In which Dean spends sick time writing a bit too much about a game about bugs.
TL;DR / Spoiler Warning: It is good, real good, and if you have any interest go play it for yourself before reading this. Spoilers ahead, and you’ll lose a great deal of the charm of the first-time experience if you read into this meta-analysis before playing and trying to figure things out for yourself.
Are you still here? Anyway, get a drink, kick your feet up, or pay less attention at work. This is one of those long ones.
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Introduction
So, in case you were living under a different rock last month, an indie sequel has been disrupting the video game industry recently.
Hollow Knight: Silksong came out at the start of last September, and made waves like few games do. The sequel of the independent developer Team Cherry’s breakout hit Hollow Knight, which released in 2017, the nearly decade-long wait for Silksong was so long and had so little news that the wait alone became the subject of memes, putting it in the same sort of forever waiting room as Half Life 3. Given how Hollow Knight itself sold over 15 million copies, putting it in the top 10 of indie games sold on steam, Silksong had high expectations.
Which, going by the player metrics it has been setting, it has been. In the first days after release, Silksong had over half a million concurrent players on steam- an exceptional showing for almost any game, but particularly for a game which did not send advance review copies to gaming media to build pre-release hype. In fact, the game only announced its release date 2 weeks before it actually released, announcing its 4 September release on 21 August. Even on such short notice, multiple indie games delayed their planned releases to avoid losing the overlap in the day one hype. While the game has its blemishes- or rather, the game is already notorious for its difficulty compared to its prequel, which itself has drawn more than a few comparisons to the infamously hard Dark Souls series. This is somewhat expected when games with deliberately steep difficulty curves hit more widespread audiences, but even then the difficulty is somewhat ‘priced in’ for a major commercial success.
So, all of this is establishing that there is a bandwagon around Silksong, and Hollow Knight as a franchise more generally. But why is there a bandwagon in the first place?
My position is that Hollow Knight’s success goes beyond the similarities it has with Dark Souls, but that it has natural thematic synergies with the classic metroidvania format mechanics of exploration, mystery, and limited lore that build upon the fact that this is ultimately a game about gods, civilizations, and bugs. The crawly kind, not the glitches. Plus, it is tied together by impeccable storytelling design that, while minimalist, effectively drops lore tidbits, uses environmental storytelling, and ties it together with exceptional use of song.
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Part 1: What is Hollow Knight, as a Game?
Hollow Knight is a metroidvania that combines platforming, exploration, and mysteries. It is also a game about bugs. This later aspect has a surprising amount of natural synergy with the tropes of the metroidvania genre.
Mechanically speaking, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania series, whose 2d platforming and exploration format draws more from the early console Metroid and Castlevania series than the more modern 3D games like, well, Dark Souls. Metroidvanias tend to be characterized by large, 2-dimensional, and maze-like maps of rooms connected by vertical and horizonal passageways, rather than separately loaded zones or linear corridors. These passageways tend to require a mix of platforming and combat to get past dangerous obstacles and enemies. The passages can be any sort of biome from traversing cave tunnels, climbing towers, trying to cross large bodies of waters by jumping between rockets, and what have you.
Hollow Knight works with this format by virtue of taking the typical 2-dimension conceit of a metroidvania, where complex 3-dimensional areas are 2-dimension solely for the sake of gameplay, and working within the real-world format of an ant farm, a common inclusion in many a natural history museum or child’s education center. These colonies present a nearly two-dimensional ant colony format by virtue of how the narrow looking pane serves as a wall constraining horizontal growth. Even though Hollow Knight practices the same premise of its levels being a small slice of a broader world, it does so with a framing that is both familiar and nostalgic to even non-gamers unfamiliar with the metroidvania genre.
Thematically, the metroidvania genre is also associated with exploration, isolation, and mystery. These themes owe some of their longevity to the eponymous early games that defined the genre, but these themes have stuck in part because of the natural gameplay synergy.
The theme of exploration is one of the most obvious, since most of a metroidvania is trying to find the parts of the map you need to get to in order to unlock the victory condition. These intermediary objectives may be where you find keys or rewards, but they are just as often the location where you get upgrades in tools or abilities that let you pass otherwise impassable routes. Since every metroidvania exploration starts with an unclear direction, unsure which fork to take, a large part of a blind playthrough is trying to develop a map, identifying the dead ends, identifying areas that look like they are passable but not yet, and trying to find the abilities that make those temporary obstacles into new branching paths.
This is a theme that is also, for better or worse, associated with bugs and insects. Like them or loath them, the ability of insects to move in ways that no human can, to places no human would be able to on the same scale, works well in the framework of a metroidvania. They unfailingly seem to hunt out and find rewards for them, even if it’s trash or rubbish to a human. Insect capabilities, such as exceptional jumping, limited flight, or climbing on walls, all make for analogous exploration mechanics. And insectoid hazards, such as pools of water, can present credible obstacles that a human would be able to swim through.
The theme of isolation is also a common one in metroidvanias. This is often because the nature of a large world puts the scale of the protagonist into a context that makes them feel literally and figuratively small. And the nature of a maze of corridors filled with enemies provides a literal and social sort of isolation. While metroidvanias can have areas of civilization and non-playable characters, these are by the nature of the game the exceptions rather than the rule. They are small havens of safety, not living civilizations. And since the gameplay of exploring often artificial passages or structures implies the prior existence of civilizations to build them, a civilization which is not here now to guide or protect you through the gameplay dangers, there is often a sense of civilizational isolation as well. Whoever built these structures is not here anymore, and it is often unclear- and thus unsettling- what convinced or compelled them to leave.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bugs. Bugs are amongst the smallest creatures we recognize as creatures, and many of them live solitary, isolated lives that are dangerous, small, and short. And while there are species that are hives of activities, these swarms of drones are just that- drones- such that the idea of thinking individuality would still be alone even when surrounded by an un-like things. These fragile and lonely lives are surrounded by dangerous and often dead past examples of bug life- the insect hives rooted out by predators, taken by blight, or overwhelmed by forces of nature and acts of gods, be they the flood-sending sort or higher beings like humanity that variously ignore bugs or exterminate them on grounds of inconvenience.
Finally, a classic metroidvania theme is the theme of mystery. Like many of the genre’s mechanical tropes, this theme’s prevalence derives from that idea of exploration. When you are building a game around exploration, you have a natural format for springling in secrets or surprises in those uncountable end-ways. If the story is to have a plot, it has a natural set of obstacles and known ways to overcome these obstacles that allow information to be doled out selectively and at a pace of your choosing, each no earlier than the unlock requirement that enables it to be found. Even though metroidvanias are by their nature exploration games, and exploration games allow the freedom of choice to try and make their own path, a metroidvania format lends itself to leveraging secrets, such as what causes the hostile isolation of the prior theme.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bug protagonists. As the ultimate underdog, and as protagonists not associated with free will or independent thinking, bugs are a natural starting point for an unaware protagonist. Bugs, with their literally small perspective, cannot see the bigger picture. They cannot at all times perceive the nest or nature of the place they are in. And even the format of the genre invites questions- why is this bug, specifically, a protagonist? Why does it think or act with will, when the tropes of bugs at large are to, well, not do such things?
So on reflection, a metroidvania about bugs makes a certain sort of sense, even if you know nothing about bugs and only a structural familiarity with the metroidvania genre.
It is not necessarily an obvious insight, and so it remains an example of creativity and imagination you might not think of unprompted, but there is an alignment of themes. The tropes of a metroidvania, and the associated aspects of bugs that transcends specific cultures, provides a… if not universal basis for embracing the game, at least an intuitive way to appreciate and relate the experience with other games and concepts the audience has a level of familiarity with.
But Hollow Knight works on a story level too.
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Part 2: What is Hollow Knight, as a Story?
(Biggo spoilers here. For reals, last warning.)
Hollow Knight is a minimalist dark fantasy about how the conflict of higher beings worshipped like gods is ravaging the hive that is the central civilization. Naturally, being a game about bugs helps here as well, making it into an example of the low fantasy genre as well.
To start with the end and work backwards, and using some very broad- and thus disputable- definitions that I will source from Wikipedia for simplicity…
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Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy,
Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy fiction in which magical events intrude on an otherwise normal world. The term thus contrasts with high fantasy stories, which take place in fictional worlds that have their own sets of rules and physical laws. Intrusion fantasy places less emphasis on elements typically associated with fantasy and sets a narrative in realistic environments with elements of the fantastical. Sometimes, there are just enough fantastical elements to make ambiguous the boundary between what is real and what is purely psychological or supernatural. The word "low" refers to the familiarity of the world within which fantasy elements appear and is not a remark on the work's overall quality.
Hollow Knight is an low fantasy akin to Watership Down, the story about rabbits trying to find a new warren that is a well-known for its rabbits-eye view of the human world as it is for a surprisingly disturbing animated film that possibly traumatized children unprepared for how dangerous the world can be for a rabbit. Which, conveniently, is how a lot of the themes and mythical structure of Hollow Knight works- a world of fragile, very mortal bugs who die to stronger, more dangerous things.
Which is where the low / intrusion fantasy works its way into the setting. There is a mundane world of bugs and nature, where bugs are dumb and act off of feral instinct. Then there is the world of bug civilization, where there is a kingdom that knows itself to be the kingdom of Hallownest, the self-proclaimed last and only civilization. While it is not in fact the only civilization of thinking bugs, hence the epithet of ‘last’ which implies a ‘first,’ the sapience of bugs is itself the magical intrusion into the world. It is as much an intrusion into the ‘normal’ as the other forms of magic, magic of the soul or dream of void, which exists in the setting.
That is because Hollow Knight is actually a story (stories, with Silksong) about species uplift. Its societies are societies that were brought up from bestial instinct by external intervention, in service of the desires of higher powers beyond their comprehension. The world of talking bugs who build societies, streetlights, songs and art- these are not the natural state of the world. These are the uplifting gifts of powers who relationship with their subjects, and each other, drive the plot.
But more on that later. Hollow Knight is not just a low fantasy, but also a dark fantasy.
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Dark fantasy, also called fantasy horror, is a subgenre of literary, artistic, and cinematic fantasy works that incorporate disturbing and frightening themes. The term is ambiguously used to describe stories that combine horror elements with one or other of the standard formulas of fantasy.
Dark fantasy is a notoriously difficult definition to agree upon, and it’s not automatically obvious that Hollow Knight would qualify.
While Hollow Knight’s art style often leads towards the gothic, or at least stylistic, at least for the architecture, it’s character designs lean far more towards the cute and adorable, with soft, smooth curves and uncomplicated faces (that are literally masks). While there are bosses designed to be more intimidating, [this is also that same boss in its vulnerable state](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/hollowknight/images/e/eb/Screenshot_HK_False_Knight_04.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20200103200805]. Hollow Knight is a series that treats even its enemies as cute character fodder, compared to the far more horror-movie monster vibes of the Dark Souls series. When one thinks of an eldritch abomination that haunts dreams, you typically think more Cthulu and less this. Hollow Knight doesn’t even try to lean into arachnophobia per see to unsettle you- this is their spider tribe.
But make no mistake- Hollow Knight is a dark fantasy, and it deals with themes that are just as disempowering and unsettling to humans as they would be to humanized bugs. To list just three: the matter of sentience, caverns of skulls, and the question of a justifiably wrathful god.
A Matter of Sentience
As was raised in the low fantasy section, hollow knight does not have a sapience-normative setting. This is actually a plot twist of sorts, as the player’s first introduction in Hollow Knight’s opening presents society and civilized bugs as normal, and the violent / feral bugs as the aberration. There is (deliberate) incongruity at this that can be passed off as cultural chauvinism at first- an early monument claiming Hallownest as the last and only civilization- but the hostile bugs are presented as sickly and succumbing to an infection that drives bugs mad. Even as we’re told bug civilization is rare, the presentation of the early game is that these bugs would be civilized as well, if they weren’t the victims of a mysterious orange infection. The framing is that these bugs have been lowered to a more bestial state. As you go across the story, you meet talking bugs, thinking bugs, very human-like bugs with amusing and understandable motivations. They are so human, and empathy is encouraged as you can identify with them.
This is a misdirection. Not just civilization, but sapience itself, is artificial. While there are bugs that are naturally capable of thought, others are not, and the degree of thought we witness is the reflection of a deific intervention by a higher power. A more magical bug called a worm, whose size was so monstrous that it is scenery setting in its own right, reincarnated itself into a being known as the Pale King, whose influence alone drew bugs to him like, well, moths to a flame as he brought the aspects of civilization like treaties and kingdoms and education.
But this uplifting was limited in space, for if a bug strayed away from Hallownest, their sapience diminished. To be sapient was a gift dependent on staying in the Pale King’s influence… and his desire was to be influential in many ways, as much political as spiritual. The Pale King’s ambition was to rule and be venerated by the bugs. The Pale King may have been a welcome uplifter, but it was as much an imposition on the natural order as the political order, not the natural state of things… even though that is how the Pale King wished it to be remembered.
But then this, too, is revealed to have been another sort of misdirection. Before there was the Pale King, there was another higher being who dominated a part of what would become Hallownest. This higher being, known as The Radiance, was worshipped by a tribe of moths, and in her era those under her influence were part of a hive mind, linked to her via dreams. But even the radiance was not the first. Just as the Pale King’s civilization and individuality followed the Radiance’s tribe and hive mind, the Radiance followed an even older, unknown ancient civilization. She was as likely to have pushed them out as she was herself pushed out… and as she is pushing out the current paradigm?
And that infection mentioned earlier? The one that robs bugs of their sapience and reverts them to bestial aggression? That is the Radiance re-emerging and re-asserting herself through the dreams of bugs, even as she remains partly trapped and certainly mad. Sapience is being subverted to a hive mind by outside will, as much as sapience was imposed in the first place.
Hollow Knight’s setting, in other words, isn’t just a setting where Kingdoms build upon the bones of prior civilizations. It is a setting where individuality, as we, the audience, know it, is a coincidental nature of how a metaphysical struggle for dominance plays out. The capacity for individuality and choice was a result of a proud king’s desire to be chosen over all others.
Your capacity for thought, in other words, is not special. But it isn’t even normal either.
Cue existential dread.
Caverns of Skulls
A second theme of the Hollow Knight games is whether the ends justify the means.
Again, this will focus on Hollow Knight rather than Silksong, though both have this theme. Both games present the ruins of civilizations that indisputably had culture and sophistication, organization and purpose. But both games grow increasingly blunt and brutal about how the societies they present, as sophisticated and civilized as they might seem, are figuratively and literally built on the foundations of those who were sacrificed to advance the social vision of the civilizational leaders. Bug Civilization is Not Nice.
In Hollow Knight, the original game, this discovery is part of what undercuts the established buildup of the Pale King as the father of civilization, sapience, and all that seems good in the bugs of hallow nest. In a setting where those who refused to join are presented as tribal, bestial, and violent- absolutely the sort of people to place skulls on spikes to mark territory- Hallownest is a place of treaties and laws and commerce. When the infection- the mysterious illness that players are initially introduced to as a mysterious force robbing bugs of their natural sapience- began to emerge, the Pale King nobly worked with sages and scholars to find a way to contain it, for the good of the Kingdom (and its people).
In truth, the Pale King’s plan- and the rise of the Pale King in the first place- were built on the sacrifice of others, including his own children. To quote his only line in the game, from a flashback-
No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.
That’s him referring to the child he needs to enact his master plan that already failed before the game started. As for the children who did have a mind to think, will to break, or voice to cry suffering…
Remember that description about how Metroidvania levels can be any sort of biome or structure?
Yeah, each one of those broken masks represents a discarded child thrown to be forgotten in an abyss. There is an entire level where you are traversing over the corpses of your discarded siblings.
So yeah, the Pale King of Hallownest- who if you haven’t gathered by now has more than a few thematic parallels with the Warhammer 40k Emperor of Mankind- devised a plan that required breeding the perfect tool to basically serve as a sacrifice. He abandoned untold numbers of his children in the process of finding the one he could sacrifice, the titular Hollow Knight. But at least he built a memorial (that was cut/bugged content). A whole lot of bug blood, ultimately futilely spilled.
But it was to save free will and sapience, so its arguably for the greater good for the sort of moral ambiguity / necessary villainy that fans love to debate endlessly. Like Skyrim Stomcloaks versus Imperials, except with a threat to all sapience and civilization.
Except, again… the Pale King kind of buried the previous civilization through an act of godly unwilling sacrifice. To spoil / simply some stuff already raised, the infection that robs sapience is the re-emergence of the hive mind of the previous higher being, who lived through the dreams of a tribe of moths. Except this ‘living through’ is both literal and metaphysical- the higher being exists in the dream world and depended on the dreams / reverence of the tribe it was patron to.
So when the Pale King incarnated to become the Pale King, and proactively expanded Hallownest as far as he could, he converted that tribe as well. Who, in falling under the Pale King’s influence and individuality, forgot / abandoned their patron goddess, leaving her trapped and starving in the dream realm. Except- being a godly higher being herself- she was ultimately able to break through into the dreams of bugs, which is the source of the infection overtaking Hallownest.
Or, to put in other words- to build his Kingdom as the exclusive civilization of the region, the god-bug that was the Pale King sealed away a prior god-bug and doom it to death by starvation. Deific sacrifice, if you will.
And to reseal his prior victim, he bred and discarded a cavern of skulls of his own children.
And it didn’t even work.
The plot of Hollow Knight occurs because the Pale King’s plan failed. The Hollow Knight remains sealed, but the infection re-emerged. The Pale King ultimately fled, even as the infection tore down the intellectual (and sapient) scaffoldings of Hallownest.
Was sapience worth deific sacrifice? Was clinging onto that civilization worth countless child sacrifices? Would they have been worth it had the grand scheme not failed?
Is the subject of our existential dread, raised above, worth any cost of victimizing other, lesser, beings?
Cue ethical horror.
Justifiably Wrathful Gods
Hollow Knight has an interesting take on gods, or at least the higher beings that understandably worshipped as gods.
In the setting of Hollow Knight, all bugs are not created equal. It is not a particularly egalitarian setting. This is understandable as the variances amongst bugs far exceeds human divergence. Some bugs are small and fragile, others strong and massive. Some can think, some cannot even be uplifted. Some bugs are innately capable of feats of magic, magic of dreams or soul or silk, and others have no such gifts.
And then there are the higher beings, who are things apart. Capable of feats of magic no spell-casting bug could match. Capable of creating great and terrible things. But worst of all, capable of dominating the minds and will of the human-identifiable bugs around them. Even as they are beings that- in physical terms- a human foot could smash, they are also so far above the bugs around them that it understandable why they would be worshiped- and want to be worshipped- as gods.
Hollow Knight does not have a particularly positive view of such gods.
The best that is said of the Radiance, the old god of hollow knight, is that she was not malicious or expansionist in her era of bug tribes and a moth hive-mind. In the present, she is the source of a maddening and vengeful blight. The Pale King built a civilization, but the arrogance and self-gratification is shallower than the cavern of skulls, and that was before he fled and abandoned his followers to die. In Silksong, the kingdom of Pharloom is built around a religion both capable of great beauty and even greater cruelty, centered on the Grand Mother Silk who’s own daughters in spirit and silk betrayed her to seal her away in sleep and worse.
At no point in the series are you, the player, actively encouraged to side or align with the higher beings. There is no faction system, no secret ending, no alignment. Your ends may align, but only accidentally and never to a point of reconciliation. Higher Beings are beings that are- if not inherently harmful- naturally inclined to dominate others. They distort the world around them by their very nature, and those distortions- both by acts of will and by their absence- lead to great harm.
But the higher beings of Hollow Knight are not malevolent. They have understandable- if not acceptable- reasons for what they do.
Radiance acts for her survival. Her infection is both her reemergence and her revenge for having been sealed away without provocation. The Pale King acts for his kingdom. Having built a realm and civilization, he sacrificed his own family more than any of his subjects to try and end a collective threat. The Grand Mother Silk was betrayed by her daughters and sealed in her own silk by an entire religion. Her actions are to gain her own freedom, and understandable as her effort to reassert her agency and control after her trust was betrayed.
These higher beings, in other words, are very much ‘gods’ to the bugs beneath them, but if not relatable, at least empathizable to the human player audience. While human players are encouraged to identify with the lower bugs who most resemble the player characters and who most converse with us with human-like personalities, the reasons for the higher beings to affect the lower is understandably human as well. Even if their actions are morally wrong, they are understandable, in much the same way the harm they do the bugs is analogous to the harm the human players might do to bugs. Sometimes you stomp a bug out of malice, sometimes out of convenience, and sometimes merely as a consequence.
But this is where the incongruity sets in. Just as human players can associate themselves with the higher beings, we can associate with the lower beings as well, the sentient bugs with oh-so-human peculiarities and interests. And by analogy, just as the god-bugs are so far higher to the normal bugs we can understand why they’d dismiss or react angrily to those that wronged them… well, what about a higher-than-human being who is as high above us? What does it imply about us, if we are acting wrongly towards it? Would our loss be as dismissible as a cavern of skulls because we were so much lesser, or if it was for some grander cause? Or- worse- are we the targets of revenge for a wrong towards that higher being that we do not remember or understand?
Humans, as a species, do not appear in Hollow Knight. There are no direct narrative parallels between god-bugs and humans, or allusions to any sort of the Abrahamic God of an all-creator or morality-defining power.
But as a thematic parallel- something that can appeal to intuitive understandings without have to be explicit- Hollow Knight is tapping at something, crawling around in the back of the minds of people who would rarely want to confront what it means to make a higher power justifiably mad.
Cue theological unease.
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Part 3: Tying Themes Together With Minimalism and Music
This is the part of this review that makes me feel a little bad, because you can’t write a review like this without ruining the experience of a first-time discovery. Sorry about that, but you were warned.
Hollow Knight follows in the footsteps of the post-Dark Souls souls-like genre of having minimal direct storytelling, significant use of significant environmental storytelling, and using small amounts of flavor text or lore drops to flesh out a world through discovery. These aren’t directly related to the themes of bugs, but they do contribute to a broader community of fan engagement as fans compare notes and impressions to try and understand the setting.
For those less familiar, the Soulsborne genre pioneered by Japanese developer FromSoft was very influential in the industry in the 2010s, growing from the niche / cult classics of Demon Souls and Dark Souls to the AAA juggernauts of Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Aside from their notorious difficulty curve, proving there was an audience for higher game difficulty despite an industry trend towards lower difficulties in the name of accessibility, what FromSoft games also influenced was how the games delivered their narrative. For all that the original Dark Souls was once characterized to me as ‘The Legend of Zelda, except darker and hard-core,’ there were no companion character to explain what to do, no setting-establishing cinematics to establish elaborate geopolitical contexts, and no exposition dump characters to hand you the plot or plot twists as you progressed through the story. You could go through the entire game and quite reasonably not understand who you were killing, why you were doing it, or even if it was the right thing to do.
Instead, the Soulsborne series leaned far more into cryptic opening narrators, and more cryptic NPCs that had a few lines that established some aspect of characterization but not much else. Instead, the primary mechanisms of storytelling were environmental storytelling and flavor texts from discoverable items.
Item flavor text is often the most explicit narrator in these sorts of games, because the minimalist format makes them the most trustworthy of sources. In games where characters like Trustworthy Patches (he’s not) trick the player, or the meddling of gods are used to trick the populace (and the audience) as to their intentions, a lack of clear truth-teller often complicates the relative lack of information. Instead, items themselves become a narrative device, providing a bit of a lore. A trophy from a boss is a bit of insight into the boss, a mundane weapon may reveal some background lore of a nation that used it. Collectively, by tying together flavor texts that reference the same characters or places or key words used to related to shared concepts, these individual isolated pieces of information start to combine for a broader understanding. Due to how few words there are, you can often link even seemingly unrelated items if you can recognize the connecting key concepts whose words would otherwise not be used. This could be obvious, such as the name of a character or Kingdom, but it can often be more indirect, such as Hollow Knight rarely using the term ‘Pale’- especially when capitalized- except when referring to the Pale King. These [clusters] of key word usage are what organize and link lore tidbits.
In the FromSoft tradition, these flavor texts are basically always trustworthy, coming from an omniscient third-party narrator. While there is a good deal of Exact Words nuance, and what is there can feed a lot of theories, the nature of the medium is that most fan discussion falls apart if you don’t accept these out-of-setting descriptions as accurate. These are often the only sources of information, the primary sources if you will, and if you can’t accept them as a starting point, you can’t discuss much at all.
Hollow Knight… does not actually follow this approach, because Hollow Knight doesn’t have much of an inventory system. There are (extremely minor) item descriptions, but what Hollow Knight leans more towards in-universe lore stones, tablets or monuments carved into areas of the map to be read in-universe. For example, a public monument to the Hollow Knight in an abandoned city called the city of tears, where the monument in a dead kingdom praises the knight’s sacrifice for saving the eternal kingdom. In Silksong, there is a (now infamous) automated confession booth in a church which tells the petitioners that they must work for redemption. Such sources are filled with the explicit and implicit biases of the narrators, whether as obvious propaganda or raising personal opinions.
What these functions have in common, however, is how they tie the discovery of new lore to exploration and allow for the combination of small bits over time. In Hollow Knight, you can find monuments to the Pale King and his civilization heralding its glory, while on the untamed outskirts you can find the testaments of doubters and outsiders who either grudgingly accepted Hallownest’s domination, or refused entirely. Whether lore you find by looting an enemy, or lore you can only reach by pushing through enemies, both of these still require exploring and overcoming adversity just to get the preconditions of lore discussion.
Environmental story telling contributes something similar, but with even more space for (and burden of) interpretation.
In environmental storytelling, the positioning of key parts of the level architecture and characters / enemies in the game is used to provide non-verbalized narratives. This is something the Fallout series has long specialized in, using apocalypse logs and the arrangement of skeletons and items to convey the final moments of the apocalypse. Think of the skeletons of an adult and a child, with the adult having a 6-shot revolver with 4 bullets left. Or Elden Ring hiding a plot twist that the eponymous elden ring of Queen Marika the Eternal was not the first elden ring by hiding a mural behind an extremely late-game boss fight. No character or narrator actually verbalizes the actions or implications but leaves it to the player to find and recognize.
Hollow Knight doesn’t go into quite the extreme of Bethesda-style environmental storytelling, as it doesn’t have the sort of 3-dimensional set dressing or inventory medium to do so. This is part of why it uses the monument tablet style that it does, which is both lore-node and environmental story telling combined. The monument to the noble sacrifice of a knight whose sacrifice did not save the Kingdom has real Ozymandias, King of King, a lone monument in a place remembered as the city of tears, tells more than what the words say. A church who automates its castigations and demands for the faithful to toil says more about the callous exploitation of the leadership than just a dogma of virtuous redemption.
There is (far) more than these alone, of course. The stark disparities of the bug-filled wilderness and civilized areas tell their own narrative nuances. In Hollow Knight, the deep nest is a wild, untamed, and never truly settled regio that Hallownest at its peak never dominated. Compared to the wide-open hallways, large structures, and paved tunnels of the capital, the deep nest is tight, claustrophobic, and dark. Spiders cross skitter across the foreground and background, things never clearly seen or encountered. Ambush predators take the form of elsewhere harmless grubs that you seek to rescue, and massive centipedes crawl through the level as terrain obstacles in and of themselves. They are impervious to any weapon, show no reason, and both the literal and figurative enlightenment of the Pale King never reached here. Nor did civilization dominate the Mantis tribe, who fight out of pride and nature, but who go from dangerous obstacles to unthreatening observers once you earn their respect, even gesturing in respect as you pass but still accepting a challenge.
This is where Hollow Knights environmental storytelling shines (or darkens). What it lacks in that level of specificity of Bethesda body placement, or even FromSoft item descriptions, it more than makes up for in vibes.
And this is where we transition from not just narrative delivery, but sound design. Which I wish I had a better vocabulary to explain, but here we go.
Hollow Knight has a very good sense of song. Not just music, but song and poem in their written form, which is used in deliberate ways to build mystery, unease, and melancholy.
Take the opening of Hollow Knight, which delivers a poem. This is a first impression of the setting, meant to frame the player’s mindset as they start their path of discovery.
In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret, For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met, Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed, A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed.
With what I’ve told you already, you can see in it the allusions to the Pale King and his uplifting. It is the start of a poem that heralds and praises the Pale King (reverence), even as it sets the sets the somber undertone (and regret). It mythologizes and raises the Pale King above the lesser bugs, whose base instincts are ‘redeemed’- and thus somehow lesser- prior to the change and being tamed.
But the real hook- a foreshadowing of a conflict I already explained but a player wouldn’t begin to learn about for hours yet- is in the last line. ‘A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed,’ at first read, is a generous and magnanimous act. Upon (much) later learning of the nature of The Radiance, as a being who lived through dreams, and it takes a more sinister turn even if the speaker would not see it as such. Rather than ‘I will give you better than you could have dreamed of,’ as in surpassing dreams, the Pale Kings world replaces dreams. This is more explicit in the full version of the poem that can be found in the game files, but was never used in-game, whose later linens more directly allude to the conflict with between the Pale King and Radiance. (And, by being too obvious, give a bit too much of the plot away.)
This is the sort of deliberate two-impression approach, the initial first impression and then a new understanding after later revelations give new context, which characterizes a fair bit of Hollow Knight’s music. Hollow Knight is one of those series that supports an entire micro-genre of YouTube first reactions where composers do an (alleged) first-experience of music in isolation to try and identify the key themes, musical momentum, and tropes of the medium of music to try and identify artistic intent. And while I have a somewhat skeptical opinion of this micro-genre in general- it is hard to verify and easy for creators to fake- it is credible enough when it comes to Hollow Knight.
That is because the Team Chery composers were very deliberate with how they designed their music, just as they were deliberate with their written poetry or songs. Some of the deliberate uses of leitmotifs to build connections- including the background music linking the prior elegy to the Pale King even though he’s not identified by name- for non-explicit narrative links. The atmosphere of various ruins, such as the city of tears, is not just visual in terms of lighting or water effects but deliberately introduced by shifts in the musical instrumentation and transitions.. And then there are the [the different themes and compositional narratives revealed by the choice of boss fight chords and balance of instruments]( (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOVEmfXEEAUB0YPkuVn1PGy0Mhdzwsrfa) noted in the musician-review genre.
But- and to tie it back together with some earlier points of interlocking themes- the music in Hollow Knight is not ‘just’ good music in isolation. It’s not like the use of classical music in space epics to give a sense of scale or majesty, but which has no real role or recognition in-universe. The role and rise of music in-setting has strong tie-ins to the themes of cultural sophistication and what elevates bugs from beasts. Art and culture are cultivated, not inherent, and the sort of music for ‘civilized’ foes often differs in vibes from the music for fighting madmen or beasts. This is background framing for most of Hollow Knight and the civilization of Hallownest but becomes even more explicit and even a major plot point of Silksong, which is a Kingdom built on song as much as with literal silk.
Music in the Hollow Knight setting, in other words, doesn’t just sound good. It is a deliberate, and exceptional, method of storytelling.
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Conclusion: Hollow Knight Is Good Because Its Elements Intuitively Reinforce
This will be a more rapid summary, because by god this is already long enough and I’m tired. In short, the various elements that have been discussed so far work as well as they do because they have non-obvious reinforcing synergies that make sense but won’t necessarily be obvious to most players.
In terms of pure gameplay, Hollow Knight’s use of bugs as the character medium works well with the tropes of the metroidvania genre. From the presentation tying to the familiar concept of ant farm, to small bugs having their own thematic parallels to the themes of exploration, isolation, and mystery, bugs are a suitably fragile protagonist for a suitably challenging game that skirts human-centric expectations.
As a low fantasy, bugs work well for much of the same reason as the rabbits of Watership Down, being small, fragile, and subject to powers beyond their understanding. The medium of bugs allows the link of a familiar and mundane world, that of bestial uncivilized bugs, and the magical hidden world, of magical bugs and god-bugs, which provide a contrast at smaller scale but not smaller stakes than a human-protagonist fantasy.
As a dark fantasy, the god-bugs as higher beings who both transcend the bugs humans are meant to identify with, but who have human motivations the players can understand as a fellow higher-sort of being, opens up non-explicit but troubling themes. By challenging the nature and value of sentience as a natural and even desirable thing, challenging utilitarian ethics by raising the great sacrifices of doomed efforts, and providing understandable if not righteous basis for higher beings (who humans can empathize with the desires of) to inflict suffering on lower beings (who humans are encouraged to identify with), the dark fantasy challenges a certain sort of human-centric assumptions. The darkness of the dark fantasy is in the existential dread, ethical horror, and the theological unease in a way few games do.
As a minimalist story telling narrative, Hollow Night uses exploration-based lore discoveries and non-explicit environmental and musical story telling to provide context it doesn’t do explicitly. While exploration-discovery and environmental story telling tie into the nature of the metroidvania, the environmental storytelling and deliberate use of music provides an indistinct style of delivery that encourages players to commune together and compare notes.
What makes Hollow Knight exceptional is not that it has any one of these elements, but that it deliberately uses all of these elements to lead into and support each other.
The character format of bugs leads into the gameplay of a metroidvania and the fragility of an animal-centric low fantasy. The low fantasy use of bug-gods leads into the themes of the dark fantasy. The elements of the dark fantasy are delivered by the exploration-linked minimalist lore drops and environmental story telling. The environmental story telling is supported, and in some cases linked, by the deliberate use of musical design and themes. The theme of music itself aligns with the theme of the civilized bugs who cultivate such culture, leading back to the low and dark fantasy elements.
It is good. It is deliberate. It’s attractively packaged together, and best of all to a casual consumer, it’s cheap, outperforming industry standards for a fraction of a typical sales price.
And I truly apologize if I have robbed anyone of the magic of experiencing it for the first time without preconditions, in case any of this review gave you a desire to try it for yourself.
That is all, and thanks for listening to my bug talk.
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Notes -
God I hate i-frames. Stupid, 'gamey' mechanic that should be replaced with actually reactive animations. If you dodge a hit, you dodge it by not letting it hit you.
The distaste extends to wonky hitboxes, I've seen some of the abominations in Dark Souls, where the hitbox of the weapon/projectile only has the vaguest resemblance to the model. It's 2025, we should be over this.
Since I'm complaining already, I hate games that replace visible damage to enemies with health bars. Stop being lazy, display damage that isn't more than a coat of red paint till the enemy suddenly goes from 100% combat capable to keeling over.
I-frames can be ok in moderation, but yeah, they tend to look very "gamey". I think Cuphead (when equipping a particular ability) did it pretty well by making you disappear and teleport in a puff of smoke.
In fairness, that's REALLY hard to do. I don't play a lot of AAA games, but Helldivers 2 actually seems to do this really well, with enemies showing damage or even getting limbs blown off but still (less effectively) coming at you.
It's 2025, I really expect devs to put more effort into it. After all, it has immediate gameplay/immersion effects, the recent Dooms can dispense with healthbars because you can visibly see demons losing chunks until they're glowing for a glory kill.
Smaller studios, like in the case of Hell Let Loose or Insurgency Sandstorm do it. It's really not an issue for AAA studios. You don't even need 18+ gibbing, even some kind of wounding or crippling effect works.
Hell, this leans into another pet peeve:
Healthbars. Accursed things, though I can excuse their use for players. They're often abused for artificial difficulty/laziness in bulletsponge enemies, and they encourage number-shooters or RPGs where the focus is on seeing number go up over anything interesting. I refuse to play Borderlands or Destiny because I don't want to see numbers flying off my guns or the enemies, I want to see the bullets, or the damage they cause.
You hate iframes because they offend your simulationist sensibilities, I hate iframes because they reduce combat to timing the iframes. We are not the same.
In general, you seem to have trouble understanding that people don't design or play games only for simulationist reasons. Yes, wounding has immedatiate gameplay effects, which can go against the intended experience and/or make the game worse.
Using the incredibly stupid phrase "artificial difficulty" is also a sign of some confusion.
Edit: an example of wounding making the game worse, from those new Dooms. In the original Doom, arachnatrons and revenants are both fairly tanky enemies with unique firing patterns. The arachnotron's steady stream of plasma prevents doubling back while facing them, but is otherwise easy to avoid. The revenant's homing rockets can be easily outrun but require active attention to get rid of by juking them into an obstacle. Both can be easily used to set up infighting. In Eternal, both of these enemies have ranged attacks that are too dangerous to let them fire, but you can easily shoot off their gun attachments. So in practice for both you just shoot off the guns the moment they appear at which point they kinda shuffle around doing nothing.
I understand this perfectly fine. I just dislike the practice, which is quite clear from my writing. There are people who like having their balls stepped on, and I understand why, while strongly preferring that CBT doesn't become the default form of sex.
Fuck no. It is a perfectly valid concept. Games that have difficulty settings that only amount to differences in HP scaling or damage dealt/received are lazy, making the player do something as brainless as wailing on a foe for twice the time with no moment to moment change in gameplay is as artificially stupid as it gets.
Difficulty that manifests as changed movesets, better AI or the player having to manage resources better is fine.
I've never seen anyone but you complain about this, and I've played all 3 of the recent Doom games without caring. In fact, I prefer it, if the enemy is defanged, in a non-trivial manner, then I'm happy to wait to dispatch them after I've dealt with everything else trying to punch me in the face.
This and the following paragraph imply you think it is a lack of effort, not them choosing not to cater to your specific preferences.
The "HP/damage scaling is bad and wrong" is another, separate stupid complaint from calling difficulty artificial. sun_the_second already pointed out some of the reasons why this is stupid - those values are what fundamentally determine whether the enemy gets to do anything before dying, and whether you have to care about what they do. This is also often having to manage resources better.
But calling difficulty "artificial" in particular is a deep confusion of what a single player game is. There is no divinely ordained natural difficulty from which any deviations are artificial. It's all artifice and there's no standard by which to differentiate them. Developer intentions are still only someone's specific choice, and for big budget games normal is going to optimized for focus testing appeal, not designer intent anyway.
If you don't see the problem with taking two significantly different enemies, each with a rich set of interactions with other enemies and the level geometry, and replacing them with two functionally identical enemies (ok, you have to shoot the revenant's guns twice), which, if you're playing well, never do anything, then I can't really explain further. I just hope game devs continue to disappoint you by making games for other people.
I fail to see how you fail to see that it can be both. Hitting a multiplier on damage/health is trivial, and since many/most players don't care, the devs have no qualms about taking the easy way out.
If any enemy can't "do anything before dying", then perhaps the default difficulty should have a damage model such that enemies aren't trivially one-tapped, unless they are intentionally designed that way.
In games like Fallout or Skyrim (and many non-Bethesda titles), difficulty modifiers often turn enemies into bullet sponges, which is even worse than them being fragile. A single mook, not even a boss, can take a full mag or a dozen blows on the head without flinching, or at least showing any form of care beyond a depleting healthbar.
Your arguments about all "difficulty" being artificial don't move me. It's a boring argument about semantics, in precisely the same way as the perennial debate about what "natural" and "artifical" mean in other contexts. Are humans "natural", since we evolved in nature? Uh, sure. Is a TSMC fab in the same category as a mountain range? Hopefully not.
Remind me how exactly we've neutralized this enemy? By applying skillful aim at well-represented weakpoints? Why, yes, being good at a game makes it easier. Who could have guessed!
It's funny how you focus on the Revenant, which is a lower-midtier foe. The Arachnotron's guns are far harder to disable, especially since they rarely spawn alone and you have to juggle a dozen other enemies in the process.
I find it rather funny that you choose to fixate on your own idiosyncratic complaint about an exceedingly popular and well received game, and then accuse me of missing the plot.
I feel like a transhumanist should really have no problem differentiating between things made through the intentional work of an intelligence and things that arose otherwise. Of which all game settings and rules are the former, so this isn't really a useful word when talking about within category differences. What do you think is the game design equivalent of the mountain range in your analogy?
I have no interest in entering a debate on the "actual" meaning of natural and artificial in the context of video game difficulty. It's a stupid question in the first place. Even your definition of "intentionally work of an intelligence" is... inadequate, is the dump I just took an object of artifice because I, an intelligent entity (citation available on request), made it intentionally?
That does not mean that the term artificial difficulty is undefined or even poorly defined.
According to TV Tropes:
There you go. That is all I'm concerned about. I have laid out my gripes with it in detail.
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