Hollow Knight: Chibi Dark Souls
Hollow Knight is a 2D platforming developed and produced by Team Cherry. The entire project was funded via Patreon and the campaign was so successful that they were able to not only create three full free DLCs for the game but also a complete sequel.
Hollow Knight is a fairly classic metroidvania game with a focus on combat and exploration. The combat system is really expertly tuned. There are dozens of boss fights, all with unique combat patterns and all of them will kill you several times. Similar to Soulsborne games the object is to memorize the boss's attack pattern so you can dodge and evade their attacks. Notably because the game occurs in a two dimensional world, the boss's patterns are much easier to recognize and adapt to than any Soulsborne games and this might be a reasonable introduction to the genre for children.
The combat system is simple but effective with an emphasis on fighting defensively but the game offers rewards for improving your skills. When you understand the boss's basic movements you'll be able to wear him down and get by him but as you get better you'll find ample opportunities to sneak in extra hits without taking damage. Each boss also has multiple modes that he can be fought in offering a sharply escalating challenge for pros.
The game has a heavy focus on exploration and gives very little guidance to the player. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of exploration driven games. I was more tolerant when I was younger but now that I'm in my 30s, since I work and have various other demands on my schedule, my time is at a premium and I want to optimize my gaming so I get the most bang for my buck; wandering around aimlessly hoping to find something doesn't appeal to me.
Moreover if you do want to make an exploration focused game it's important to take me places I want to go. Hollow Knight isn't an ugly game but it's not "Breath of the Wild" or DragonAge or Skyrim either. Given the fact that Team Cherry is a three man crowd funded studio, it's utterly unfair to compare Hollow Knight to any of these triple A games but the fact remains that with few exceptions, none of the areas in Hollow Knight were attractive enough to make me want to look around and explore and that's a fatal flaw in any exploration based game..
If you don't have the budget to make areas that really look nice and impressive, another potential approach is to plant seeds of interest. If NPCs talk about areas and why they're important before you arrive in them, they can help build up hype for these areas and give you some ideas for things in the region which are worth looking for.
About ten hours into the game I reached an area called the Queen's Garden and spent three hours hunting for the White Lady which I vaguely remembered from a Let's Play I watched. I wasn't sure if she was involved in the plot in any serious way but as long as I hadn't found the White Lady I knew I hadn't cleared the area. After beating my head against the wall for several hours I realized that she must be down one of the passages I couldn't break through yet and resolved to go elsewhere.
This was a huge waste of time and it could have been made much better with a little direction.
There's barely a story to speak of. The game borrows heavily from DarkSoul's style of story telling (Was that a joke? I'm honestly not sure myself). The game makes frequent references to "Soul" and "Void" without ever really establishing what those concepts mean or if the game has any philosophy at all.
The basic story is the game's inhabitants are suffering from a plague that either drives them made or reduces them to beasts. The society reacts to this plague by having a sacrifice who absorbs it and gets sealed away but now the previous sacrifice is weakening and you need to kill and replace him.
Mind you, I only know this plot because I looked it up on wikipedia. The game talks in such abstruse language (when it bothers to talk at all) that's it incredibly difficult to ever figure out what's going on.
My previous reviews on DarkSouls and Bloodborne already establish that I'm not a huge fan of games that don't provide direction, it would probably be a waste of time to hash over that any further. Hollow Knight falls squarely into that mold which will either annoy you, or it won't.
I remember I played for about four hours before I encountered Hornet for the first time and almost six before she gave me my first "quest", this being to find the grave of someone. It was another three hours before I found said grave and when I did I had already forgotten I was even looking for it. Hours later, I realized I had actually found the WRONG grave and what Hornet had told me to find was in a completely different area that I hadn't found yet. The lack of direction annoyed me.
That said the game is enjoyable. The combat system is particularly impressive and is a good way to kill some time. There are some brutal boss gauntlets in the game which I never bothered to complete (sadly these gauntlets do lock the true ending) and a truly impressively sized world to play in.
It's certainly not on par with games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne but it's definitely worth a look.
Final Score: 7/10