Hollow Knight Is Designed to Make You Feel Bad | Design Delve

This is exactly the sort of post that keeps me coming back to Design Delve. I love finding out how the magic happens, be it an analysis of how a novel is structured so all the plot threads get resolved, or of a piece of music to see how the different instruments combine. Hollow Knight isn't for me, and for that matter I don't care for platformers, but it's fascinating to see how little choices like jump speed and knockback can affect the feel of a game.

Hollow Knight is my comfort game. I grew up playing platformers and metroidvanias, so I fell in love with that aspect immediately. I love how you can also use your nail to hit solid spikes and gain some momentum. I make HK responsible for my love of 2D Souls games now. Everytime I go back to it, I enter a really zen state of flow. Which is funny to say for such a brutal game (it is hard) but I feel immediately relaxed playing it now.

I quit HK shortly after getting the Manís Claws. The skill requirement got to be too much and it wasn’t fun anymore.

Hornet should be much more powerful in the early game versus Hollow Knight, but that would matched by equally powerful opponents.