Hollow Knight & Environmental Storytelling

Hollow Knight is a game that is very special to me, a mix of the best things of Dark Souls and the challenging platforming found in classic Metroidvania games. There's not much I can talk about before gushing about the art style, so let's get this out of the way first.

This.

Game.

Is.

Beautiful.


Hollow Knight is a 2D action-platformer by TeamCherry Games, an indie studio with one published game under their belt: this one. Hollow Knight boasts an expansive, layered world for you to explore, each background element hand-drawn and each action, effect and environmental piece hand-animated. The colours are bold, sound design is top-notch, and the area designs are a mix of dark-gothic architecture and stunning sprawls of hostile caverns.

The game takes place almost entirely in the grand, underground city of Hallownest, where an ancient being called the Pale King has given sentience to his insectoid subjects so they can worship him as a god. The Kingdom of Hallownest is sprawling, dense with gorgeous detail, (and by the time the player stumbles across it) crumbling to ruin because of an infection that causes all the buggy residents to lose their sentience and revert to their primal selves.

Story-wise, Hollow Knight is elusive and mysterious, focusing on environmental storytelling and emotional character-pieces that hit every creative beat they possibly could. NPC's have their own personal questlines that take them and the player into the darkest regions of Hallownest in search of self-discovery, glory, and adventure.

The music in Hollow Knight is an art in and of itself, composed by Christopher Larkin over the course of the game's development. It would take ages to go over the intricacies and leitmotifs in the songs that Larkin uses to evoke emotion in every track, not to mention how tightly every aspect of this game (music, narrative and atmosphere in this case) fits together, so I'm going to give one contained example that covers everything in one go.

I'm going to talk a bit about the City of Tears area, found about mid-game.

The City of Tears is a sprawling insect metropolis carved out underneath a vast underground lake, causing a near-constant rain to fall over the city. Is it generally considered bad planning to build your main population center under a giant body of water? Probably, but unrealistic architecture aside, the rain pattering on the cobble streets and off the large windows, combined with the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack makes for a wonderfully melancholy feeling while exploring.

Whilst cavorting around the crumbing, soggy ruins and dispatching the feral husks of the city's former inhabitants, the player might come across a sealed door to an area called the Pleasure House. Inside is a long elevator ride up to a hot spring, as well as the ghostly remains of a butterfly, singing a very familiar tune.

Her name is Marissa, and her lonely lament which you can play audience to is almost exactly the same as the background choir playing when running around the city proper- eerily similar, in fact. Talking with Marissa gives you the understanding that the butterfly was a singer when the city was whole, and had found success in her calling. Now though, after the scourge of the infection, Marissa can only lament the loss of everyone she ever knew, though she doesn't appear to realize she has met the same fate as the rest of the city. Instead, Marissa asks you to be her audience while she stands vigil over the city, offering a safe place of respite for those still sane enough to seek it. 

It may not sound like much, but after realizing that the choir in the background of the City of Tears' music is Marissa's song, it re-contextualized the entire area for me. After I left the haven, the city felt entirely different now that I knew Marissa was singing in the background. I started to avoid husks instead of attacking them, simply because they might have been people Marissa knew, people with dreams and families of their own. The game instilled a genuine emotional connection between me and what are essentially cartoon bugs on a laptop screen. And I love it for that. 

There's a lot about this game that makes me grin every time I boot it up. The clean animation, the incredible soundtrack, the tight controls and rewarding gameplay, the surprisingly smart dialogue, the challenging boss fights, the feeling of filling in your map as you slowly weave your way through the crumbling kingdom... there's not a more fitting word to describe Hollow Knight than polished, as every aspect of its design feeds into itself to create an engaging, thought-provoking experience from start to finish.

One more thought to leave you on before you go: I clocked in a final playtime on a 100% playthrough at about 50 total hours. That's pretty long for a story-based indie game. Hollow Knight is packed with secrets and characters and storylines that you can skip entirely if you want to streamline your experience, but if you take your time, complete small side-objectives and finish up NPC quests, you'll get a more rounded experience.

Oh, and it's $15 on Steam. Even on a student budget, there's no excuse not to get it. I promise, you'll find Hollow Knight worth your time and money.