Hollow Knight: Explore a Vast, Ruined Kingdom

Overview

Hollow Knight is a 2D action-adventure from Team Cherry, released on PC on February 24, 2017. You play a small nameless knight who descends from the withered surface town of Dirtmouth into Hallownest, a fallen insect kingdom below.

No objective is handed to you. The cryptic remarks of the bugs you meet, and your own memory of doors you could not open, are the only guidance you get.

The loop is: descend, hit a dead end, earn a new ability, return to what you could not pass. Dash, wall-cling, and a second jump arrive gradually through bosses and hidden rooms.

Crucially, the game does not give you a map. You buy each area's map from the cartographer Cornifer somewhere inside that area, and it is only written in when you sit on a bench.

Working out where you are is itself the early game.

Features and Systems

Combat is melee, built around your nail, which swings up and down as well as sideways. Striking downward in mid-air bounces you upward — the "pogo" — and later areas expect you to cross spikes and enemy heads that way.

Fighting and traversal are the same skill, so boss fights often ask you to hit something in order to stay airborne.

Healing is not automatic. You spend Soul gathered by hitting enemies, and you must stand still to channel it.

Offensive spells draw on the same pool, so every fight is a running choice between healing and damage. That single shared resource is what makes avoiding hits feel immediately rewarding.

Build variety comes from Charms. Notch slots are limited, so an expensive charm crowds out others: trade away your position marker for damage, or movement speed for a safety net when hit.

There is no correct loadout — reconfiguring for a specific boss is the practical use.

The death penalty is unusual. A Shade stays where you fell, holding your Geo and part of your Soul capacity.

To recover it you must return and defeat it. Dying deep in dangerous territory makes recovery harder, so "how far do I push before returning to a bench" is a constant judgment call.

System Requirements

Demands are modest, as you would expect from a 2D title. Steam lists the following.

The recommended GTX 1050 sits just above integrated graphics. Most recent laptops clear that bar even without gaming hardware, so the entry barrier is genuinely low.

Recommended VRAM is only 2GB, which is a reasonable ask for hand-drawn 2D art.

The CPU side deserves a note. Both the i3-3240 and the i5-3470 are old four-thread parts, meaning the floor is low — but input precision decides outcomes here.

If frames stutter during a boss, attacks you should dodge will land. Treat a stable 60fps as your real target rather than the listed minimum.

At 9 GB installed, storage is unlikely to be a concern.

How It Differs From Other Metroidvanias

Most games in the genre place objective markers or keep a quest log. Hollow Knight has almost neither.

Your hints are indirect NPC dialogue and pins you place on the map yourself. That refusal to guide you is the source of the discovery, and for some players the single biggest source of frustration.

The difficulty also has a particular flavor. Bosses are tuned around learning attack patterns and reducing mistakes, so persistence matters more than raw reflexes.

There is no difficulty setting: when you are stuck, the only adjustable variables are your charms and your own practice.

It has also grown substantially through free updates — Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood, and Godmaster — which folded extra bosses and quests into the base game. Nothing is a separate purchase.

Getting Started

The first few hours combine weak attacks, slow movement, and no map, and that is where people quit. A few things make it easier.

• Always sit on a bench when you find one. Saving, map updates, and charm changes all happen there.
• Listen for Cornifer's humming. Until you buy his map, that area is not recorded at all.
• Do not hoard Geo. You drop it on death, so converting it into maps and tools early loses you less.
• Remember dead ends. They are not closed forever, only for now.

Reception

Years after release, the game has held a high standing on Steam. Praise tends to focus on the atmosphere built by hand-drawn backgrounds and the soundtrack, on how new abilities reframe the world you already walked, and on the weight of the boss fights.

Telling the kingdom's history through ruins and offhand remarks rather than exposition is widely admired.

Criticism converges on the lack of direction. "I wandered for hours with no idea where to go" and "not knowing my own position until I buy a map is tedious" are the recurring complaints, along with sudden difficulty spikes and long walks before fast travel opens up.

These are the flip side of the design rather than defects, so the useful question is which side you fall on.

Who It's For

• Players who enjoy filling in a map themselves.
• Players who like learning a boss over many attempts.
• Players who would rather assemble a story from fragments than be told it.
• Anyone without a powerful GPU looking for something dense but light to run.
• Anyone wanting a single long game; with side content it runs considerably long.

Who Should Skip It

The worst fit is a player with limited time who wants steady, guaranteed progress. Getting lost is designed in, and without waypoints, detours are unavoidable.

A real share of your playtime goes to confirming dead ends. If that reads as wasted time, pick something else.

The absence of difficulty options is a hard constraint. There is no easy mode or assist toggle; when stuck, you rework charms and try again.

If action games are not your strength, budget for being held up by a late boss for a long while.

Traversal friction is worth knowing in advance. Fast travel stays limited well into the game, so you will walk the same routes repeatedly, and some areas space their benches widely.

Tonally, it is dim, quiet, and lonely from beginning to end. If you want something bright and lively, it will not suit you.

The insect-based art direction is also central, so check screenshots first if that is a concern.

I cannot confirm the current language support from the data available here, so please check the supported-languages list on the store page. Store listings occasionally show information that does not match the actual product; confirm the title and screenshots before buying.

Current standing and purchase conditions change over time and are deliberately left out of this text — check the dedicated panel on this page and the store listing.

Summary

Hollow Knight asks little of your hardware and a lot of you. Against a recommended GTX 1050, 8 GB of RAM, and a 9 GB install, it demands the patience to draw your own map and to relearn bosses.

If that asymmetry sounds appealing, it will last you a long time. If a game that refuses to guide you sounds miserable, trust that instinct.