Why I Quit Playing ‘Hollow Knight’
This past weekend, after 27 hours in the game, I made the decision to stop streaming Hollow Knight. This was an emotional decision to make, because Hollow Knight is such a masterfully crafted piece of art. The game boasts perfectly unique and immersive environments, a glorious soundtrack, and high-energy fun combat. But the game has one design decision that ultimately drove the nail through the coffin of my playthrough, and that decision was to limit respawn points to far-away benches.
Difficulty in video games has become a trending topic due to the recent release of From Software’s newest title, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The game maintains a deliberately difficult combat system that many players think should allow for easier, or at least customizable, options. No doubt that the developers of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry, were influenced by From Software’s Souls series, and one of those influences is the checkpoint system. In Dark Souls, your spawns are anchored to bonfires; in Hollow Knight, your spawns are anchored to benches.
Hollow Knight is not an easy game, but it certainly doesn’t require the kind of player persistence of games like Sekiro. Hollow Knight is more frustrating than it is difficult, in my experience. Though the boss encounters require you to learn a boss’ attacks, patterns, and phases, the fights are always fun and encourage you to reach new skill ceilings. Here’s the rub: when you die, you don’t spawn ten steps away from the boss arena. Instead, you spawn about ten screens away.
Hollow Knight sparingly places its benches across the map, a design decision that I can’t really understand in terms of player motivation. To remove you so far from the action discourages the tendency that most games teach, which is to keep trying. Some games even lock the door behind you once you’ve decided to conquer a boss, but Hollow Knight seems to do the opposite, sending you halfway (or further) across the intricate map.
In addition to the punishment of moving you physically far away from your goal, the game requires you to traverse enemy-infested screens and platforming sequences from hell. This translated into a playstyle that I wouldn’t have adopted if the game was designed differently. I was discouraged from risk-taking behavior in my exploration throughout the game. Because risk-taking led to death, and death meant starting over and losing much of my progress, I found myself playing a lot more conservatively than I would have otherwise. Some games like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy intentionally undermine the progress you’re making in a game, and I have written about why the high-stakes failure condition in that game is good game design. Hollow Knight is mind-numbingly boring when you lose progress. And that kills my motivation because the walk back isn’t even a skill ceiling – it’s just repetition.
In fairness, Hollow Knight’s epic boss battles are a resounding success in the game’s world. Each encounter feels epic, fights in a way that you can master, and sticks out as unique from all the rest. I think of the Dung Defender, Hornet, and the Watchers, just to name a few standout examples of good boss design. Nothing feels recycled. Every fight feels just out of my reach at first. But these awesome boss battles were marred by the grim reality that, if I failed, I would have to dash my way across several enemy-infested screens to return to the boss room, where I would then have to battle my shade to recover my geo and soul-meter. All of this before the next attempt at battle. I just wonder why this decision was made.
I often hear Hollow Knight mentioned in the same conversations as Celeste and Cuphead, punishing indie games that have earned their reputation for difficulty. And to some extent, I see why the comparisons are made. I nearly quit these games as well. Cuphead and Celeste, however, both handle the feedback loop between death and attempt in ways that don’t feel like a needlessly tedious and tiresome routine every time you fail. In Celeste, when Madeline bursts into a radiant explosion, or Cuphead takes more projectiles to the mug than he can handle, your next attempt is only a button press away. You can see what went wrong and immediately apply it in the laboratory of the boss arena. In Hollow Knight, however, you’re forced to relive unmemorable experiences that actually decrease the efficacy of your learning and therefore ability to move forward. Ricky Haggett recently tweeted out an excellent thread on this topic, which I will reproduce here in paragraph form:
“If you want to teach someone to do something hard, ideally allow them to try it repeatedly with as tight a feedback loop between attempts as possible. They make an attempt, see how it works out, then try again while the memory of *exactly* what happened is fresh in their minds. Forcing the player to back up 10 mins before the next try is like a rap on the knuckles with a ruler: a boring sit on the naughty step. But it also significantly weakens that feedback loop for learning. Learn to play? Sure – but a lot of games could do a better job of teaching. It took me many, many attempts to get through some of those screens [in Celeste], but I never gave up because I was entirely focused on learning how to do something incredible, rather than schlepping back through bits I had already learned.”
Hollow Knight would be a better game if it had a tighter feedback loop between boss attempts. There should be a bench outside every single boss room, encouraging you to continually engage and improve. Instead, you spawn way too far away from the action. The only thing you learn is how to move more quickly through a particular hallway. Unless you’re a speedrunner, this isn’t exciting.
As someone who streams myself playing video games, I try to select games that will be a lot of fun, and games that I can play for hours without feeling too formulaic. In my playthrough of Hollow Knight, there were two kinds of streams: fun streams and tough streams. The fun streams were characterized by progress. I’d find a new area, unlock a new ability, encounter a new boss, save another adorable grub, and so on. The tough streams were characterized by repetition and backtracking. I understand that backtracking is a necessary component of Metroidvania-style games. Unlocking a new ability encourages you to retrace your steps to find new secrets. But the repetition for repetition’s sake in Hollow Knight killed my motivation to continue on.
When repeating the same few hallways and boss fight in an endless loop over the course of several hours, the novelty wore off. The feeling of excitement to overcome a boss disintegrated into a kind of ennui that made me dread the game itself. Perhaps my approach should have shifted when I started feeling this way. I could have gone and done something else within the game. There were certainly underexplored areas on my map where I could have garnered new abilities, discovered new strategies for combat, or upgraded my nail weapon. But that decision meant turning around and literally backtracking across the entire map to see where I could explore further – a prospect that merely amplified the feeling of dread I had.
Ultimately, I decided to put the controller down for Hollow Knight because I realized it wasn’t my kind of game. I have a soft spot for indie titles that extends far beyond my normal comfort zone. Hollow Knight is an unbelievably expansive game, with content amounting to near infinity. Nothing about the game feels unpolished, broken, incomplete or forgotten about. In fact, I am stunned that the game only costs $14.99 for its quality. But this is a game I’m going to have to finish off stream, where I can pick up a boss fight here and there, rather than all at once. For me, Hollow Knight is going to join the club of casual games that I pick up when I have twenty minutes to kill, as opposed to the main focus of games I experience on stream for hours at a time.
Everything I keep reading and writing about whether games should have difficulty options anchors itself back to the question of Hollow Knight’s benches: if you’re going to make your game difficult, at least don’t make it discouraging for the player. Game design should continually nudge, “Keep playing.” All it would have taken is some encouraging benches and I would still be in Hallownest.
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