![]() ![]() The sheer number of systems in the game make it feel almost like an immersive sim at times with a consistent internal logic, and I can point to any number of moments where they all came together for an experience few other open world games are capable of. The scope is massive, making its obsessive details even more gratuitous. Which is a shame, because there’s a phenomenal game in here. Upon discovery that the good ending was locked behind a super boss that requires beating the normal final boss prior to every attempt, I completely lost interest. These are fundamental design problems, and they’re frustratingly solvable. ![]() ![]() Or my personal favorite, the optional Super Meat Boy spinning saws platformer area where your health is supposed to be a scary limitation for the platforming gauntlet, but I had equipped the charm where your last pip of damage slowly recovers, and so every death meant 30 seconds of looking at my phone instead of playing the game. Fast travel is limited, and this led to many situations of fast traveling, walking a minute to the bank, walking back, fast traveling somewhere else, buying something, walking to another vendor, finding out I needed more geo, going back to the bank… Or the situations where I die to a boss and have to redo trivial (but slow!) platforming challenges and basic baddies to get back to the boss only to die again. Hollow Knight is an absolute slog towards the end, not necessarily due to the difficulty of any of its mandatory bosses (I don’t think I died more than thrice on anything required), but because of the amount of downtime. I have patience for certain difficult games, such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy, but those games almost universally feature instant retries without penalty. 8.5 hours later, having settled for the bad ending, I can’t. 10 hours in and I was ready to award it 5/5 as a fantastically executed Metroidvania/Soulslike hybrid with superb controls and presentation. ![]()
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