony of the Night for that game's insane customizability, and the inverted castle is still pretty dang genius, rehashed as it may be. SotN is my second favorite Castlevania game behind Order of Ecclesia, then Aria of Sorrow afterwards.

For Super Metroid though, I played Zero Mission and Fusion before Super Metroid and personally I still loved Super Metroid quite a bit more than Zero Mission/Fusion. Zero Mission and Fusion are still fantastic and among my favorite GBA games, but something about Super Metroid's world and pacing of the game captivated me so much. There are some weird things like Samus being very floaty and the run button not needing to exist at all, but overall the level design was so strong that it's tied with Metroid Prime as my favorite game of all time.

Hollow Knight's world being as expansive and freeform as it is reminds me a lot of Super Metroid's level design as well, moreso than a lot of other Metroidvanias out there. Another plus for Hollow Knight in my book.

@EvilLucario SOTN is definitely a good game, but I don't really feel like it's the height of Castlevania game design, you know? But, as I said, I thought the flipped map was horrible, so I'm betting that's a big part of why I'm not super thrilled with the second half. And yeah, I love OoE. It feels like a great balance between the two primary styles of Castlevania game design. The same is true of Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, actually.

Super Metroid was a bit... I don't know. It's a bit dour for my tastes. I agree HK's world reminds me a lot of it, but HK also has little flashes of humor and personality everywhere to balance out the grim tone. I generally prefer the physics and level design in Zero Mission overall, and I LOVE that game's final act. I've never seen anything like that in a Metroid game before or sense. It was such a great surprise. As to Fusion, while I'm not a huge fan of the more linear design of the game, I really liked the tense horror element SA-X brought to it, and it's definitely more well-developed on a narrative level than previous games.

Super Metroid is also a great game, but I don't really revere it like other people do. Like SOTN and Ocarina of Time, I feel like it has been bettered since. It provided a fantastic foundation for the future of the series, though.

The spikes in this game are very annoying. Just take me out of the experience and make some things much harder than they otherwise would be due to it completely resetting your position. Essentially the only thing in the whole game that does that.

@Ralizah Yeah, to each their own. I'm sticking with the game for now and starting to get into it a bit more.

Maybe it seems obvious to others, but I didn't know about the down slash for the first few hours of the game, since I tried it standing still and that doesn't work, but slashing up standing still does work, so I just assumed there was no down slash. I feel like there are a few things like that early on in Hollow Knight that are almost deliberately designed to throw you off. There's an object that says it would fit into a slot and a door somewhere else with an open slot, but apparently they have nothing to do with each other. And the lamp costing 1800; I just find little things like that off putting.

But I can see why a lot of people love this game so I'm going to keep going with it. Maybe I was tired when I made that post, because when I went back to the game the next day I realized I had somehow missed an open path which cost me an hour or so of frustrating backtracking and wandering around. I'm making steady progress now.

I picked this up launch day but haven’t had much time to sink into it till this past weekend and I absolutely loved it I’m terrible at it but I’m slowly getting better.

Does anybody know if you can get the good ending after getting the bad ending on the same file? I want to get the bad ending at least once, and I want to know if I should get the bad ending on my current file, and then start a new file for the good ending (and %100 that one), or if I can do the bad ending in this one, %100 it, and then get the good ending.

@LilVoidBoy Thanks much!

Ugh, the White Palace is a massive pain in the butt.

Really glad I got the Hiveblood charm beforehand.

This is really a life saver - used it too after countless of deaths.

But only if you do not change a specific charm into another, right? As far as I know, I can't experience the bad ending anymore.

@8-Bit_Superman On my monitor I have no problems. Are you sure that your TV is set to Game Mode? That isn't Hollow Knight specific, it's TV specific.

@Ralizah: It's kind of funny to me to complain about the inverted castle in SOTN. When I played SOTN back in the day, I considered the inverted castle a nice post-game bonus but not part of the main game. It is a nice touch but a bit repetitive, so I just stopped after finishing the main game and never bothered with the inverted castle. I probably would've got bored with the inverted part, but because I didn't play it, I thought the game was amazing. It's not like the existence of the extra, optional content makes the game worse. Maybe if you had taken my approach you would have enjoyed it more

@wollywoo I'm pretty sure it's part of the main game, though. Even the real ending is hidden behind the inverted castle. It's just the second half of SOTN.