When I first picked up Hollow Knight, I was expecting a short-ish platformer with difficult combat. To my surprise, the game took me 19 hours to complete and was jam packed with content. The visuals, music, and sound design are all top notch and beautifully executed. Overall, I enjoyed the experience that this game offered and would recommend it to anyone who likes platformers and is up for a challenge (in many different ways). There are many positive aspects to Hollow Knight, but also some features I did not like. I'll start with the positives.

Hollow Knight breaks many of the conventional standards and expectations that the majority of modern games impose, which increases its novelty. For instance, there are very few explicit waypoints, objectives, or quest journals that guide you through the game. The navigation in the game is done through maps that have to be obtained at the locations before providing any information or connecting it to a broader outline. Shops and other key locations are not marked explicitly and have to be found. Secret locations that you think to be small turn out to be major areas that progress the story.

The combat system is highly refined and offers a expansive variety of customizable "charms" and upgrades that are obtained through vendors or map locations. There are tons of bosses and various challenges that force the player to focus their skills into defining moments. Defeating hard bosses is satisfying and rewarding. New abilities are obtained in a logical progression that is never overwhelming or hard to control.

Hollow Knight is a cryptic game in nearly all aspects. The story is relayed in an unconventional way: mainly through environment, small hints of lore, and minor cutscenes. While the story never felt as though it was driving the game forward, it was by no means bad. Having played pretty attentively, I caught a glimpse of a incredibly rich, deep lore that the game is built upon despite only reaching 52% completion on my first run through. It's the kind of game that you really have to read into and immerse yourself in if you want to appreciate and understand the intent of the developers.

While the cryptic aspect of Hollow Knight makes it feel unique and satisfying to find new locations, there were a couple times where I hit a brick wall in my exploration. Essentially, the only way I was able to get past these parts that stumped me was by traveling to every location on my map that had an unexposed passageway and tried to see if it would progress the story. I'm not the kind of person who likes to look up walkthrough tutorials, so I occasionally spent an hour or more aimlessly looking around for new locations (not fun). Having difficulty in this way is not something that I appreciated, especially since I payed close attention to the cues granted to me and followed them.

I was expecting to get frustrated about the combat difficulty. However, there were a couple of key defining boss battles that felt a bit too easy for me. I would say that the difficulty mid-game was prime, but I felt as though the game should have gotten much harder late-game. When you feel comfortable fighting the final boss, the difficulty curve may need to be increased. Regardless, the game was a challenge for the most part and this is only a small thing that I would have liked to have seen.