There exists, in the deep and shadowy recesses of a ruined kingdom, a work of such singular and dreadful beauty that I confess myself possessed by it still. Hollow Knight is its name, and I have wandered its depths until the small hours, heart lit with a strange fire, unable to quit the descent.
The Descent Itself
The game opens upon a small knight, robed in white, who falls into a ruined kingdom as one might fall into a tomb. There is no herald to explain the way; one must endeavour, by patience and by wound, to comprehend the melancholy passages through one’s own labor, for no guide is given. I found this refusal of instruction not a fault but a virtue, for it lent every passage the character of a genuine and forgotten place, rather than a thing merely fashioned to instruct.
The kingdom is vast beyond what its modest beginnings suggest — mosses, tombs, cities of glass and ruin, a pestilential cloud beneath all — and each region bears its own melancholy and heavy temperament, one distinct from the next. I moved through them the way one moves through the chambers of a dream one cannot wake from, doubtful whether dread or wonder was the truer sensation.
The Business of Battle
The knight is armed with a nail, humble in appearance, terrible in consequence when wielded with patience. Every foe demands its own particular study; recklessness is punished with a severity that borders on cruelty, and yet the penalty never feels unjust. I was made, again and again, to face my own faults, and to mend them, which is perhaps the finest thing a labor of this sort can accomplish.
The shades and visions one meets in battle — knights, spirits, terrible remains of the old kingdom — are rendered with a strange and dreadful grace. Their movements possess a grim eloquence; one does not merely fight them, one converses with them in blows. Certain of these meetings, particularly against the kingdom’s more exalted keepers, attain a height of terror and rapture I have seldom known in any labor of leisure.
Of Sorrow and Silence
What elevates Hollow Knight above mere labor is its temperament — a melancholy that pervades all things yet never turns to mere despair. The kingdom is a graveyard of the great and the humble, both together, and the game permits one to grieve for it without ever demanding tears directly. Its silence speaks; its music, spare and full of grief, does the remainder of the speaking.
The story is not delivered but discovered, gathered in fragments among the ruined and the dying, so that the player becomes something of an antiquarian, piecing together a history from remains and letters. I found this method more moving than any direct account could have been, for grief but slightly seen is grief doubled.
A Small Reservation
I will not pretend the descent is without its trials of temper. Certain passages demand a delicacy that borders on the harsh, and the kingdom’s chart, though conceived with great care, may vex the traveler not used to charting out his own course. These are not faults so much as the natural rigor of stone upon so singular a rose — yet rigor it remains, and I would be false to deny its sting.
In Conclusion
I departed that ruined kingdom changed, as one departs a true and dreadful dream — unwilling to leave, haunted, grateful. Hollow Knight is an extraordinary endeavour, wrought with a patient hand and a poet’s melancholy, and I recommend it to any soul willing to descend into shadow for the sake of what beauty may be found there.