Having picked this one up on sale on Steam (Yes, this means I am playing it's 2017 release on not this year's Switch Port, meaning the game won't be eligible for my top 10 list this year), it was one of those indie games that I'd recently started hearing a lot of hype about, but missed on it's launch. I have always been a bit hit and miss on these indie Metroidvania style games, but this one had a great look to it so I figured it was worth a shot, especially with the sale.
And having finally played it, I'm really sad I missed out in its original release, because this may well be my favorite of this genre. You play as the Knight, essentially a walking exoskeleton who is on a quest to release the Hallow Knight. The reasons as to why and the lore of the world is discovered as you explore the Hallownest and view the remnants of the kingdom.
Considering even the small details of the story are intended to be discovered, most things I can say would be considered a spoiler, so I will say it like this. There is an incredible amount of lore to discover for anyone interested, and a lot of it is pretty cleverly written. Many things are found off the beaten path, and it makes the exploration aspect of the gameplay a treat. There is a good story here for anyone willing to seek it out, though if you're the kind of person who is just playing through the game you are going to miss out on a lot of it.
The biggest thing about the Gameplay is similar to many other games of its kind, most of your upgrades are more about movement and exploration than the combat proper, though they all do play a role in combat. You start of being able to jump and attack. As you explore the world eventually you can double jump, wall climb, swim in acid, and other things. You can unlock areas in places you'd already been doing some backtracking, and this is where the crux of the gameplay is discovery and exploration.
That isn't to say that there aren't combat focused upgrades, they come in the form of a few spells and techniques you can use with your needle, the games weapon of choice. They are nice and all, but outside of one offensive spell I didn't really find myself using them all that often. That said, I can see how many of them can be effectively used. There are also a lot of badges you can equip in order to give you passive buffs or alter abilities, such as your Shadow Dash now damaging foes, or increases to your damage output. Overall though, upgrades to mobility definitely make for the funner upgrades to get.
The game benefits from having a lot of well-hidden spots, but it can potentially suffer from one issue a lot of these games have. While your mileage on this will vary, it requires you to remember a lot of stuff you stumble across for later. While some of this is covered by pins you can buy that auto-mark certain things on your map when you are able to do things like break floors you'll need to remember every shaky floor you've come across if you don't want to miss anything. And considering how open the game is from the beginning, you may well have come across a lot of them, and thus will have to constantly retread ground, especially if you don't have time for long gaming sessions and are only playing from time to time. Time Constraints like that can really make it hard to recall small details.
The actual combat is also very smooth, though not without problems. To start with the good, while all those tricks for exploring the world may be focused on that, they also add a lot to combat. Double Jumping and wall climbing, for example, can make certain enemies a lot easier to fight that gave you a lot of problems when you only had a single jump and platforms to get into the air. Some areas like the arena have entire sections where you cannot touch the floor and have to stick to fighting on the wall surface making for some interesting fights, and the game offers a great variety of enemies to make use of all of your abilities on. None of the actions in this game feel frivolous, and encounters are constantly fresh and changing as you progress through the game, at least until you are doing a lot of backtracking.
There is one issue I have, and that is just how many hits certain enemies can take before you take them down. When I entered one area there were these spiders with masks you fight in small hallways, far to small to jump over the spiders, but there mask block attacks. It is very easy to bait them out and hit there face, so once you know the trick the fights with them become trivial. These trivial fights, at the time, still took five shots to the face to take down one enemy. Not a boss or mini-boss, one enemy that appears multiple times in the area. There are a lot of enemies like this in the game that takes a few hits to take down while simultaneously being way too easy, and this can drag out some portions of the game a bit. It does happen often enough to be noticeable and remains the single biggest problem I have with the game.
The aesthetic of the game is overall fantastic, though there is a small issue that can crop up. It can be legitimately haunting at times, which feels like the intent they were going for. The visuals at sound mesh wonderfully to create a foreboding atmosphere, and mixed with the elements of the story that are revealed as you progress you can very easily start to wonder if you should even be on this quest of yours. There is also a lot of humor in the game to lighten the mood, which is fine, and the designs actually do a good job at being able to bounce back and forth between the light-hearted moments and the dread. But sometimes it feels like the goofy side of things seeps a bit too much into the serious, and there are a few encounters that I feel lost some of that visceral impact as a result of it. It's not enough o majorly detract, but it's just noticeable enough to take away slightly.
Hallow Knight is a game of couple minor flaws and one fairly big one but is more than counteracted by everything the game does right. Exploration and combat are fun and fast-paced (With a couple caveats), a good story and world for anyone wanting to take the time to explore it, and a world full of great visuals and music. That's not even getting into the ways you can tweak your play-style thanks to the various badges you collect. At the time of writing this review, I have finished the first ending and have taken some time too clear out a lot of the remaining things to do in the game, and up until this point, I highly recommend the game to anyone who's a fan of platforming games and exploration.