Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is a 2017 Metroidvania action-adventure game developed and published by Team Cherry?, a small independent studio based in Adelaide, Australia.¹³⁷ The player controls the Knight, a silent, nameless, genderless insectoid warrior, in exploring Hallownest, a vast fallen kingdom of insects buried beneath the surface and plagued by a supernatural infection.¹⁵¹⁸ It was released for Windows, macOS, and Linux on February 24, 2017, and later brought to the Nintendo Switch and other consoles.¹³¹²

The game was built by Team Cherry’s creative core, co-directors William Pellen? and Ari Gibson?, who met through mutual friends and began entering game jams together shortly before development.⁷ Pellen served as the game’s designer and Gibson as its art supervisor, the two describing themselves as the studio’s “creative core” and “beating heart”.⁷ Both were well versed in NES-era platformers, and Gibson framed the game as “built upon our love of classic Nintendo games,” calling its arrival on the Switch “the peak of a 30-year cycle” of growing up on and then paying homage to those games.¹² The Knight was conceived during the 27th iteration of the Ludum Dare? game jam in August 2013, for which a nascent Team Cherry created a top-down survival title called Hungry Knight, in which the pale-faced, nail-wielding hero kills bugs to stave off starvation.⁷ That game remains playable on the Flash games site Newgrounds?, where it carries a user rating of one out of five stars.⁷

The full concept emerged from a subsequent game jam with the theme “Beneath the Surface,” which Team Cherry missed the deadline for but kept discussing; the idea of “the little insect knight exploring a deep, old kingdom beneath the surface of the world” snowballed from there.⁷ Team Cherry has said that because Metroidvania maps resemble ant nests anyway, setting the game in a subterranean hive made it a near-perfect match of form and theme.⁷ Development took about two years, and the game reached players after a moderately successful Kickstarter? campaign.¹²⁷

Gameplay

Hollow Knight is a 2D action-platformer centered on exploring an open, interconnected map, hunting for secrets, and finding abilities that unlock previously inaccessible areas.⁸¹⁷ The Knight begins with a basic jump and a sword-like weapon called the Nail, gaining spells and movement abilities such as a dash, wall climb, and double jump as players delve deeper.¹⁵¹⁷ Hitting enemies fills a resource called Soul, which can be channeled to heal or to cast ranged attacks.¹¹¹⁷ On death, the Knight loses its currency, called Geo, and part of its Soul, leaving behind a shade the player must return to and defeat to reclaim what was lost.²¹¹⁸ Completing the game unlocks a permadeath Steel Soul mode.¹⁸

The game deviates from the genre’s usual structure in withholding a fixed path forward: after the Knight learns to air dash and wall jump, players can go almost anywhere in Hallownest, restricted mainly by their ability to overcome the enemies guarding each area rather than by a prescribed sequence.¹⁵ This openness, reviewers noted, produces a distinctive sense of aimlessness and discovery not found in other nonlinear platformers.¹⁵⁹

A charm system lets players equip badges that modify abilities within a limited number of notches, forcing trade-offs between effects such as increased Nail range, greater Soul generation, doubling health while preventing healing, or showing the player’s location on the map.¹¹¹⁵ Reviewers frequently swapped between “exploration” and “boss” charm loadouts.²¹ The mapping system is unorthodox: rooms do not fill in automatically, and players must first buy a regional map from a wandering cartographer named Cornifer, then purchase a quill in Dirtmouth to add outlying rooms at the iron benches that serve as save points.¹⁵²⁰ Quick travel is provided by the Stag stations, a stag-beetle subway that carries the Knight across the map.¹⁷ The game features over 140 enemies and roughly 30 bosses.¹⁴²¹

Combat is built around timing quick directional Nail slashes with jumps and dashes; hits feel weighty, pausing the game for a split second on connection, and most enemies must be defeated with a “dodge-swing-dodge-swing” rhythm rather than button-mashing.¹¹¹⁷ Team Cherry modeled the Knight’s movement on the Mega Man and Mega Man X series, giving the character no acceleration or deceleration on horizontal movement so that “any hit they take or mistake they make could have been avoided right up until the last second”.¹² Gibson described the world as “a game based largely on Metroid,” built around “the joy of getting lost and finding your way”.¹² Reviewers also compared its cryptic, environmentally told lore and punishing death penalties to those of Dark Souls, and Steam users tag the game “Souls-like”.²⁰¹³

Setting and art

Hallownest is a once-thriving kingdom fallen into decay, entered through a well beneath the fading surface town of Dirtmouth, whose lone remaining resident, the Elderbug, warns that bugs who venture below are stripped of their memories and driven mad.¹²¹⁵ Its distinct regions include the rain-blanketed City of Tears, built beneath a subterranean lake; the overgrown Queen’s Gardens, once a monarch’s private sanctuary; the mushroom-dominated Fungal Wastes; the lush Greenpath; the fog- and jellyfish-filled Fog Canyon; and the dark, spider-filled Deepnest.¹²¹⁷¹⁵ Different insect species live as tribes across these regions, from the Mantis tribe of the Fungal Wastes to the bees to the flukeworms of the waterways.¹⁸ Each region carries a distinct color scheme layered over an omnipresent midnight blue, with an acrid orange representing the infection that glows in the eyes of hostile bugs and bursts from them when they die.¹⁵

The game’s story is told obliquely, doled out through dialogue, environmental clues, and a special ability that reveals characters’ thoughts, and it is difficult to piece together fully even after completion.¹⁷²⁰ Its inhabitants are quirky, cartoonish bug-people, including a giggling shopkeeper, an amnesiac wandering swordsman, and the boisterous Zote the Mighty, who will recite all 57 of his precepts.⁸¹¹ Characters relocate around the map as the story progresses, so their dialogue can be missed entirely.²⁰¹⁸

The game’s art is hand-drawn in a traditional 2D frame-by-frame style; Gibson photographed his sketches with a phone and cleaned them up on a computer before scanning them into the engine, working to a “keep it simple” mantra that he credited with allowing a small team to build so large a world in two years.¹² Maintaining a sense of discovery while still giving players a useful map was, Team Cherry said, the single biggest design challenge of development.¹² The game was built in the Unity engine.¹⁶ Its haunting orchestral score, echoing the sadness of a ruined civilization, was composed and produced by Christopher Larkin?.¹⁴¹⁶

Release and reception

Hollow Knight’s PC, Mac, and Linux release passed 1 million units sold the day before its Nintendo Switch launch, a milestone that took 15 months to reach; in its first two weeks on Switch it sold more than 250,000 copies.¹² Its Switch debut was aided at E3 2018 when Reggie Fils-Aimé?, president of Nintendo of America, named the game during the company’s presentation, a moment Pellen recalled watching the game’s Discord community react to in real time.¹² As of July 2026, 97% of the game’s more than 178,000 Steam reviews were positive, and its recent reviews were rated “Overwhelmingly Positive”.¹³ The game holds a Metacritic score of 86 out of 100.¹⁹

Reviewers praised its world design, atmosphere, and combat while noting its difficulty and demanding structure. PC Gamer? called it “a new classic, with a dense and detailed world full of secrets to discover,” and scored it 92 out of 100.⁸¹⁶ IGN?’s Tom Marks wrote that its lore was so deep he felt he “could practically write a book on it”.¹⁷ Nintendo World Report scored the Switch version a 10, though its reviewer scrawled in his notes that one boss was “so frustratingly hard that I cannot recommend this game”.²¹ Not all reception was uniformly positive: Rock, Paper, Shotgun?’s John Walker judged it “genuinely good, but rather unoriginal,” a “stock metroidvania” unfavorably compared to Ori and the Blind Forest.⁹

The game has since appeared on numerous best-of-all-time lists, including those of Rolling Stone and IGN, and GamingBolt’s, which placed it 14th and called it “one of the very best” indie Metroidvanias.³²⁵ Team Cherry supported the game with four free content packs — Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood, and Godmaster — adding bosses, quests, charms, and music.¹⁴¹⁶ A Nintendo Switch 2 Edition with higher resolution, improved frame rates, and additional effects was later released.¹⁴ A sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong?, was long in development.⁵