Hollow Knight Review: Team Cherry’s Silent, Sprawling Masterclass in Atmosphere

Hollow Knight asks you to explore a dead kingdom with almost no hand-holding, and the result is one of the most confidently atmospheric metroidvanias ever made.

Welcome to Hallownest, Population: Almost Nobody

You begin Hollow Knight as a small, silent, horned insect-like creature descending into Hallownest, a vast ruined kingdom of bugs that has already collapsed by the time you arrive. There is no opening cutscene explaining who you are or why you’re here, no quest marker, and barely any dialogue in the traditional sense. Instead, the game trusts you to piece together its history through environmental details, cryptic NPC conversations, and item descriptions, a design philosophy clearly inherited from games like Dark Souls but applied to a 2D, hand-drawn world.

This restraint could easily have made Hollow Knight feel cold or inaccessible, but it does the opposite. Hallownest feels genuinely ancient and genuinely tragic, a civilization of bugs that built cathedrals, waged wars, and ultimately succumbed to something called the Infection, and exploring its corpse at your own pace, without a game constantly explaining itself, makes every discovery feel earned rather than delivered.

Exploration and Combat That Respect Your Patience

Structurally, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania in the strictest sense: a large interconnected map gated by abilities you gradually acquire, double jump, wall cling, dash, and a handful of more exotic movement tools that open up entirely new routes through areas you thought you’d already finished exploring. The map itself must be manually purchased from an NPC cartographer and filled in as you explore, and until you buy a compass upgrade you won’t even see your own position on it, a small touch that keeps the sense of being lost intentional rather than frustrating.

Combat centers on a nail, essentially a sword, combined with Soul, a resource built by landing hits that can be spent on healing or a growing list of offensive spells. The nail can be upgraded for damage, and a system of interchangeable Charms lets you customize your build significantly, charms that boost soul gain, add thorn-like retaliation damage, or grant passive healing over time, letting you tune the game toward aggression, survivability, or mobility depending on your charm loadout.

Boss fights are where Hollow Knight is most frequently discussed, and for good reason. Encounters like the Mantis Lords, Hornet, or the various Dream Warriors demand precise pattern recognition and punishing execution, closer in spirit to Dark Souls than to most platformers. The difficulty curve is steep by design, but checkpoints are generous enough, and the movement kit expressive enough, that failure rarely feels unfair, just a signal to learn the fight better.

A Visual and Musical Identity All Its Own

Every character and background in Hollow Knight is hand-drawn, giving the game a distinctly gothic, almost storybook quality that separates it visually from the more pixel-art-heavy side of the indie scene. Areas like the bioluminescent Blue Lake, the crumbling City of Tears, and the volcanic Deepnest each have a completely different color language and sense of scale, and the game uses environmental storytelling, ruined statues, forgotten shrines, abandoned homes, to communicate history without a single line of exposition.

Christopher Larkin’s orchestral score matches that mood perfectly, leaning on strings and choral elements to underline the melancholy of a fallen kingdom rather than pushing bombastic action music, even during boss fights. It’s a soundtrack that would work as a standalone listen, which is a rare compliment for a game score built primarily to support gameplay tension.

A Kingdom Built From Optional Detours

What keeps players in Hallownest long after the main path is cleared is how much of the game’s best content is entirely optional. Areas like the Colosseum of Fools, a gauntlet arena of escalating enemy waves, or the Hall of Gods, a boss rush against the game’s toughest encounters, exist purely for players who want more of a challenge and add nothing to the critical path. The Grimm Troupe, a substantial free content update added after launch, layered an entirely new optional storyline and boss fight on top of the base game, following a traveling circus of nightmare creatures that quietly reframes parts of Hallownest’s history.

Charm combinations deserve particular praise here, since the same base kit of nail and spells can feel like an entirely different character depending on loadout. A build focused around Grubsong and Thorns of Agony rewards aggressive, contact-heavy play, while a Quick Focus and Deep Focus combination turns the player into a ranged-focused spellcaster who avoids melee entirely. Few metroidvanias give players this much control over their core combat identity without resorting to a traditional class-selection system.

Sequel Anticipation and Lasting Influence

Hollow Knight’s influence on the broader metroidvania resurgence of the past several years is hard to overstate. Its blend of Souls-like difficulty, hand-drawn 2D art, and deliberately obscured lore delivery has been cited directly by a wave of subsequent releases, and the long-anticipated sequel, Silksong, has become one of the most closely watched follow-ups in the indie space precisely because the original set such a high bar for atmosphere and mechanical depth simultaneously.

That anticipation is a testament to how rarely games manage to feel both meticulously designed and genuinely mysterious at the same time. Hollow Knight never explains its map layout, never marks a boss’s weak point on screen, and never tells you outright what happened to Hallownest, and yet none of that restraint reads as withheld information so much as an invitation to look closer.

Where the Silence Can Wear Thin

Hollow Knight’s commitment to obscurity is also its biggest barrier to entry. Players who want clear direction, marked objectives, or straightforward lore delivery may find the opening hours genuinely disorienting rather than mysterious, and a handful of the game’s late optional bosses and platforming challenges, particularly in the Path of Pain, are difficult enough to test even experienced genre veterans. The game is also long, easily forty-plus hours for full completion, and its slower, more deliberate pace won’t suit players looking for something tighter.

Boss difficulty spikes are also inconsistent in ways that can catch players off guard. Some required story bosses arrive with relatively generous room for error, while a handful of side bosses encountered around the same point in the map are considerably harder, meaning players following the game’s more obscure optional paths can occasionally hit a wall well before the main story would have asked the same of them. Without a clear difficulty setting to fall back on, that inconsistency occasionally shifts from tense to simply frustrating for less experienced action game players.

Tips for Surviving Hallownest’s Early Hours

New players often struggle most in the game’s opening stretch simply because Hallownest doesn’t clearly indicate which areas are meant to be tackled early versus later. As a general rule, if an area introduces an enemy type that consistently deals more damage than your current health pool can comfortably absorb, it’s usually a signal to explore elsewhere first and return once you’ve found a Mask Shard or two to expand your health total. Dirtmouth, the small town at the very top of the map, is also worth revisiting often, since new NPCs and shop inventory frequently appear there as you progress, and it’s easy to miss vendors simply because there’s no prompt telling you to check back.

Investing early in the Mothwing Cloak, which grants a horizontal dash, and the Monarch Wings, which grant a double jump, dramatically opens up backtracking options through areas that felt like dead ends earlier, so prioritizing the paths that lead toward those two upgrades tends to pay off far more than pushing straight into harder optional bosses first.

Final Verdict

Hollow Knight succeeds by trusting its players almost entirely, trusting them to read an unmarked map, to learn a boss through failure rather than a tutorial prompt, and to piece together a kingdom’s fall from scattered fragments rather than a cutscene. That trust is rewarded with one of the most atmospheric, mechanically rich, and quietly devastating games the genre has produced, and its influence is still visible in nearly every metroidvania released since.

For players deciding between platforms, the Switch version holds up well for handheld exploration despite occasional frame dips during the busiest boss fights, while the PC version remains the smoothest overall experience and the easiest platform on which to install popular quality-of-life mods, none of which are necessary but many of which are appreciated by players chasing full completion. Whichever version you pick, budgeting well beyond a first casual estimate is wise; players consistently underestimate how long a full completion run, all charms, all masks, all bosses, actually takes once Hallownest’s more obscure corners are accounted for.

Reviewed on Switch by the Foremy Team.