What Did We Play Yesterday?

Now that I am officially the guy who plays any given game last, it's only natural I would wait to pick up this highly-recommended and inexpensive Metroidvania when it went on sale 50% off in the Switch eShop. I put this one off in part because I heard it was very challenging and I'd already had several games in a row that were too difficult to finish, so I wasn't too eager to add to that pile.

Hollow Knight is a beautiful, beautiful game with wonderful play control. I love the art style and the subtle sense of humor, so much love has been put into this game. As with Steampunk Dig, you descend into the underground from the fading town of Dirtmouth to find goodies and fight monsters and locate villagers, who then return to the surface and improve the town. You can purchase maps as well as map markers for various locations of importance (rest spots, train stations, and so on), you can also buy pins to place on your own POIs which is a neat and useful feature.

It's challenging. In each new area you have to locate the cartographer to get the base map for that area (his cheerful humming is music to my ears). Until then you're exploring on your own and must rely upon memory, and as a result I find myself doing quite a bit of backtracking and retreading of some areas. I could do with less of that, though it does feel more like honest-to-god exploration than fog of war. I wish the stations in the underground railroad were, I dunno, more, but they do a good job of placing the stations convenient to the level's boss fight.

The last game I played like this, Ori and the Blind Forest, I got stuck on one particular jump unfortunately somewhat early in the game. I could never get past it, so I put the game aside and never got around to trying it again. The most challenging parts of Hollow Knight are definitely the boss fights, but the benefit of concentrating most of the game's challenge there is the player can practice and overcome, buy loot for a little help, etc. As with classic Metroidvanias the bosses have tells, so practicing and learning the patterns pays off. I do think, from a design standpoint, it is better to have more difficult bosses than punishing parkour segments. Maybe I'm biased in that regard, being God King of the Shitty Casuals. I have a "I survived Guacamelee!" T-shirt around here somewhere; if the game's good enough I'll work at a parkour challenge, but if there's no way to mitigate the difficulty with power-ups, etc., then eventually, as with Ori, I may have to give up, and that's not what developers intend when they create these challenges.

I've just opened up the third area, Fog Canyon, so I have quite a ways to go, but so far Hollow Knight is a great Metroidvania I would put up there with Guacamelee: Gold!, and both of these are on sale on Steam right now.