Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight
By; Teagan Booth
Warning: the following article contains many spoilers for the lore of Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight's story is a maze of stories within stories and not all of which will be explained here– but I have captured enough of it to intrigue and lure you in. Sorry in advance for your next gaming addiction :].
General Info
The 2D Metroidvania story game Hollow Knight was first created and published by the Australian independent studio Team Cherry for Windows Steam on February 24th, 2017. Later expanded to support platforms like; Linux, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox One. Starting back in 2014, Team Cherry launched a Kickstarter complete with poster art and rough gameplay clips hoping to raise 57,000 dollars. In just a few months they surpassed their goal, and Hollow Knight began development. Its popularity skyrocketed after its release. The pleasing art style accompanied by lore and fun gameplay made Hollow Knight one of the most successful games of 2017.
Hollow Knight follows the journey of a silent, bug-like protagonist– known as "The Knight" or "Ghost"– through the ruined bug kingdom of Hallownest. A once thriving civilization filled with the hustle and bustle of life, now lies bare and dead. The horror in Hollow Knight isn’t always loud– but it’s built into the architecture, soundtrack, and ambient sounds. Hallownest is an underground labyrinth of broken cities, corrupted creatures, lost gods, and a ravaging infection that drives bugs into madness.
Autoethnographic Reflection
My initial exposure to Hollow Knight came through fan art on Pinterest, back in 2020. I found the pieces inspiring and enjoyable to come across. Oftentimes, I’d catch myself sketching the characters and environments in my class notebook. It wasn’t until four years later that I finally decided to purchase the game. After playing it for an hour, its art, music, and game mechanics had captured my attention. I realized Hollow Knight was my new favourite single-player game while fighting the three Mantis Lords– those first few attempts were some of the most fun I’ve had in solitary gaming. When I first realized defeating the first lord wasn't enough, and the two others began attacking, I felt overwhelmed at first, but once I found their rhythm I was able to overcome them and move forward. Of course, I must touch on Deepnest. This was an area of the game I had heard of as being hated and disliked, and I must say I can understand the distaste. I remember how the music faded and the unsettling atmosphere began to creep in. Spiders scuttled across the corners of the screen, making uncomfortable pitter patter noises that stuck really added to the tension and atmosphere. In every room I entered, I got the feeling I was being watched. The time I spent in Deepnest during my first play through I was on edge. Even now, when I've put in close to two hundred hours in the game Deepnest is still a place I avoid, if I can help it.
Something that stuck out to me when first learning about Hollow Knight is it's use of darkness representing good, and light for evil. These parallels are everywhere throughout games and cinema, however the roles are usually reversed. I have taken inspiration from this idea, including it in several of my short stories since. It is one I thoroughly enjoy playing around with. I did not anticipate a cute Metroidvania game to make me feel so unsettled, or captivate my attention so completely as Hollow Knight has. When I first started playing it was from a curiosity of the fan art, but now Hollow Knight is one of my all time favourite games to date.
Style and Art
Every frame in Hollow Knight is filled with an atmosphere I have rarely seen in games. Art director for Team Cherry, Ari Gibson, emphasized the game's hand drawn style, sketching concepts in cafes before scanning them in digitally into the computer. He described the process as: "thousands of simple things all jammed together" to create a well thought out world, (Gibson, INTERVIEW W/ ARI GIBSON, 48:30.) This strategy gives Hallownest a unique and organic feel, with each environment feeling lived in or completely abandoned. The use of background light and shadows combined with subtle animation in both the fore and background deepens the game's sense of beauty, helping to immerse you in the game's depth. The layers move independently from eachother as the Knight moves throughout the map, creating the impression of grand caverns or smaller alcoves. The game area Greenpath is a wonderful example of lighting and colours merging to create atmosphere. The clean line work minimalist palette stuck out to me right away, giving visual where cute and simple characters find themes of death and darkness.
Basic Game Outline
In early game, Hollow Knight is fairly straight forward. You begin in the small town of Dirtmouth, explore the Forgotten Crossroads, meet the NPC's, and learn how to control the Knight. Once you obtain the first of three spells by beating the Forgotten Crossroads boss, you are able to unlock the new lush and lively Greenpath, wherein you gain the dash ability. This was where the game really began grabbing my attention, the dash made travel and combat much easier and more enjoyable– I do feel however that it could have been implemented a little earlier. From Greenpath, you make your way to the Fungal Wastes where you fight the Mantis Lords and gain the wall-cling ability, freeing up the games vertical dimension and allowing the player to reach new areas they couldn't before. It's around here that Hollow Knight feels larger and more interconnected.
Next is the City of Tears, a once full city home to Hallownest's nobles. Here you find the second spell, and are able to open the Crystal Peak, located in the top right of Hallownest. The city Waterways lie directly below, but can only be accessed with a key the player finds on their travels. The City of Tears is constantly raining as water leaks from the Blue Lake located in the Resting Grounds above. Once in the Resting Grounds, an ancient graveyard, you gain access to the dream nail– an item that allows the Knight to enter the thoughts of the dead– revealing hidden layers of Hollow Knight’s hidden story– and unlocking new routes toward the games end.
The Knight must travel throughout the kingdom, locating the Dreamers, and slaying them. Once all three Dreamers have been killed, the player is shown a cut scene where it is revealed the Temple of the Black Egg has been opened. Inside the Knight must confront the "Hollow Knight," the Vessel who was chosen by the Pale King to imprison the infection, and take his place. Sacrificing themselves to save the survivors of the Hallownest.
Divine Figures
As with many mythic narratives and lore heavy story games, Hollow Knight has its share of divine figures who shape the history of Hallownest.
The Radiance
Resembling a moth the ancient god Radiance is the embodiment of light, purity, and divine control twisted into horror. Once powerful and revered for its brilliant light by the moth civilizations of Hallownest's Crown, the Radiance found itself abandoned and forgotten as they turned their backs on it to follow Pale King's new empire. It was their worship that had allowed the Radiance to become a powerful celestial being, and without it the Radiance was left weak. Angry, the Radiance spread a luminous infection to consume the minds and bodies of Hallownest's inhabitants, gaining power with every soul it enslaved. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection– in this case decay and infection– provokes horror as it threatens the boundaries of identity and wholeness. The radiant plague has spread throughout Hallownest, seeping deep into the shells of its people, turning them mindless and violent. There’s a horrifying fear in watching as your body and mind slip away, knowing you’re still in there somewhere, but powerless to stop the corruption as it twists and consumes you. It’s exactly what Kristeva describes in her work, where you become something to be feared. Add to that the idea of an alien-force like the Radiance bending your will and using your body as a puppet and slave– that notion is terrifying. The player repeatedly witnesses the bodies and identities of others get stripped away and deformed, (Kristeva, p.213, 216.)
The Pale King
The Pale King represents order, civilization, and rational control. His attempt to contain the Radiance and purify the bugs of Hallownest through sacrifice led to the kingdom's downfall. When the Pale King arrived in Hallownest, it was no more than a sprawling mass of tunnels and towns. Seeing potential for rule, the Pale King began building his empire of worshippers, convincing tribes of bugs to follow him on his path for greatness. Among these were the moth tribes of Hallownest's Crown.
In his making of the Vessels, (such as the Knight,) the Pale King tried to create the perfect species– emotionless and immune to the Radiance's deadly infection. He did this by having many thousands of eggs with The White Lady– his wife and Queen of Hallownest– and throwing the eggs into the Void pools in the Abyss. In the end, he was both successful and failed in his task. He was able to create a "Pure Vessel" to imprison the Radiance's infection, but it did not happen until long after his death and the kingdom's ruin. His failure reveals the uselessness of denying imperfection, making him like a figure of myth who destroyed that which he wished to protect– a Theseus of Hollow Knight.
Void Entity
A creature of pure Void– an ancient, vaguely liquid, and powerful substance of which all the Vessels are made– the Void Entity is a collective of consciousness taking on a physical form. In ancient times, it is believed the cosmic void was worshipped by many tribes of insects, and its pools were treated as sacred. The history of Hollow Knight proves that large collectives of worshippers give power to the divine, as such was the case with the Radiance. The devotion of the Void's fanatics gave the Void awareness and a physical form, becoming the "Void Entity," or "Lord of Shades." The Void Entity ruled the Abyss for an unknown period of time, keeping to itself, and not caring for the world around it. In this sense, the Void Entity can be read as an embodiment of Jerome Cohen’s notion that "the monster is the harbinger of category crisis," a chaotic deity neither alive nor dead, (Cohen, p.45.) As the ancient civilization died, the Void Entity lost its power and collective consciousness, leading it to go dormant and lose its physical form. This was until the Pale King used Void to create the Vessels. The Pale King gave many forms of consciousness to the already unstable Void, resulting in its chaos being contained in many Vessels. In one ending of the game, we see the return of the Void Entity as the Knight merges with his fallen sibling's essence to defeat the Radiance.
Horror relations
Hollow Knight in itself is not a horror game. The game has more than enough dark and Gothic connections to feel like a horror tale in a unique visual style. The feeling I got in places such as Deepnest sometimes caused such nerve racking anxiety I was afraid to move. Touching again on Julia Kristeva's work on abjection, she describes horror as that moment when what we cast out– whether waste, decay, or other– starts to leak back in and threaten the boundary of the self, (Kristeva, p.213, 216.) Hallownest is in collapse everywhere, there's evidence of what once was, and the infection of what is now. Empty towns filled with mentally broken or breaking survivors. A good is an example of this is the NPC Myla. When we first meet her, Myla is singing songs and mining gemstones in the Crystal Peak. However, as the game goes on Myla is unable to resist the infection, and the voice of the Radiance commands her to kill the Knight. Myla is, as Kristeva describes, a good example how "disgust can often be mingled with empathy," (Kristeva, p.213, 216.) That's body horror, but not of the usual gross mutilated variety, but the fear of looking in a mirror and seeing something other than yourself.
That same feeling continues in the game's soundtrack and sometimes the lack there of. Christopher Larkin– Hollow Knight's musical composer– uses leitmotifs to tie different layers of the game together, building continuity and nostalgia for later on in the game. Soft strings and piano can be heard for lore heavy areas, while loud and harsh notes surround divine encounters/boss fights. Bernard Perron notes that horror games often use acoustics to better immerse the player in moments of drama or tension, "where emotions are felt through the screen," (Perron, p.138.) Larkin aced this principal with the music. I never found it overwhelming or annoying, instead it adding to the game in a way that makes the player feel more immersed. Larkin’s music helps to build the game’s emotional rhythm; comfort and safety in towns like Dirtmouth and the Lake of Unn, despair and loss in places like the Abyss and Deepnest. The occasional absence of music ties in with Michał Mochocki and Raine Koskimaa’s work on story beats, or what they call "sensory and motion beats." Useful for explaining how the game makes those quiet moments land, breaking the narrative down into tiny things that together create a unique atmosphere. (Mochocki/Koskimaa, p.6-18). A wonderful example of this would be when the Knight is on one heart, or mask. The screen takes on a faint dimming effect and dark streaks form in the edges, the Knight is bent over slightly, leaking Void from its shell. It’s not dramatic enough to interrupt gameplay, but it creates tension and the sense of fragility and pressure. That links straight into Thurgill’s topophobia, the idea that space itself can be terrifying. Deepnest and The Abyss aren’t scary because they’re crowded with monsters (although they are,) they’re frightening because the atmosphere in the spaces make you feel small and lost, (Thurgill, p.33-56).
Video Gameplay
“HOLLOW KNIGHT Gameplay Walkthrough FULL GAME (4K 60FPS) No Commentary” uploaded by Shirrako, published March 15th, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wIRNsDPPw
Citations and Sources
- Cohen, Jerome. "MONSTER CULTURE (SEVEN THESES)." In A. S. Mittman & M. Hensel (Eds.), Classic Readings on Monster Theory, pp. 43–54. Arc Humanities Press, 2018.
- Kristeva, Julia. “Powers of Horror.” An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, pp.213-216, 1982.
- Mochocki, Michał, and Raine Koskimaa. "Story Beats in Videogames as Value-Driven Choice-Based Unit Operations." Images, vol. 29, no. 38, June 2021. Peer-reviewed.
- Perron, Bernard, editor. “Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play.” McFarland & Company, p.83, 2009.
- Stein, Eric, “Pure Vessels: The Insect and the Other in Dark Souls and Hollow Knight.” Digital Games Research Association Conference Proceedings, 2020. https://philarchive.org/archive/STEPVT?utm_source
- Thurgill, James, “A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes.” The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.33-56, 2018
- “INTERVIEW W/ ARI GIBSON: Hollow Knight & Team Cherry - The Creative Hustlers Show #45” Youtube, uploaded by Frame Freak Studio, published on July 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlrtpDqDJbI&t=189s
- Team Cherry. Hollow Knight [Cover art]. 2017. Team Cherry Press Kit, https://www.hollowknight.com/
- “Maps.” Hollow Knight Wiki, Fextralife, https://hollowknight.wiki.fextralife.com/Maps
- DARKDOG15566158. (2023, January 1). [#HollowKnight]. X. https://x.com/DARKDOG15566158/status/1485878474568978432
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- AidaitaBird. (2019, March 25). [The Pale King of Hallownest]. X. https://x.com/AidaitaBird/status/1111841454371033090
AI Disclosure
Grammar checkers were used for punctuation and ChatGPT was used to help site sources.