You’ve in a basement with the lights off, and only a lighter to flicker off the walls. In other areas of Hollow Knight, you can see the area around you, but here? Not a chance. A lot of Hollow Knight works like this: encounter unfamiliar thing, figure it out, move on.īut then, while exploring an otherwise innocuous area, I fell into a deep hole, with no way to escape. Each area has new dangers, aesthetics, and enemies, but it remains comforting to follow a procedure that’s reliably worked out in the past.
You start out without a map, resulting in a lot of blind walking from one room to the next, making notes in your head, and hoping the next section will bring the familiar hum of the game’s mapmaker, who you can pay a few dollars to chart the locale. Hollow Knight knows this, and the moment you’re feeling safe, it kicks you in the teeth.Įarly on, there’s a familiar cycle to finding a new area in Hollow Knight.