This could be the most over-rated game of all-time. Just about every annoying feature in gaming is collected in this single game. It seems to thrive on a popularity of difficulty, but difficulty does not a good game make.
The boss fights are overrated. They all have high difficulty, some especially. Basically, they are bullet sponges with different patterns. Some of them moveThis could be the most over-rated game of all-time. Just about every annoying feature in gaming is collected in this single game. It seems to thrive on a popularity of difficulty, but difficulty does not a good game make.
The boss fights are overrated. They all have high difficulty, some especially. Basically, they are bullet sponges with different patterns. Some of them move off-screen during the fight because the camera is too tight. Enemy hitboxes are bad. I have vidcaps of "missing" an enemy through whom my nail clearly intersected. Some bosses spawn projectiles….in mid-air…even AFTER you jump in the air a projectile could spawn in your path that wasn’t there WHEN YOU JUMPED. Some say the fights are hard but fair, but some are very cheap. I didn’t find any of them that creative. It all makes for tedious, repetitive, trial-and-error fights for anyone less than A-grade skill who likes reflex tests and has the controls down as 2nd nature. Unfortunately for my average skills, I played multiple boss fights 10x and more. There was little sense of accomplishment. I only won because I grinded out muscle memory. I got gud but it still wasn't fun.
The save benches are too far between. Poor design. Forcing players to replay long tedious sections of a game is a bad way to get a player back in the action. It rips the player out of the flow. And it removes the player from the section where the last death occurred, making it needlessly more difficult to remember whatever dumb pattern you were just beginning to learn to get past a certain section. Other games avoid distant checkpoints, such as Metroid Dread or Bloodstained. Bad checkpoint design is a feature of Hollow Knight.
Jumpnastics sections—part of what makes the bench distances even worse is some of the game has ridiculous jump dash gymnastic sections requiring precise timing and motions. There are sections that involve bouncing off the top of rubber mushrooms or whatever, and you have to do a downward slash as you land to get the extra vertical height off the bounce—sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. I would swing down while landing and he wouldn’t do it. The window for precision is too narrow. Tedious, tedious, tedious. This screws up the timing of the dash you are supposed to make right after bouncing, and thus a trip to an acid bath below. Elsewhere, a single miss results in collision with thorny growth and a full notch of damage (because the protagonist is a pitiful weakling). And then the game removes the opportunity to replay these jumpnastic sections by sending the player back to a bench several minutes away. This is garbage design. The only workaround to these sections is getting the hiveblood charm—which I didn’t know about until way late. You can somewhat cheese the jumnastics by waiting 12 seconds for your last mask to heal thanks to the hiveblood. This allows you to redo jumps again fairly quick, with same number of masks, instead of getting killed and plodding your way back.
The hero is incredibly weak. Everything gives costs him a mask, even bumping toes with an enemy. You’ll take a hit but the enemy won’t. His offense is awful too. It takes forever to level up his weapon. Most bosses are mid to upper hundreds in HP or over 1000, so even his maxed out nail will need to get in like 30 hits to win. So basically he just gets killed all the time until he can do fights with no/low damage, sneaking in heals when trial and error teaches you when. The game is mostly just not fun.
When you die, you lose your geo coin things. To get them back, you have to re-kill your own shadow ghost in the death area. If you die before reaching it, you lose all geo and possibly hours of collecting in the process. This refusal to let the player keep his progress is garbage. Sometimes the ghost appears farther in a section than the player made it before, making it easy to get killed before reaching the ghost again, and losing all geo. The ghost location is garbage. You can overcome this shortcoming by paying a grub to teleport your ghost, but that wouldn’t be so needed without the goofy ghost spawn positioning. Some say geo doesn’t matter late in the game but this isn’t true, especially if you’ve lost geo due to the 2x kill trap. To update the fragile charms, you need a combined 36,000 geo.
Even the map is a tedious affair, and unnecessarily so. You want a map of the environment? You gotta buy it. You want benches marked on the map? Gotta buy that too. You want fast travel locations marked on the map? Yes, you have to buy that separately also. Can this "hero" just mark anything he wants with the “quill” he supposedly has and be done with it? You want to see where you are on the map? Gotta use a charm slot. The game is an utter hassle to navigate.
I can scarcely think of a redeeming quality to this game other than perhaps it didn’t crash and there is some decent scenery… Expand
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