Hollow Knight Review: Why This Metroidvania Defined a Generation

Hollow Knight sold over three million copies in less than two years after its February 2017 launch – an extraordinary result for a game built by a tiny Australian studio on a Kickstarter budget of roughly AUD $57,000. Developed by Team Cherry, the game earned an 87 out of 100 on Metacritic and carries “Overwhelmingly Positive” status on Steam with more than 300,000 user reviews. If you want to understand what independent game development is truly capable of, Hollow Knight remains the clearest single example the industry has produced this decade.

The Origins of Hollow Knight: A Kickstarter Bet That Paid Off

Team Cherry began as two collaborators in Adelaide, South Australia: artist and animator Ari Gibson and programmer William Pellen. Their first public step toward Hollow Knight was a short game jam entry called Hungry Knight, released in 2014, which used the same basic insect protagonist concept. The positive reception to that small prototype prompted them to launch a Kickstarter campaign later that year, setting a goal of AUD $35,000. Backers pledged AUD $57,138 – roughly 163 percent of the target – funding a much larger vision than the team had originally planned.

Composer Christopher Larkin joined the project early in development, and the team spent approximately two and a half years building the game in the Unity engine. The scope expanded dramatically. What began as a relatively contained underground world grew into a 17-area interconnected kingdom called Hallownest, home to dozens of NPCs, more than 40 boss encounters, and a layered lore system that players still debate in granular detail today. Few indie games in history have matched this ambition-to-budget ratio, and none did it at $14.99.

The PC, Mac, and Linux release landed on Steam on February 24, 2017. A Nintendo Switch port arrived in June 2018, and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions followed in September of that year. All platform versions carry the same $14.99 price, and Team Cherry released every piece of post-launch content – four major DLC packs – completely free of charge.

Core Gameplay: Exploration, the Soul System, and Charms

Hollow Knight is a 2D action-platformer built around the Metroidvania template: a large, interconnected map you explore progressively as you gain new abilities. You play as the Knight, a silent bug-like warrior descending into the ruins of Hallownest. Movement starts simple – dash, jump, strike – and expands steadily as you discover new skills hidden throughout the world. The design philosophy borrows from FromSoftware’s patience-rewarding approach: the game tells you almost nothing and expects you to piece things together yourself.

Combat revolves around a weapon called the Nail, essentially a long pin used as a sword. Landing hits on enemies generates Soul, a resource you spend on a healing ability called Focus or on a small set of offensive spells. This creates a deliberate rhythm: press forward to gather Soul, then retreat to spend it. The system rewards aggression without making it mandatory, which suits both careful and aggressive playstyles equally well.

The Charms system is where build variety lives. Scattered across Hallownest are 45 equippable Charms, each modifying combat or traversal in meaningful ways. Some extend Nail reach; others alter spell behavior; a few are absurdly situational but beloved by dedicated players. A limited number of notches prevents stacking everything at once, pushing deliberate buildcraft over raw stat accumulation. Average completion time for the main story sits around 25–30 hours according to HowLongToBeat community data, with a full completionist run reaching 55–65 hours. At $14.99, that works out to under 30 cents per hour of play – a ratio nearly no full-price release can match.

Hallownest: World Design and Environmental Storytelling

The world of Hallownest is an ancient underground kingdom populated entirely by insects and arachnids, now largely dead or corrupted by a spreading supernatural blight called the Infection. Seventeen distinct biomes – from the fungal marshes of Fog Canyon to the crystalline caverns of Crystal Peak – each carry their own visual identity, enemy roster, and audio atmosphere. None feel recycled. Transitioning between them creates a sense of genuine geographic scale that most 2D games never achieve.

Lore delivery is almost entirely environmental. Tombstones, corpses, leftover records, and brief NPC conversations build a picture of what Hallownest was and what destroyed it. The game never pauses to explain its history; instead, you reconstruct it through fragments as you move through the world. This approach rewards attention and punishes skipping dialogue, creating an unusually engaged player mindset. The contrast with AAA games that over-explain every plot point is sharp and deliberate.

Hallownest doesn’t tell you its story – it leaves it buried for you to dig out, which is exactly why players are still finding new details seven years after launch.

Navigation uses a map system that requires purchasing cartographic tools from a traveling seller named Cornifer. You must actively buy a blank map for each area, then fill it in by exploring. Adding your own markers and pins to the map is part of the experience. The choice to make navigation partially manual feels archaic for about an hour, then feels entirely intentional: it turns exploration into a genuine activity rather than waypoint-following.

Boss Fights: Where Hollow Knight Earns Its Reputation

Hollow Knight contains over 40 boss fights, ranging from mandatory story encounters to completely optional hidden challenges. The quality is unusually consistent. Most bosses introduce a clear set of patterns, give you room to read them, then escalate in a second or third phase. Deaths feel instructive rather than arbitrary – almost always traceable to a readable mistake.

The optional Pantheon challenges – added in the Godmaster DLC – represent some of the hardest content in any action game released this decade. The Pantheon of Hallownest chains over 40 consecutive boss fights with no mid-run saves, demanding near-flawless execution across more than an hour of play. Completing it sits as a meaningful achievement even among experienced players of the genre. It is entirely optional and has no bearing on the main story endings.

The Radiance and Pure Vessel fights in particular have entered gaming shorthand as benchmarks for boss design – encounters other developers study. Their telegraphing is precise, their phases escalate logically, and the music amplifies the emotional weight without overloading visual readability.

Art Direction, Soundtrack, and Atmosphere

Ari Gibson’s art style draws from watercolor illustration and Gothic architecture, rendered in a limited but expressive palette of greys, blacks, and muted jewel tones. Every frame of animation – and there are thousands – was hand-drawn. Enemy designs achieve maximum personality from minimal visual complexity: a simple shape language that communicates movement intent during even the fastest encounters.

Christopher Larkin’s orchestral soundtrack is one of the most discussed elements of the game’s lasting reception. Each biome receives its own thematic material – strings in the elegiac Resting Grounds, unsettling woodwinds in the claustrophobic Deepnest, grand brass in the City of Tears during its perpetual rainfall. Boss themes escalate from tense chamber music to full orchestral swells, calibrated to match each encounter’s dramatic arc. The soundtrack is available on all major streaming platforms and has found a substantial audience well beyond the game’s playerbase alone.

Hollow Knight Specs, Platforms, and Pricing

The table below covers essential specifications for all platform versions, current as of 2025.

Pros and Cons

No game suits every player. Here is an honest breakdown of what works and where some players disengage.

Hollow Knight vs. The Competition: Metroidvania Alternatives Compared

The Metroidvania genre produced several standout titles in the years surrounding Hollow Knight’s release. The table below compares the major options by price, length, and critical reception. All prices reflect current standard retail pricing as of 2025; Metacritic scores reflect the highest platform score for each title.

Hollow Knight competes directly with Ori and the Blind Forest on price but offers three to six times the content. Dead Cells earns the highest critical score but belongs to a different subgenre – built around procedural runs rather than a fixed authored world. For players who want a single, deeply crafted world to explore over many hours, Hollow Knight has no direct equal at its price point. It belongs on any list of the best indie games across all platforms – a consensus that has held firm since 2017.

At $14.99 for 40 to 65 hours of hand-crafted content, Hollow Knight offers a value proposition that a $70 AAA release cannot touch.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hollow Knight

Is Hollow Knight suitable for players new to the Metroidvania genre?

Hollow Knight is playable by newcomers to the genre but requires patience in the early hours. The game offers no tutorial and drops you into its world with limited explanation of its systems. The early areas are forgiving enough that most players can find their footing through experimentation. Death penalties are modest: you lose your collected currency (Geo) and must return to retrieve it from your last death location, but there is no game-over state and no lost exploration progress. Players who have previously enjoyed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Super Metroid will feel immediately at home. Those coming directly from games with objective markers and waypoints may find the first two to three hours frustrating before the world logic clicks into place. Sticking with it through the opening Forgotten Crossroads area is strongly recommended before forming a judgment.

How long does it take to beat Hollow Knight?

According to HowLongToBeat community aggregates, the main story takes most players between 25 and 30 hours. Completing all major side content and the four free DLC packs typically pushes that figure to 40–50 hours. A full completionist run – including the optional Pantheon challenges and every hidden item – averages 55–65 hours. Speedrunners have pushed the any% category below 30 minutes through a set of well-documented movement exploits, and the game has an active speedrunning community. For a normal player engaging with the content at a comfortable pace, 35–40 hours is a realistic expectation before reaching the credits. Multiple endings exist; accessing the true ending requires gathering specific items across the world and completing certain questlines, so a second partial playthrough is often needed to see everything.

Is Hollow Knight worth buying at $14.99?

By almost any measure, yes. At $14.99, Hollow Knight delivers more authored content than the majority of games priced three to four times higher. The four free DLC expansions – Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood, and Godmaster – add new bosses, story content, and game modes without any additional charge. The game goes on sale frequently on Steam and the Nintendo eShop, sometimes dropping to $7.49 or less during seasonal promotions. Low system requirements mean it runs on hardware from 2010 or later. Whether you measure value by length, art quality, musical score, or mechanical depth, Hollow Knight delivers on all four counts. Its 87 Metacritic score and 300,000+ Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews reflect a broad consensus that has not meaningfully eroded since 2017, which is rare for any title in any medium.

What platforms is Hollow Knight available on?

Hollow Knight is available on PC via Steam and GOG, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The PC Steam version is the most frequently updated and has the largest active community. The Nintendo Switch version is particularly popular given the game’s suitability for portable play – individual sessions can run long or short, and the bench-based save system accommodates interrupted sessions well. No native PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X version exists as of 2025, though the PS4 version plays via backward compatibility on PS5 without significant issues. No mobile version has been released. All platform versions are priced identically at $14.99 USD and include all four free DLC packs.

When is Hollow Knight: Silksong coming out?

Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced by Team Cherry in February 2019 as a planned DLC that grew large enough to become a standalone sequel. It stars Hornet, a major character from the original game, and features an entirely new world called Pharloom. As of mid-2026, no official release date has been confirmed. The game appeared at Xbox’s June 2022 showcase with a Game Pass listing, raising expectations for a near-term launch, but development has continued well beyond those timelines. Team Cherry has maintained near-total public silence on the project since 2023. The wait has become a running source of dark humor within the fanbase. The original Hollow Knight is fully standalone – its experience is entirely self-contained and not dependent on Silksong’s eventual release.

How does Hollow Knight compare to Dark Souls in difficulty?

The comparison between Hollow Knight and FromSoftware’s Dark Souls is common because both games use environmental storytelling, deliberate pacing, and a death-and-retry combat loop. In practice, Hollow Knight is more accessible than the average Souls game. Hit boxes are clearer in a 2D space, checkpoints (called Benches) are placed generously in the base game, and the death penalty – losing Geo at your last death location – is lighter than Dark Souls’ soul loss mechanic. The gap narrows sharply in the optional Pantheon content, which demands execution precision that rivals or exceeds most Souls boss sequences. For a player who has bounced off Dark Souls due to frustration, Hollow Knight is frequently the gateway game that successfully introduces the same patient-play philosophy in a less punishing package. Many players report completing Hollow Knight before returning to finish a Souls game they had previously abandoned.

Does Hollow Knight have multiple endings?

Yes. Hollow Knight has three primary endings and an additional hidden ending that constitutes the true conclusion to the game’s story. The standard ending is reachable on a first playthrough without special preparation. A second ending requires gathering a specific set of items. The true ending – often called the “Dream No More” ending – requires completing several optional questlines, acquiring the Dream Nail ability, and meeting additional conditions the game reveals gradually. A fourth ending related to the Godmaster DLC adds further narrative closure. Each ending reveals different facets of Hallownest’s lore, and accessing all four provides a substantially more complete picture of the game’s story than any single playthrough can offer. The lore community has documented each ending thoroughly, though discovering them without guides is the more rewarding path.

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Sources

• Wikipedia – Hollow Knight
• Metacritic – Hollow Knight (PC) review aggregation
• Steam – Hollow Knight store page and user reviews
• OpenCritic – Hollow Knight critical aggregation

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