Because risk-taking led to death, and death meant starting over and losing much of my progress, I found myself playing a lot more conservatively than I would have otherwise. I was discouraged from risk-taking behavior in my exploration throughout the game. This translated into a playstyle that I wouldn’t have adopted if the game was designed differently. In addition to the punishment of moving you physically far away from your goal, the game requires you to traverse enemy-infested screens and platforming sequences from hell. Some games even lock the door behind you once you’ve decided to conquer a boss, but Hollow Knight seems to do the opposite, sending you halfway (or further) across the intricate map. To remove you so far from the action discourages the tendency that most games teach, which is to keep trying. Hollow Knight sparingly places its benches across the map, a design decision that I can’t really understand in terms of player motivation. Instead, you spawn about ten screens away. Here’s the rub: when you die, you don’t spawn ten steps away from the boss arena. Though the boss encounters require you to learn a boss’ attacks, patterns, and phases, the fights are always fun and encourage you to reach new skill ceilings. Hollow Knight is more frustrating than it is difficult, in my experience. Hollow Knight is not an easy game, but it certainly doesn’t require the kind of player persistence of games like Sekiro. In Dark Souls, your spawns are anchored to bonfires in Hollow Knight, your spawns are anchored to benches. No doubt that the developers of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry, were influenced by From Software’s Souls series, and one of those influences is the checkpoint system. The game maintains a deliberately difficult combat system that many players think should allow for easier, or at least customizable, options. But the game has one design decision that ultimately drove the nail through the coffin of my playthrough, and that decision was to limit respawn points to far-away benches.ĭifficulty in video games has become a trending topic due to the recent release of From Software’s newest title, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

The game boasts perfectly unique and immersive environments, a glorious soundtrack, and high-energy fun combat. This was an emotional decision to make, because Hollow Knight is such a masterfully crafted piece of art. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.This past weekend, after 27 hours in the game, I made the decision to stop streaming Hollow Knight. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a 'scraper' or 'downloader' program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.Using GameFAQs regularly with these browsers can cause temporary and even permanent IP blocks due to these additional requests. If you are using Maxthon or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, you should know that these programs send extra traffic to our servers for every page on the site that you browse.The most common causes of this issue are: Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.

Hollow knight walkthrough