Hollow Knight Is One of the Best Games You’ll Play This Year

If you have a Nintendo Switch, you gotta pick it up.
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Team Cherry

Over the past two weeks, I've been playing Hollow Knight, a game that I can only really describe as "A Bug's Life, but directed by Guillermo del Toro." That is, by the way, a ringing endorsement. Hollow Knight, which debuted on Nintendo Switch this summer—where most people will likely encounter it for the first time after it came out on PC last year—is one of my favorite games I've played this year, a strange story that's both spooky and endearing and littered with bodies, so many bodies, and you can't help but wonder why.

You play as The Knight, a small, nimble little bug of mysterious origin. It's not quite clear what you are, or why you're here, but you have a tiny sword in your hand and a large mystery to solve: What happened to the kingdom of Hallownest, the underground empire that lies beneath a well?

Hallownest is a kingdom full of bugs, and the bugs are kind of cute. They're also all slowly going mad, and most of them want to kill you. A few of them don't, though. They will talk to you, and you'll always be surprised by how colorful they are. There's Cornifer, a map-maker so obsessed with his work he will willfully dive into places he probably shouldn't, only to admit he was too scared to complete his maps in full (leaving you to fill them out for him). There's Zote, a bug who swears he's a mighty warrior but alway seems to get his ass kicked. There's a shopkeeper with a secret, a mask-maker whom I can't quite make sense of, an old bug who just wants to talk your ear off. There are characters I have not met and you might not either. Hollow Knight is a game that is in love with its strange, macabre world and delights in whatever amount of time you decide to spend in it, rewarding you accordingly. You can zip toward a conclusion, or take your time and notice that Hallownest isn't a place that has one mystery but many—and it has as many answers as you're willing to find.

Hollow Knight gets at one of my favorite things in video games, where it takes a story and hides its bones in the walls of every corridor, the clues in the rhythm and meter of its words, quietly asking you to notice things about the creatures you're fighting; the way they move and act and look. It's like a novel you can play through and construct at your own pace, where the twists and payoffs aren't delivered to you directly but instead come from the assemblage of puzzle pieces in your own time.

A big reason for this is because the game is largely the product of two people. Australian developers Ari Gibson and William Pellen make up Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry, and with the help of composer/sound designer Christopher Larkin, Hollow Knight has an aesthetic that feels entirely its own. A gothic tragedy enacted by charming-yet-creepy insects with a score that evokes sorrow, whimsy, and adventure in equal parts, Hollow Knight feels unique despite playing like a million other Metroid imitators. As someone who actively resists games as big and sprawling as Hollow Knight (I spent about 20-odd hours playing it; if you wanted to, you could maybe double that number), I was pretty shocked at how willing I was to keep playing for hours at a time, how much I wanted to figure out the map of this underground world and solve the puzzle of its existence.

There are a lot of games that ask you to do the things Hollow Knight does: explore a sprawling map full of creatures to fight, take on challenging boss fights, find hidden secrets. You know: video-game stuff. Few games give you a good reason to do any of it. That's what makes Hollow Knight remarkable—if you ask it why, it has an answer.