Hollow Knight Review

Team Cherry was three people, and Hallownest is bigger and stranger than most worlds a hundred developers assemble. The map is the achievement: an interlocking ruin of pale corridors, fungal wastes, and a rain-soaked city where you buy a partial chart from a wandering cartographer and then find your own way, which restores the feeling of being genuinely lost that the genre had traded away for waypoints. Combat is spare and exact, a nail and a handful of charms, and the limited charm notches turn build-making into a real decision rather than a menu.

The bosses escalate from instructive to cruel without ever cheating, and the optional depths hide fights that stand beside anything the studios chasing FromSoftware have managed. What lingers, though, is tone. The bugs of Hallownest are dignified and doomed, the score keeps its distance, and most of the story is told through architecture and a few sad lines of dialogue. Backtracking on foot before the late movement upgrades arrive will test anyone's patience. Almost everything else here is close to perfect.