Hey thanks for watching and for all your lovely comments! Just wanted to issue a few corrections and clarifications: [1] I said that Hornet was referring to the Resting Grounds when she said “seek the Grave in Ash”. She’s actually talking about the Cast-off Shell in the Kingdom’s Edge, where you fight her for the second time. [2] There’s a few extra routes through the game that I didn’t mention, namely a path to Deepnest through the Fungal Core, and a path to the Kingdom’s Edge through a secret tunnel in the King’s Station. [3] It’s true that you can get your shade back without travelling to where you last died by giving a rancid egg to Jiji in Dirtmouth. This is useful in some situations, but I don’t think it changes the underlying design of the shade mechanic in a substantial way. [4] Your soul amount drops by a third, not a half, when you die. [5] I could have worded the DLC stuff better. Mentioning that bosses are “exclusive” to free, auto-installed DLC packs is a bit weird. My intention was to help out people who played Hollow Knight's base game in 2017 and were confused about missing these bonus bosses.

@Bob Zwetsloot Actually, there is a part of Kingdom’s Edge that’s only accessible by tram. When you take the tram to Kingdom’s Edge you come out in a new part of the area. This opens access to the Hive, and a long tunnel that leads back to the Waterways. After a little exploration you’ll find a breakable wall that leads back to the main part of Kingdom’s Edge.

Your video was so great. When it was over i was sad.

@Noah C. Fisher It can also be like this "Hello.",

I hope people see this comment! You're right that the DLC stuff sounded a bit off. The fact that Team Cherry released 4 free DLC packs is amazing.

Olá, Game Makers Toolkit Boa tarde tem vídeo novo no nosso canal. Não perca!

you know this guy is harsh when he talks about the few bad things about hollow knight and doesent mention the primal aspid

The organic oven acly contain because recess intringuingly tug abaft a second-hand nylon. decisive, capable scarf

A lot like Metroid 1. Way too open.

ha even today, almost a year after i first played im still learning theres areas i never saw before

best area is city of tears, worst area is royal waterways, most forgettable area is ancient basin

11:26 how the heck dose he have so much geo

"Dark souls esc difficulty spikes" shows hornet protector

I should play this game

"it took me 20 hours to get to the credits the first time" * glances at my save file at 50 hours not even a half way through.. * - this game is HAAAARRRD!

Great video and homage that does justice to describing the depth, heart and attention to detail that was poured into building this game!

Botw 2, new fallout from obsidian, hollow knight silksong, remake of lego star wars the complete saga, and a nes zelda game and watch. Would make me the happiest man on earth (3 out of 5 are confirmed and the other 2 are likely), but then I realize that costs money and I don't have any.

The greatest indie game out right now imo

It's all just square rooms lol

speed runners you say there's four ways to get there we use a skip

“How cool that team cherry doesn’t care if you don’t find all the stuff. Truly exceptional” “Bwaahh I needed to use a walkthrough because the game doesn’t tell me shit, what a let down” Clown.

The only bit of criticism I want to give is that you mention you had no drive to seek out the required locations for the end game boss, and had to use a walkthrough because you had no idea where to go, but a few minutes prior you mentioned how you can find hidden routes by looking at your map to find locations you hadn't been to yet. I feel like that's a great way to stumble across these areas, especially the "one jump" you need for the Kings Brand. It shows on your map that there's a path you hadn't taken yet in Kingdom's Edge. Otherwise this was really well written and well spoken. Great job on the video. :)

The only thing this video taught me is that there is a mantis boss fight. I finished the game beforehand btw

The great thing about this game is that there are so many paths. After beating hornet, I didn't even know I could go to the city of tears and I ended up going to deepnest and the resting grounds before finding the bridge to the city of tears

that's called *locked door*

w

“A deep well of lore that would launch several youtube careers...” LMAO

18:19 okay, that´s it! i´m going to sub now-

i already saw some footage and it being featured in game design analyses by adam millard. and always thought this looks actually really good. now i started this video and thought what the heck before i get to many spoilers, im gonna get it right now. i know im late to the party but whatever...

For Zote : AND IN THE FUCKING GOD DOMAIN !!!! the 57 fucking little shit

Thank you

Yeah the game definitely stops holding your hand in the city of tears considering I had to google how to get out

I remember the first time I played this. I was frustrated at how little information you got. After losing 8000 geo, I quit. However a friend who got me to initially try it told me about the guy shop who trade ransid eggs to bring the soul to his location (ensuring I won't lose my geo again) After starting over, the gane grew on me and now I play every quarter. (I'm trying to find everything without any guides) If they had explained the dying and losing the remnant, I wouldn't have quit and needed a third party to convince me to given it another go.

God I love hollow knight so much! Great video!

Amazing video! Great work. :)

there, now you've made me start hollow knight again! I only ever got the bad ending as I could never defeat the traitor lord...

i stuck on soul master lol XD

I remember trying to get to the top of the Crystal Peak without the Monarch Wings. I didn't want to look anything up, so I just kept at it until I figured out I could bounce off of one of the miner's pickaxes in mid-air and make it up to an otherwise inaccessible ledge. It felt really good collecting that pale ore.

I love this game but I end up running around lost and stoned a lot. But with how pretty it is, that's no problem.

you could make 'the level design of Ori and the will of the wisps'

That was a beautiful testament to Hallow Knight, I loved it!!!

19:24 the Asylum Demoni, Bell Gargoyles, Iron Golem, Nito, Bed of Chaos, Four King, Seath and more important the immortal Pinwheel are skipable

I just got the game and refused to play it for in a few days Then I decided to watch the video and had it all spoiled Good video though! Ima still play it I think

The greatest game ever. After skyrim elder scrolls V of course.

Man, Hollow Knight is SUCH a good game

You can also finish the game without isma's tear. This is how my playthrough was.

I mean, I'll usually uninstall games as soon as I see the credits. But I keep coming back to HK. I've played other stuff since getting the first ending, but I'll keep it installed, and every now and again I'll just feel it call to me. I've still got to beat the third level of the colosseum of fools, still got to fill out the pokedex (I refuse to call it anything else).

one year later, and im still excited for silksong

This is one of the few games where I refused to look anything up online while I was playing and I’m so thankful for that

I was so sad when Myla got infected

32:36 why wouldn’t you want to use the compass? It’s op, no reason not to use it

@Jacob P. for real, it carried me through the radiance.

@randomguy6679 Works very well paired with Gathering Swarm

So great for boss fights, amirite?

Imagine experiencing 20 hours of HK and get the easy ending then figure out there is more content, just to youtube you're way through it and still feel like you can talk about exploring HK authentically, what a joke man, makes sense 30% of what you said was literally wrong, you didn't even play the game

with the part about the radiance, that gave you guys trouble? i beat absrad on my fist go.

40 minutes well spent. Twice actually. Haha. Watched it the first time when it was released, rewatched it now after actually playing hollow knight.

1:50 Its so cool How did the video show the game levels in this way

Well done and BTW there are three ways to the Deep Nest. 3rd is the fungal core. BTW did you miss the Dream no more ending?

cute beelets are not the only enemy in the hive. Theres also giant bees that turn into fucking drills

Why walk when you can ride?

And it all started from a little game called hungry knight

Fantastic video, and I agree with your sentiment. At least to me Hollow Knight is the best Metroidvania ever so far. Hopefully Silksong surpasses it.

Close your eyes at 1:27 and imagine he's talking about Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Simulator. You're welcome.

I finished blasphemous, darkest donjeon,xcom 2 but i cant continu this game.he s very hard for me..really.plateforms are insane if you wanna the 100%. So i only could play 7h.. really hard game.

When I realised that I had to go back into deepnest to kill herath i was like: OOHHH FUUUUU-

Excuse me, but I think you're so wrong about the true ending of the game. I finished knowing there was stuff I missed because of my inventory and game percentage, and all it took was turning on the game again and finding out I could buy the maps that I'd missed, which let me see which paths I had yet to explore. Through that I reached Kingdom's Edge. I guess finding the Abyss could be kinda hard, but I remembered seeing a seal there so I knew to check there. The only thing I really didn't know how to do was the birthplace thing, I didn't know it was supposed to be that place, but the game tells you. I just needed to pay more attention because I think Hornet says so.

Lol, Boss Keys will be back likely when Silksong, Metroid Prime 4 and BotW 2 are out. You pretty much just listed the three greatest videogame myths.

And then there are the Godmaster endings. Ha-ha! Haha ...

I like how in your boss chart, the Watcher Knights are towards the end, but in my playthrough, I fought them pretty early in the game. I was so underpowered, I don't think I could ever repeat it again lol.

you don't actually need isma's tear to get to monomon, it's just really tricky. it requires very skillful use of parkour and the crystal dash (slightly touched on in the video) and it's terrible, but you can totally do it, which is another testament to how lit this game is.

Dude I defeated the radence with the three lifeblood charms and longnail I think

Boss Keys for La-Mulana 1 & 2, my favourite Metroidvanias. This is all I ask for. Axiom Verge 1 & 2 would be interesting as well. I put Hollow Knight on hold until my frustration with it wears off. The grind became unbearable. I lost all my money in an instant death spike zone and can't get it back. Just remembering that place makes me not want to continue. Why is death not just game over? Is death not enough of a punishment? The game could have been good.

What place are you stuck on?

maybe i'm too used to Dark Souls, but i hate Hollow Knight for the combat, because in the first i have a reliable way to get stronger, in Hollow Knight i always feel like i just keep losing geo because of the unforgiving enemy design that doesn't let you get to a boss or a zone, ir shouldn't be easy, but it feels like it's just laughing at me every time i die next to my shadow

I LOVE Hollow Knight. Never finished it.

It's funny, by my pure desire to end the game with a completed map on my first playthrough, i actually managed to complete all the conditions to get to the Radiance before I'd killed the Hollow Knight, but because I didn't think to dream nail him I ended up getting a variant of the bad ending anyway :

well, without remembering that i have watched your video before, i walked just like that in the begining..... just like it was time to watch your great video asecond time, its time i start my second run. to hollownest!, and everything in between. :3

God i love 2d dark souls

I found the resting ground because my friend told me "There are no abyss pits in hollow knight."

I spent more than 80 hours on my first run, and got 109% completion. Yeah, I only finished 2 pantheons in god home lol.

most beautifully designed game ive ever played

12:16 2 more soft locks/gates I could think of: Fury of the Fallen can be acquired at the very beginning of the game if you can pogo off the spikes. Same deal with fighting Brooding Mawlek, if you're good enough at pogo-ing, and can find the secret passageway in the Forgotten Crossroads, you can beat her before False Knight.

Love the Video only complaint is the list of games in the intro, you should have added The OG Dark Souls, as that was From Softwares attempt at the style, instead of level based games like Demons Souls and Kings Field.

Got me 38 hours to the bad ending lololol

17:10 actually he can, if you pogo on furniture

there is no good or bad ending it just ends in another way, just becuse the radiance was defeated does not mean that hallownest will be alive again

Speak for yourself I thought axiom verge was much better than hollow knight

let me tell ya a secret: he does speak for himself

still hate the traitor lord...

17:12 hey you are wrong I woke up her without the wing thing.

Oh ok I did that 18:11 thing a lot

I missed some bosses, interesting. I should replay this sometime.

3 things. 1. Its called SOUL 2. Its one-third of your SOUL total 3. And finally, its called geo.

I got to the city of tears after getting the crystal heart. It didn't occur to me that I could use the mantis claw.

I plan on getting this getting this game soon not for the fun but for the SPEEDRUN

I liked hollow knight, but personally, I find it inferior to the Ori games. Hollow knight is big and beautiful, but for me, the story was too cryptic and confusing. I believe you have made a story slightly to hard if you have to google what the game is about. I would also have loved some super expensive or super late-game item, that helped you discover some of the secrets. As a completionist, I was super annoyed the number of times I had to look for rather big things in the game (like the entire hive zone!). Overall it doesn't have to be as linear as the Ori game, but make it easier (like if you have beaten the game or collected 50.000 geo or something) to discover what the game has to offer. It could make it so breakable wall slightly glows when you walk past them, not showing them on the mini-map, but does so you don't have to hit every single wall...

Stories in games are told in different ways. A story like Hollow Knight’s let’s the player decide how they interpret something. Also every single breakable wall in the game except for the entrance to the path of pain looks different visually. The ori games are incredible though and you are 100% entitled to your opinion

oi

Hey, I do partly agree with your point about the shade mechanic discouraging exploration; however, I think it also serves a different purpose exceptionally well. Hollow Knight being an extremely hard game, it requires perseverance and determination to beat. The shade mechanic encourages you to persevere instead of basically giving up for the moment and go somewhere else. If someone doesn’t have a high amount of determination alone, the shade is an incentive to go there again; and in most cases, that means starting the bossfight in the process (I think the positioning of the shade in many fights was intentional.) So, I think the shade mechanic shouldn’t be simply removed, but balanced so it encourages perseverance without discouraging exploration. Perhaps by making you lose your geo, but not have your soul vessel be cracked. Geo can be regained without fighting your shade, the other half of your soul vessel, can’t.

SomeTimes I hope i play it for the first time again , because it was such a great experiience , I can't wait to play silksong

"Ehm, 'finish the game'" love it.

On my first playthrough of the game, I spend a lot of time right at the beginning collecting money for the lumifly lantern, so I got to the resting grounds really early in the game (before fungal wastes, I think). But I told myself that I would play the base game first before doing anything from the dlcs, and I knew that one of them was called "hidden dreams", so I ended up not using the dream nail or collecting essence until I actually looked at what hidden dreams added.

I feel bad only paying 15 dollars for this masterpiece of a game. It deserves to be at least 60 tbh

no cost too great

Cool

I've purchased it four times. Steam, Switch, and twice for friends.

I'm sorry, but I can't forgive a Metroidvania that fails on exploration and upgrades. Actively discouraging the player from exploring and having the bare minimum effort put into upgrades makes it clear that Team Cherry went into this thinking about how to design an action game- when I play Metroidvanias, I want more than just good boss fights, I want an ADVENTURE that drives me to explore and gives satisfying new abilities. Both of which Hollow Knight severely lacks. I do hope that Team Cherry studies some of the great adventure games of the past before releasing Hornet's spinoff.

@AdamTheFanatic you're confusing criticism with a bad opinion that no one agrees with and is demonstrably false on all accounts. Like the "discourages exploration". The game doesn't discourage exploration, it encourages caution while exploring, but when you die it gives you an incentive to go back out and continue exploring by removing 1/3rd of your soul and all of your geo, but giving you a chance to earn it back by simply going back to where you were. It also demonstrates very early on that exploring leads to profit and upgrades.

Don't spend time arguing with Hollow Knight fans tbh, it's not worth your time

@AdamTheFanatic How are they contradicting statements by saying they have played other games?

@Jonah Clements Yes, how dare I question when someone contradicts their earlier statements. To all you trolls out there that can't handle someone criticizing flaws in your favorite game, I'm making it so this conversation doesn't show up in my notifications anymore. No game is above reproach, especially one as flawed as Hollow Knight.

@AdamTheFanatic You: "Well you just haven't played other games so you have no idea of what a good game is." Him: "I have played all these games." You: "No, you're lying."

Shoutout to all my homies that made it over the Crystal Peak and got the Dream Nail before even getting the Mantis Claw........

Great video but I would like to note that confessor jiji can summon your shadow to you if you want to try a different path.

Please tell me how you got those level camera pans 2:10 ?

@Game Maker's Toolkit Hehe, alright. Not gonna bother 🙂

A debug mode and hard work ;)

its the grave of wyrm and it always is raining ash

One correction: you dont need ismas tear to access monomon... I learned that the hard way (edit) ah... you mentioned that you can do that later on ion the video... now im confused

Oh man, such an amazing deep dive! I am beyond pysched to learn that not only were the things I so loved completely intentional, but that the dev's design went even deeper than I dreamed could have been intended! I started this game last year, so had all the free DLC, and I didn't look up a single guide or hint until I semi-accidentally heard that there was a boss called "The Radiance" when looking at something related to GodHome, which merged with a vague memory I had of there being a "true ending"... Ironically, I had Dream Nailed the Hollow Knight's cracked skull on one of my first couple kills and went "huh, guess not" when it did nothing. Either I hadn't unlocked the void soul (which I had no idea was a requirement until watching this video - I honestly thought it was just a secret "final" charm with lots of attached lore), or I just missed the timing and so didn't find the final boss until finishing the majority of the GodHome ultra-endgame content. I'm pretty sure I had the Void Soul and my timing was off, because my completion percentage on that first kill was something like 92% with 75 hours played... (A solid 10 of which was The Path of Pain, which I found completely accidentally, haha). I'm bummed that my main save file is still sitting at 111% out of the 112% DLC total, as I can't quite beat the final boss of the 4th gauntlet in GodHome, especially since I'm so proud to have gotten that far without any but the tiny spoiler mentioned above... (I'm aware there's some more that is not counted for % - including what I correctly assumed is a 5th ultimate gauntlet.) I'm also bummed that you didn't enjoy the true ending content - having found it organically, I was in a constant state of "what in the heck is going on?! This is so creepy and awesome!"

I can't overstate just how discouraging the death mechanic was for me. I actually stopped my first playthrough after getting frustrated with it. I remember actually feeling nauseous when even considering going on with the game. Only because a friend kept nagging me about how great the game is did I eventually start a second run. Sry for necroposting.