I finished the game Hollow Knight two weeks before I write this blog. From my perspective, Hollow Knight is a great 2D Metroidvania game, but there still remains some place to improve.
The video above is a record of me fighting with the final boss, Hollow Knight and the hidden boss, Radiance. From the video you can see its unique art style, which is simple but smooth. And the music is great, offering me a sense of epic.
But there is a critical problem for this boss fight. If you want to fight with Radiance, you have to fight with Hollow Knight first. And the game set the challenges of beating Radiance as very high and the challenges of beating Hollow Knight as quite low. This is understandable because Radiance is the hidden final boss, so it should be harder for players to conquer. But for those players who can’t improve their skills fast, like me, the final boss fight would be tormenting. Every time I want to fight with Radiance, I have to go through a long boring fight with Hollow Knight and then be beaten by Radiance within thirty seconds. Team Cherry, the team who made this game, might put the smoothness of storytelling at the first place when they design the boss fight, but it actually causes the players to suffer.
Similar design can be seen in other boss fight, although fighting with a pre-boss turns into travelling through the map. Take fighting with Hive Knight as an example, in the image below, player has to go through such a long way to reach the place for boss fight, and when they lose, they will have to walk the path again.
I don’t know whether the game designer made it intentionally or not, but it seems that the game is trying to increase the time of playing by adding on the cost of travelling in the map.
Regarding the map design, I think it is great, with plenty of hidden places to discover. But the designers seem to take for granted that every player likes to discover every place of the map, which makes them neglect the contents of guidance. For example, when player reaches the abyss for the first time, the gate is closed and there is only a “riddle” showed below, which doesn’t provide any help to open the gate.
Although I have raised several problems the game Hollow Knight have above, I still think it’s a good game due to its unique art style, epic music, smooth action and fantastic map design. However, there are still several drawbacks which make players uncomfortable while playing. Now I feel that game design and development is really hard. Any tiny mistake may bring players a bad experience, which could easily cover the efforts put on other parts of the game. Therefore, as game designers, we should always pursue for perfectionism.