Hollow Knight takes one of the genre mainstays - learning new moves to access new areas - and wrings every last drop out of the mechanic. By the final challenge in the White Palace its some kaizo mario-esque nightmare of stringing moves together with instantaneous death on all sides.
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You gain movement upgrades - a dash, a wall grab, a double jump - that the game demands you learn how to use if you want to access its secret areas and upgrades. From the very beginning, you’re dodging stalactites, jumping over spiked filled pits and dodging enormous bug-devouring worms. In Hollow Knight, platforming is at least an entire third of the game.
Later on, there are some traps, but luckily by that time you’ll have unlocked the bat transformation, completing negating the need to confront any further platforming ‘challenges’. The most exciting platforming section in the entire game is when you have to jump between some (2!) very slowly swinging pendulums. Most of your time spent moving around the level is going up and down staircases. Sometimes, when the game is feeling especially frisky, you need to do a double jump. That is, you traverse between platforms - on occasion. It may have taken 20 years, but we finally have a title that someone can point to as a true evolution of the genre. It expands where it should grow, cuts where it needs to trim the fat, and it refines so much of the experience to a mirror sheen. Its because Hollow Knight is the true, next generation successor to the title of metroidvania.
So why then do I feel compelled to compare SOTN to Hollow Knight? They’re just different - we assess them through our experiences and feelings rather than saying a level has a size factor of an 8 out of 10. Larger levels can feel more empty than smaller levels, and more options isn’t always better than having restrictions. More pixels does not mean better graphics. The nature of creating the systems that govern games is that they are ruled by opportunity cost. I think this is a rarer thing in the game industry than one might think. Because the fact is, Hollow Knight equals or exceeds SOTN in every conceivable way. Hollow Knight is the reason playing through SOTN feels so strange. It’s a masterpiece, and I treasure it all the more for how unexpected it was - I started playing it entirely on the recommendation of a friend. Hollow Knight was my game of the year for 2017, and it is probably in my top 5 games of all time. I even love games where knowledge is the tool that opens pathways, like in The Witness or Antichamber.īut there’s one metroidvania that stands out, one that turbocharged my interest in the genre. I’ve dabbled in (although not finished) Salt and Sanctuary and Cave Story. I’ve played Ori and the Blind Forest and Guacamelee. Of course, like every video game critic on the planet, I’ve played Dark Souls. When my co-host James first suggested it for our podcast, I was excited - this was the ‘vania’ part of metroidvania, after all! And while SOTN wasn’t the progenitor of the genre (what is an inventor anyway, in this field of flowers), it has certainly gone down in history as one of the most influential and well regarded. Dashmaster: grants The Knight to use Dash frequently and adds the option to dash downwards.Playing through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SOTN) has been a surreal experience for me.Equipping certain Charms can modify this ability:.This skill can be upgraded into Shade Cloak.
And after defeating her, loot the body of a Vessel where the ability can be found.
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