Depends on what you want out of a game like this. Hollow Knight's biggest strength, besides its art style and mechanics, is its sense of exploration and discovery. It is the heir apparent to the Souls games and Bloodborne in that regard; no other games have captured, as well as Hollow Knight, that Souls-esque sense of a sprawling world with history and the descent to darker weirder places, layers upon layers of intricately constructed environments to explore, uncovering cryptic lore and meeting interesting characters as you make your way through a place. The world that Team Cherry constructed is astounding, it's bigger and more smartly designed than you would imagine; it's hard to really appreciate the level of craftsmanship until you're playing and realize how dense it is but also how each area has a logical narrative reason for why it's the way it is and its location on the map.Is there a chance I could like this game even if I'm not a fan of Metroidvanias? I just could never get into axiom verge or any of the Metroid games. I did enjoy cave story though which I suppose has some metroidvania elements
Wrote this as my blurb for my GOTY list last year
Hollow Knight is the best Metroidvania I've ever played, bar none, and it's the only other game to capture that elusive essence that make the Souls game so engaging. The oppressive Gothic atmosphere, the layered complex world that grows darker and more haunting the deeper you descend, the meticulously constructed level design that connects regions in fascinating ways through both location and lore, the cryptic yet intriguing story and how the story is revealed through level design, secrets, characters, and so on, the compelling NPCs that can reveal a lot through only a few words and their design and their place in the world, the sense of mastery and overcoming challenge, the tight controls, the exploration and feeling of learning a map that Dark Souls and Bloodborne did so well, all with its own unique style, aesthetic, and lore
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