Hello and welcome back to my blog!
I am a big fan of Hollow Knight and can't wait for Silksong to drop. But this wait is getting a bit longer now. This prompted me to look up games that might give me the same sense of pleasure. The closest to Hollow Knight I found is a game called Nine Sols. It is a Metroidvania with vibrant hand-crafted artwork. One of the best aspects of Hollow Knight is its presentation, and I liked what I saw in the Nine Sols Trailer.
It starts with a dramatic cutscene which sets the tone of the game. I loved the art style; it is very unique.
The narrator talks about some kind of betrayal and rebellion, and we see the protagonist, Yi, almost falling off the cliff. Now, that's a literal cliffhanger.
The world looks ancient and futuristic at the same time, which is a setting that is very tough to achieve. Yi seems to be the fallen hero; we with a chance to fix it all. Whatever is going on in games like these is explained slowly within the game. I remember how little we knew about the beautiful world of Hallownest when the knight started in this long-gone kingdom from Hollow Knight.
The game gave us a simple tutorial with some movement tutorials inside a cave. The controls were very tight, which I like. Precision is such a useful thing in 2d Metroid Vania games; it can really break the gameplay. We learn to climb vertical surfaces, etc.
We meet a little boy who seems to be a friend of ours, and it seems only this person knows our identity in the village.
Yi just puts a big round hat on top of his face to blend in... he seems to be living this way for a year. These villagers (or apemen xd) are blind, or they don't care who is living with them for a year.
This village was preparing for a weird ceremony where a platform comes up from the ground, and they sacrifice one person every two years or something. I didn't pay much attention to the Shaman dialogues lol.
But tonight was the night of the ceremony and it was the little guy's turn who kind of saved Yi, the protagonist and even though we were trying to figure out what happens after the ceremony and the objective was not to interfere and stay in disguise but watching the little guy's skull about to be crushed we saved him and hacked the platform.
This is where I feel the actual game starts. We have to traverse through enemy territory in some kind of futuristic base. The game teaches us its parry mechanics, and use of combat becomes very prevalent. I liked the aesthetics of the game so far; they felt better than the combat system, which was a bit more punishing from the start.
If I have to compare it with Hollow Knight, I would say this one has a steeper learning curve at the start. The parry roll and hit mechanics don't come very naturally to you. This is where I had to start from a checkpoint multiple times. Eventually, I got the hang of it, but it still felt a bit unnatural.
The game aggressively wants you to be better at this parry mechanic that if you die repeatedly in the early game, it sends you to this special room where you can do more training and improve your combat skills. This might be a sign that things are going to get much tougher later in the game.
It does have a skill tree, which is a completely different approach than Hollow Knight. This gives much more freedom in terms of combat and gameplay choice you can have in the game. This ought to help you fix some of the combat challenges.
It wasn't too long before we encountered our first boss fight. You can't parry many of his sword attacks, and I died once in this fight. But the mechanics weren't too different from the other enemies we were fighting in this level. The scale was just different.
I am not sure how to judge this game yet. Probably too soon to say things, but one thing is clear that you simply cannot clone the level of gameplay Hollow Knight gave. That game is such a masterpiece in every way, and playing these similar games will make you love HK even more. I can't simply point to what exactly is missing in this game, but something feels off. Is it how the character feels? A bit too heavy or how the weird parry mechanic is designed. I don't like parrying in games, so I am just pushing it at this point.
On the other hand, visually it looks really neat. I liked the art style and character animations. The blend of ancient and medieval Asian elements with futuristic elements works well, even though you feel it shouldn't. Overall, the game has very positive reviews on Steam. 94% of about 28k reviews are positive, but to answer my question from the title. No! No game can fill that Hollow Knight void for me.
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Screenshots are from the game, Nine Sols.