I don’t think I’ve posted any video’s from Mark Brown’s other show, Boss Keys. Immediately in the wake of my having finished Hollow Knight seems like as good a time as any to correct that omission. But, as ever, I have a bone to pick with some of Brown’s (nevertheless superb) analysis.
At 12:43, Brown says that the plethora of routes through Hollow Knight are excellent for multiple playthroughs and special challenges, but then adds (with a lovely title card for emphasis) that this provides a feeling of legitimate Agency. Except that, in reality, it only provides agency for the handful circumstances he identified, because you have to know where to go and what you’ll find in order to make a deliberate choice.
For a new and unassisted player, the choice to explore Deepnest versus the Resting Grounds is as trivial as “left” versus “right”, because the player doesn’t have any basis for picking one over the other. Indeed, in spite of Team Cherry’s efforts to provide alternate pathways and prevent players from getting stuck, the game tends to turn into the same aimless wandering as any Metroidvania: long stretches where there’s no clear indication of where the player could or should go, leaving them to either explore at random or systematically check every dead end.
In my own journey, my focus was finding the cartographer in each region. This way, I could unlock that area’s map and avoid as much aimless wandering as possible. But in an early region, the Fog Canyon, the cartographer is blocked behind an impassable “Shadow Gate”. Therefore, I changed objectives: first find a way to cross this gate, then resume my mapping efforts.
After hours of directionless stumbling about, I was still no closer to achieving my humble cartographic goals. By pure chance, I bumped into new abilities on occasion, but never one that helped with the gate. The game steadfastly refused to even provide clues or guidance – I was working blind. Unbeknownst to me, the gate is there because there is also a late-game boss in the same area. To acquire the abilities necessary for my humble goal, I would need to almost finish the entire game.
That’s not agency, it’s the precise opposite: total frustration. After I reached the limit of my patience, I spoiled the game by reading a guide. This finally gave me the agency that Brown talks about: with foreknowledge of my destination, I could choose how to proceed, and the game resumed a brisk pace. What a shame, then, that guidance of this sort was not something the designers thought to include within the game itself.
