Hollow Knight Review — The Best Game I Have Ever Played

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve played a lot of games — across a lot of genres, a lot of years, a lot of late nights I probably should have spent sleeping. But Hollow Knight is the one I keep coming back to. Not because I haven’t finished it. I’ve finished it three times. 112% completion, three separate saves, every secret found, every boss beaten, every hidden path explored. I know this game better than I know most places I’ve actually been in real life. And somehow — somewhere — every time I boot it up, it still gives me something. A detail I missed. A moment that hits differently. A fight that reminds me why I fell in love with it in the first place. There are games you enjoy. There are games you respect. And then there are games like Hollow Knight that get inside you and stay there. This is that game for me.

Team Cherry made Hollow Knight with three people and a budget that most AAA studios would spend on a single cutscene. What they built is one of the most complete, confident, and emotionally devastating games I have ever played on PC. It is not a game that holds your hand. It is not a game that tells you where to go or what to feel. It trusts you completely — to explore, to struggle, to discover, and to sit with an ending that I am still not entirely over after three full playthroughs.

If you have not played Hollow Knight, nothing I write here will fully prepare you for it. But I’m going to try anyway.

Hallownest Is One Of The Greatest Game Worlds Ever Built

The first time I dropped into Hallownest, I had no idea where I was going. That’s by design. The game gives you a basic map, a nail to swing, and a direction that feels roughly like forward — and then it lets go completely. Early Hallownest is deliberately disorienting. Paths branch in ways that feel random until they don’t. Areas connect in ways you couldn’t have predicted from the surface. On my first playthrough, I spent twenty minutes going in completely the wrong direction and stumbled into an area I wasn’t supposed to reach for another few hours. I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought the game was enormous. I was right, but not in the way I expected.

What makes Hallownest extraordinary isn’t its size — it’s how lived-in it feels. Every area has its own visual identity, its own enemy types, its own atmosphere, its own story that the game communicates almost entirely without text. The Fungal Wastes feel genuinely alien. The City of Tears is the most beautiful, depressing place I’ve ever spent time in a video game — rain falling forever on a dead kingdom’s capital, music that makes you feel like you’re mourning something you never knew. Crystal Peak is stunning and immediately hostile. Deepnest — and I want to be careful about how I phrase this because I don’t want to spoil it — is the most effectively terrifying area in any game I have played. Full stop. Not because of jump scares. Because of the atmosphere, sound design, and the creeping realisation of exactly what you’ve walked into.

By my third 112% playthrough, I knew every inch of this map. Every hidden wall, every grub, every obscure corner that hides something most players never find. And I still found myself stopping to look at things. That’s the mark of a world built with genuine artistry rather than just competent game design.

The Combat Is Precise, Deep, and Completely Unforgiving

Hollow Knight’s combat looks simple from the outside. You have a nail. You swing it. You collect Soul from hitting enemies and spend it on spells or healing. That’s it on the surface. Underneath that surface is one of the most precisely designed combat systems in the Metroidvania genre, and the bosses built around it are the reason I have 112% completed this game three separate times rather than moving on after one.

The nail feels right in a way that’s hard to articulate until you’ve played enough games where it doesn’t. Every swing has weight. Every hit registers with a satisfying impact. The knockback when you hit an enemy from above gives you just enough air time to reposition for the next strike. Learning to use the nail’s directional attacks in platforming sections as well as combat took me into my second playthrough before I felt like I’d fully internalised it. That depth being available without ever being forced on you is exactly the right way to design a combat system.

The bosses are the centrepiece,e and they are spectacular. Every major boss in this game is a genuine test of everything you’ve learned up to that point, and beating them after repeated attempts feels like a real achievement rather than a scripted story beat. ThMantiLords ‘ds fight is elegant and demanding in equal measure. Soul Master is a masterclass in escalating pressure. Watcher Knights made me want to throw my keyboard through a window, and I loved every second of it. And then there’s the Path of Pain. I’m not going to say much about the Path of Pain except that it exists, that I have completed it, and that anyone who tells you it wasn’t genuinely one of the hardest things they’ve done in a video game is lying to you.

The Charm System Gives You A Different Game Every Run

One of the reasons I’ve been able to 112% this game three times without it feeling repetitive is the charm system. Charms are equippable upgrades that fundamentally change how your character plays — and I mean fundamentally, not just slightly. Quick Slash turns your nail into something that barely stops swinging. Fragile Strength makes every hit hit harder at the cost of breaking if you die. Grubsong generates Soul when you take damage, which completely changes how you think about getting hit. Joni’s Blessing removes your Soul but gives you extra health in a way that forces a completely different relationship with healing.

On my three playthroughs, as I ran completely different charm builds, I genuinely felt like different games. My first was a cautious healing-focused build because I didn’t know what I was doing, ing and dying felt expensive. My second was an aggressive Fragile Strength Quick Slash build that turned me into something terrifying in boss fights, but punished mistakes immediately and without mercy. My third was a Spore Shroom Defender’s Crest chaos build that I ran mostly because I thought it was funny, and it turned out to be genuinely viable in ways I didn’t expect. The charm system rewards experimentation and rewards it with actual mechanical variety rather than just different numbers.

The Story Will Sit With You Long After You Finish It

Hollow Knight tells its story almost entirely without telling it to you. There are no long cutscenes, no exposition dumps, no narrator explaining the history of Hallownest. Instead, the story lives in the environment, in the NPCs you meet, in the item descriptions, in the things enemies do, in the architecture of areas that were clearly built for purposes that no longer exist. Piecing it together across a first playthrough feels genuinely exciting. Understanding what you missed after it ends and going back with new knowledge feels devastating.

The lore of Hallownest is one of the richest in gaming. A dead kingdom, a plague that was almost contained, a sacrifice that defined everything, a Pale King whose choices echo through every corner of the world he built and abandoned. I am not going to spoil any of it. What I will say is that by the end of my first playthrough,h I sat in front of my PC for a few minutes not doing anything, and by the end of my third, I still felt something I couldn’t fully name. Games that do that are rare. Games that do that consistently across three complete runs are almost nonexistent.

The dream nail mechanic — where you can read the dreams and thoughts of enemies, bosses, and the remains of the dead — is the most elegant piece of environmental storytelling I’ve encountered in a game. It’s entirely optional. You can finish Hollow Knight and never engage with it seriously. But if you do, the additional layer of history and feeling it adds to everything you’ve already experienced is extraordinary. On my third playthrough, I went out of my way to dream nail every single thing the game would let me. It took extra hours. It was completely worth it.

Christopher Larkin’s Soundtrack Is Genuinely Perfect

I cannot write a review of Hollow Knight without talking about the music. Christopher Larkin composed one of the best game soundtracks I have ever heard, and it doesn’t get nearly enough credit outside of the people who have actually played this game. Every area has its own theme that does exactly what great game music is supposed to do — it tells you where you are, how you should feel, and what this place has lost without a single word.

The City of Tears theme has been on my playlist since my first playthrough. The Hornet boss theme is one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of video game combat music I’ve heard — urgent and elegant at the same time, matching the fight it scores beat for beat. The Hollow Knight boss theme, which I’ll say nothing more about than its name because hearing it for the first time is an experience that deserves to happen without warning, is something I still listen to on its own. Three playthroughs in, hearing certain musical cues still does something to me. That’s not normal. That’s exceptional.

The Free DLC Adds More Content Than Most Paid Expansions

Team Cherry released four major free content updates after launch — Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood, and Godmaster. Each one added significant content. Godmaster alone added the Pantheons — a series of gauntlet boss rushes culminating in the Pantheon of Hallownest, which is one of the most demanding pieces of content I have attempted in any game on PC. You fight nearly every major boss in the game back-to-back in a single run with no checkpoints. Dying sends you back to the start.

The 112% completion figure includes all of this. Every Pantheon cleared. Every dream boss beaten. Every binding challenge is completed. I say this not to make it sound impressive but to be clear about what this game offers at the absolute top of its content — it is enormous, it is demanding, and it kept me engaged long past the point where any other game in the genre would have run out of things to show me. The base game alone is worth full price twice over. The free additions on top of that make Hollow Knight one of the most generous purchases in PC gaming.

It’s Hard. It Doesn’t Care. You Should Play It Anyway

Hollow Knight is not easy,sy, and it will not pretend to be. You will die repeatedly. You will lose geo at inconvenient moments. You will get lost in areas that seem designed to disorient you on purpose — because they are. You will spend time on bosses that feel impossible right up until the moment they don’t. If any of that sounds like something you can’t engage with, this review isn’t going to change that, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

But if you have any tolerance for a game that demands patience and rewards it with something genuinely special — if you want an experience that treats you like an intelligent adult capable of figuring things out without being guided every step of the way — if you want a world that you will think about after you’ve finished it and want to go back to not because there’s more to do but because it’s just that good — Hollow Knight is the game I would put in front of you before almost anything else on PC. It is one of the best games ever made. I believe that without any qualification. Three 112% playthroughs and I would start a fourth tomorrow without hesitation.

FINAL VERDICT

I never thought a game about bugs would make me feel this much. That sounds ridiculous to say out loud,d and I genuinely don’t care — it’s the truth. A game about insects in a dead underground kingdom made me rage at my screen, made me pump my fist when I finally cracked a boss I’d been stuck on for hours, and made me sit completely still at the end of a playthrough feeling something I couldn’t put a name to. It made me cry. Not in a cutscene-designed-to-make-you-cry way. In a quiet, slow, “I didn’t realise how much I cared about this world until it was over” way. And on top of all of that — on top of everything this game puts you through — it gave me music that I still listen to years later. Music that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Christopher Larkin wrote melodies for a game about bugs that hit harder than most film scores I’ve ever heard. That should not be possible. Somehow it is.

Hollow Knight is the most complete gaming experience I have ever had. Three 112% playthroughs, every secret found, every boss beaten, every hidden corner explored — and it still gives me something every time. The world is breathtaking, the combat is precise and endlessly deep, the story earns every emotion it reaches for, and the generosity of the free DLC still blows my mind when I think about what three people built and just gave away. If you haven’t played it yet, I genuinely don’t know what you’re waiting for. And if you have — you already know. You already know exactly what I mean by all of this. Some games you play. Some games you experience. And some games — very rarely — become a part of you. Hollow Knight is that game for me. It will be for a long time.

Final Score: 10/10 — The best Metroidvania ever made. One of the greatest games ever created. A game about bugs that will break your heart, test your patience, and give you music you’ll never forget. Play it.

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Mr. Sano

Hello! I am Mr. Sano Ethan, a content creator, variety gamer, and the driving force behind Kick Of Draft. With over 6 years of hands-on experience across PC, console, and indie gaming,