7. Hollow Knight (2018*)
- * released on the Nintendo Switch in 2018; original PC release in 2017
- Final score: 63 points
- Total placements: 4 lists
- Highest placement: #1, Kevin
Schnei writes:
The best metroidvania. Art direction, crisp responsive combat design, a lush soundtrack I still listen to regularly, world design that kept pulling me deeper, and a level of challenge that often teetered on “too hard” but stayed compellingly within reach that I would always keep pushing overcome my “skill issue” struggles and finish them off (see: embarrassingly long Discord stream of my Lost Kin fight; a performance I proudly hail as overcoming the hidden added difficulty of capture card lag).
The previous testimonial provides no warranty, express or implied, regarding optional content up to and including Absolute Radiance.
Bill writes:
Trying to look back on Hollow Knight at this point in my life feels a bit like how I imagine what goes through Picard's mind whenever he thinks back over that entire second life that got embedded in him by a dead civilization so that he could preserve their memory and learn the pan flute. My first Hollow Knight life was 70 hours spent in the all-time great Metroidvania as it probably ought to be remembered: clarinet sonatas accompanying secluded wooded glens, hidden seats of a dead empire eternally covered in rainfall, perilous treks that pop you out in places that feel ancient and forgotten and instinctively wrong to tread on that you ultimately come to realize are your true home. For all of its Soulslike flaws, a beautiful gem through and through.
My second Hollow Knight life consisted of the 355 hours spent in the "Godmaster" DLC and its infamous "Pantheons" (i.e., boss rushes). Mansionlanders who recognize those words (which just may be all of you, since I streamed some of my playtime on Discord for MLNY 2020-21) likely remember the unforgiving final "Pantheon of Hollownest," which would have the player beat all of the game's 42 bosses without dying, and with health refreshers coming along at most intermittently. I've never really been able to distill a single coherent way to think about this second life, and instead have decided to just make my peace with the following grab bag of points, sticking out from each other at odd angles:
- To acknowledge what those reading this know already, aspects of this boss rush that are unaccountably cruel and unusual, and they are almost all of them hurled by at you by one boss. It can takes tens of hours against her first form to build a working theory of her openings, and another few tens of hours to realize that those can't be relied upon either. Success against her second form depends mostly on if the RNG ever puts her on screen. Perhaps the most disheartening moment is when you realize that she is in fact largely nothing new, only an acceleration of a boss that you would have first met and mastered hundreds of hours ago in the main game. You aren't struggling against some immaculately constructed final challenge, just a meaningless killing machine, sawing your head off with timing edge cases left in by the developers wholly unsmoothed, maybe even unnoticed. Various "Hardest Bosses of All Time" lists miscredit her as "Absolute Radiance," but we all know better, because we were present when Kevin rechristened her properly as "Absolute Bullshit."
- Even if some of the mode's bosses are pathologically cruel, its mechanics are designed quite nicely to give you a steady, incremental path to someday succeed. A training area allows you to hone your skills against each boss one by one before tackling them all in sequence; with the few cruel exceptions, boss battles are on the whole pretty fair: many are still plenty hard, but short, sweet, and precise and in a way that somehow makes me look back at them with the vibe of a showdown in an old samurai flick.
- Even if so much of this mode was a meaningless technical grind, then there is also how it was finished. The Sunday night after MLNY2020-21, and before I had to log back into (email address redacted) the next morning, the Pantheon remained unbeaten (despite so many runs up to Absolute Bullshit, despite that I was consistently beating her in 60%+ of training matches), and I had to confront the facts that (1) there was a reality where I just never beat this game and (2) the more time that passed from now, when I had been playing for 8 hrs/day for two weeks straight, the more likely that reality became. Against the part of my judgment that was a good caretaker for my employer's and customer's interests and values, I started on one last post-11:30 PM run. Chaya took a spot on the couch next to me when the run killers were due to start showing up at 25 minutes in. No bullshit from Markoth or Grey Prince Zote though, Nightmare King Grimm was tough but fair, as planned. Very solid run against Pure Vessel, critical because it decides your HP and MP going directly into Bullshit. In fact, enough MP to ensure a completely clean Phase 1 and then a Phase 2 where she left herself open to Descending Dark in only three turns, which puts us in the rare territory of Phase 3 (nasty jumping sequence and I take a hit, but still alive) and then the final Phase 4, which in theory is rote as long as you can get into the right groove and perform a fairly precise jump about eight times. I slip up after six and fall, and that's the end: as close as I could possibly get but no cigar. I start to physically unclench. Except not: I instinctively thought I was dead because in training, I practically always took two hits by Phase 4, but this time the hit in Phase 3 was only my first: by Phase 4, I still had one to give away. The Knight pops back on screen blinking, I cheese a few cheap hits in the iframes and that's the ballgame without honor or humanity, in my favor. We could watch the Final True Ending cinema on youtube any time we want, of course, but it feels wrong to miss even a second now so we just sort of hug each other blindly as [REDACTED] unifies the [REDACTED] and achieves final [REDACTED]. There hasn't been, couldn't be, a moment quite like this since Getting Over It, and there may not be, probably should not be, something quite like this again.