Hollow Knight is clearly one of the best to ever do it in my opinion. It also totally transformed the landscape of metroidvanias, with subsequent games imitating it left and right.
Can you expand on this? I feel like there’s some interesting perspective in there.
And I will probably play Silksong eventually, too but I’m just trying to understand why people think it stands above the rest.
I’m not OP, but Hollow Knight is a master-class of world design imo. The world is absolutely massive and seamlessly connected, it feels like it never ends until you finally reach the end game. Seeing it loop back on itself 10+ hours later is something I almost never see anywhere else.
The combat is also fairly simple but very tight. There’s a crazy amount of enemy variety and it has some of the most exciting bosses in the genre - especially if you’re going for the true ending. I played so much of the genre but nothing gave me the feeling HK did. I finished it 3 times.
It was, imo, the founder of the Vania part of Metroidvanias, so they didn’t have the benefit of standing upon many shoulders. Hollow Knight is a great spiritual successor to that endeavor, and I agree that they took much of what made SotN great and improved upon it.
It’s interesting watching people get so excited by HK, I have to wonder if that’s what it was like when SotN and successive games came out.
Symphony of the Night is, in fact, the origin of the term Metroidvania but not in the way you might think. Castlevania pre SotN was a very different series with none of the elements associated with “metroidvania”, so people started calling SOTN a “metroid-vania” derogatorily, as a Castlevania that was trying to ape Metroid. The term had staying power for the genre because what the fuck else are you gonna call them, it was before slapping -like on everything was popular but after calling stuff “clones” had fallen out of favor. No, “search action” will never be a thing. And you’re not just gonna call them Metroids because that’s one specific series. So after future Castlevanias had Metroidy stuff in them, it became a genre name.
Aside from the dozens of direct shameless hollow knight clones, more “legitimate” artistic efforts are unmistakably if not explicitly influenced by it in a massive way. I think Nine Sols is probably the apotheosis of this. Will of the Wisps was famously accused of completely copying HK, much to the ire of the devs lol.
It’s also quite complicated because HK and the souls genre share so much DNA. And Dark Souls itself owes much of what makes it great to metroidvanias. So with these three things in mind (soulslikes, metroidvanias, and HK itself) which are all so interconnected, my argument is basically contingent upon whether or not HK is a particularly strong inflection point in gaming as a whole.
I think it clearly is, and I think it’s because it effectively culminated everything about the genre that we’ve come to love while also contributing new things to it. It was made with absolute reverence for the style, with the devs saying more than anything they wanted to create a world where players could get truly and completely lost. The fact that the art and music are impeccable seals the deal for most people
I would argue Animal Well is another such inflection point in gaming, and also probably the best example of a modern metroidvania that strongly diverges from HK
Can you expand on this? I feel like there’s some interesting perspective in there.
And I will probably play Silksong eventually, too but I’m just trying to understand why people think it stands above the rest.
I’m not OP, but Hollow Knight is a master-class of world design imo. The world is absolutely massive and seamlessly connected, it feels like it never ends until you finally reach the end game. Seeing it loop back on itself 10+ hours later is something I almost never see anywhere else.
The combat is also fairly simple but very tight. There’s a crazy amount of enemy variety and it has some of the most exciting bosses in the genre - especially if you’re going for the true ending. I played so much of the genre but nothing gave me the feeling HK did. I finished it 3 times.
Do give Symphony of the Night a try sometime! You’d probably enjoy it.
I have! and it’s a great game but still not quite the level of HK
It was, imo, the founder of the Vania part of Metroidvanias, so they didn’t have the benefit of standing upon many shoulders. Hollow Knight is a great spiritual successor to that endeavor, and I agree that they took much of what made SotN great and improved upon it.
It’s interesting watching people get so excited by HK, I have to wonder if that’s what it was like when SotN and successive games came out.
Symphony of the Night is, in fact, the origin of the term Metroidvania but not in the way you might think. Castlevania pre SotN was a very different series with none of the elements associated with “metroidvania”, so people started calling SOTN a “metroid-vania” derogatorily, as a Castlevania that was trying to ape Metroid. The term had staying power for the genre because what the fuck else are you gonna call them, it was before slapping -like on everything was popular but after calling stuff “clones” had fallen out of favor. No, “search action” will never be a thing. And you’re not just gonna call them Metroids because that’s one specific series. So after future Castlevanias had Metroidy stuff in them, it became a genre name.
Neat!
Aside from the dozens of direct shameless hollow knight clones, more “legitimate” artistic efforts are unmistakably if not explicitly influenced by it in a massive way. I think Nine Sols is probably the apotheosis of this. Will of the Wisps was famously accused of completely copying HK, much to the ire of the devs lol.
It’s also quite complicated because HK and the souls genre share so much DNA. And Dark Souls itself owes much of what makes it great to metroidvanias. So with these three things in mind (soulslikes, metroidvanias, and HK itself) which are all so interconnected, my argument is basically contingent upon whether or not HK is a particularly strong inflection point in gaming as a whole.
I think it clearly is, and I think it’s because it effectively culminated everything about the genre that we’ve come to love while also contributing new things to it. It was made with absolute reverence for the style, with the devs saying more than anything they wanted to create a world where players could get truly and completely lost. The fact that the art and music are impeccable seals the deal for most people
I would argue Animal Well is another such inflection point in gaming, and also probably the best example of a modern metroidvania that strongly diverges from HK
Animal Well is on my wishlist, so I’ll look forward to that someday!