this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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I don't really understand the appeal of Hollow Knight. Like don't get me wrong, I loved it, but having played lots of other Metroidvanias, including the classic Symphony of the Night, it didn't rock my world or reshape the paradigm that existed. It is a good Metroidvania alongside others.
Is the appeal a kind of generational thing—people who hadn't played a lot of those predecessors but experienced this one first?
Edit: I appreciate the responses and everyone's unique perspective!
On the flipside, I’m a huge metroidvania fan and 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.
The fact that silksong has remained more or less the #1 wishlisted game on steam since it was announced speaks to the broader cultural impact of the game. Hollow knight really elevated metroidvanias as a genre
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.
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!