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[Hollow Knight] Sequel: Now has a store page; still no release date
Cantido
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAO2urG23S4&t=2s
Oh yeah, son, we playin' Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is a tough but amazing Metroidvania, successfully kickstarted by Team Cherry. You are a lone, mysterious stag beetle warrior (or are you?) exploring the ruined kingdom of Hollownest for a mysterious mission. Some evil miasma destroyed this kingdom and drove its inhabitants insane. The Hollow Knight knows why, and is on a mission to stop it.
It goes without saying that the artwork is stellar. It starts off monochrome, but the use of color is critical to the game. Combat and movement are fluid.
More to come. I think my thumb and index finger are fucked. Its quite literally stopping me from continuing this game.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAO2urG23S4&t=2sOh yeah, son, we playin' Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is a tough but amazing Metroidvania, successfully kickstarted by Team Cherry. You are a lone, mysterious stag beetle warrior (or are you?) exploring the ruined kingdom of Hollownest for a mysterious mission. Some evil miasma destroyed this kingdom and drove its inhabitants insane. The Hollow Knight knows why, and is on a mission to stop it.
It goes without saying that the artwork is stellar. It starts off monochrome, but the use of color is critical to the game. Combat and movement are fluid.
More to come. I think my thumb and index finger are fucked. Its quite literally stopping me from continuing this game.
3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767
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The map system is of particular note. I know it's turned off some people, but here's how it works: You don't just auto-map the places you've been to. You first have to find a recurring companion named Cornifer, who is a cartographer. He'll provide you with a sketch of the zone, which you can view by holding L in real time. The map doesn't show where you are unless you have a badge equipped (this was my first badge and frankly I don't think I'll ever be able to take it off). Once you have the map, you'll be able to draw in the places you've been. But only when you reach a place to rest. Benches in this game are your respawn point, where you can change your badges, and the only place where you can "fill in" the map.
The practical effect of all of this is that when you enter a new zone, you're flying totally blind. You'll have to muddle your way though unfamiliar territory, just hoping to find a fast travel point, a bench, or gods willing, Cornifer. In one zone, I actually couldn't find him, and I was in there so long I built a nearly complete mental map of the entire zone before acquiring the in-game map.
So fair warning, if you don't like getting lost beneath the surface of the earth, you're going to have a rough go of it. Personally, between the challenge of the combat, the thrill of the unknown, and the freedom to be lost for hours, this game is exactly what I wanted. The atmosphere is perfect. The one thing that doesn't quite feel like Metroid (and this is a deliberate design choice, not necessarily a failing of the game) is that you don't feel like an unstoppable killing machine. I'm 14 hours in and I've only expanded my life by 1.
Edit: Has anyone figured out how to unlock the tram? There's a slot, but I haven't figured out what to put in it, and I've already explored the zones on both sides, so I think I just missed something.
Nope. I've seen a lot of tram stations but still haven't found the pass.
Unrelated tip: talk to NPCs multiple times, and check in on them once in a while.
Spoiler (d key):
Whoops! I turned him into essence and absorbed him.
It should be noted that if you don't mind just looking things up, a player shouldn't get stuck that bad. Most of my negative experience in the game has been that there is just absolutely no useful guidance after a certain point and a SHITLOAD of space to try and figure things out in (and LOTS of time spent without being able to see the maps for a lot of areas). But I also absolutely hate the notion of looking something up because it's ridiculous to have to do that for a modern Metroidvania game; however, if the player doesn't really care about looking things up, it shouldn't be a problem.
This game is large.
Like really fucking large, holy shit.
Yeah, there's a really really good reason why I was getting super pissed off about not being able to find maps for sections and how bad the game is about letting you know where you need to go. And it's because the game is pretty damn huge. At least twice the size of the usual 2D Metroid game, but probably more like 3 times the size.
When you flounder here, you flounder over a fuckload more distance and it takes a lot longer to find things.
Which just means go look up a map online, which I was tremendously resistant to because this is 2017 and nobody should be having to do stupid crap like that anymore due to bad design choices.
What's more, so, so much of it is optional. I just finished my first playthrough, clocking in at almost 22 hours. Before I went to the end, I bought all the maps I'd missed, and there were entire zones I'd never been in. I've frequently lamented that most games these days seem really fenced in, even ostensibly exploration based ones, because developers don't want to put in hours on content people won't see. This game is the opposite. You can push out to the frontiers, there aren't nearly as many hard upgrade gates as a typical metroid. In fact, I think there are only... 5 mobility upgrades?
The character interactions are very Dark Souls as well. There are some bugs I met once or twice and never saw again, one who I think met an unfortunate fate I might have been able to prevent, and one whose story I saw to the end. There's no quest markers or ways to track them, of course.
There are a couple of really intense fights in here. The last boss is some white knuckle shit.
Big Spoilers
Joni's Blessing - can't heal, but you get 4 extra life
Lifeblood Heart - 2 more life
Steady Body - no pushback when attacking
Thorns of Agony - counter damage when struck
So I had 12 blue masks going in and I came out trembling with one left after about 12 tries on both of them.
Mark of Pride you get as a reward after beating the Mantis Lords, Longnail is purchased from Salubra.
On top of that, most of the charms offer so little benefit that they're basically pointless. Increased magic efficiency and magic power charms offer so little increase they may as well not even be in the game. Charm that shields you when healing? Damage still interrupts your healing, you just don't take life damage from it so it's pretty useless for bosses. It also only works a handful of times between rests, making it even more useless. Damage aura? Ineffective against anything but the weakest of weak enemies.
Probably a solid half of the charms in the game are pointlessly weak, another quarter are borderlines pointless, and only the remainder are reliably useful for anything.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
I'll concede that the money pickup charm should have been a permanent thing though, like the lamp.
While we're in spoiler territory, is there any way to save...
Honestly annoyed I wasted my time playing, if they call that an ending. Not at all a challenging fight, short mostly-meaningless cutscene kicks in, and then there are some unskippable credits. Kept waiting for some other fight to kick in, but nope, just wasted 20-something hours of my time to get an incredibly lazy and short ending. All that atmospheric world-building and I expected, well, an ending, not a 15-second copout, even if I got the "bad" ending (and no fucking game you can spend 20 hours should even have a bad ending, talk about shitty design). If I haven't "earned" a decent ending for a game by doing 75% of everything, the devs just don't know what they're doing as far as game design goes.
Yeah, I know you can go do some grindy shit to get a different ending, but honestly, I'd just suggest people not bother with the game at this point. Or at least don't bother playing it with the expectation that the ending is worth something; if you just want it for exploring a pretty neat-looking setting, go for it.
The atmosphere, the art, the sound design, the music. The characters! The controls!
It's a Unity engine thing. Notorious for stutters like that, and it's a bit more prominent in Hollow Knight that some others.
Next patch is supposed to be optimization focused so hopefully they get fixed.
There's some serious Nope down there.
And I think the story is turning into a nod of Dark Souls.
I'm quite fond of Fragile Strength because I'll take every piece of DPS I can get while my thumb is busted.
Detroit?
Thankfully you can always quit the game to return to the last bench and retain your geo and any progress. Two of those incidents were from 1.0.0.5, which was the release version, so it's possible they've been fixed, but the last one happened last night.
Happened to me constantly, and I also could not find the reason for it.
And now I'm going to put my thumb in ice...
I will say that Hollow Knight does a better job than most.
Hollow Knight does something interesting. Radiance is a god of beasts. He created hive minded, savage insects, mindlessly eating and killing and fucking and laying eggs. Until the Pale King was born with enough might to overthrow Radiance, giving insects sapience. Radiance, still sealed, gradually imposes his will on Hallownest, reducing its inhabitants to something worse than instinct: savage malice.
But man I hope they patch out the performance hiccups it seems to get at intense moments.
i ask myself this question over and over.
EDIT:
AFTER A LONG PLATFORMING SECTION?!