Day 147: Lost in Hallownest

Nothing much going on tonight. Worked a 12-8, came home and edited some photos, went out to buy tea, got back, ate, played Hollow Knight, stuck my face into the tempestuous vortex of the Internet, listened to the vortex howl… and now it’s 1:30am. Oops.

I’m lost in Hollow Knight. The obvious way forwards, what game designers call the critical path, has dwindled to nothing; I met a character who put a marker on my map, back in an early area, but nothing happens when I go there, I think I need to defeat some bosses or collect some doo-dads to activate whatever it is, and there’s nowhere else obvious to go next. 

There’s a new area on the other side of the map, filled with exploding jellyfish and spasmodic electrical crackling charges, but I don’t seem to be able to get far into this zone without butting up against pulsing black fibre barriers blocking my way that clearly require an ability to traverse that I do not yet possess. 

That sentence was weird. There are barriers in my way. I can tell I’ll need to acquire an ability to get past them. 

But I’m not sure whether I get that ability from this new area, whether there’s just a room or a passageway I’m missing - I can’t even use the map for this section to check for potential routes, because the map vendor is blocked by one of the black barriers - or whether I need to go somewhere else entirely and then return here later. 

I remember there being sections of ground that shook when I crossed them in other places in the game, and I recently learned how to smash through weak floors, so that’s something to try - but I’ve got no idea where those sections were, so short of retracing my steps through the entirety of the game I’m not sure what to do. I could look the solution up, but in a game about mapping the darkness and bringing order to chaos, it feels like reading walkthroughs on how to do this would turn the experience into drone work or something. I want to play a game. I don’t want to tick items off a checklist. I’m an active being, not a passive consumer.

So I guess I’ll head back into that labyrinthe and see what I can see. It feels like a lot of ground to cover - literally the ground, I’m literally going back over the cave floors looking for the bits that shake as I walk over them - but it’s not a huge world, and I’ve got plenty of skills now that make traversal fun - dashes and wallclimbs and whatnot - and I could do with farming the easier enemies for the money they drop to put towards buying upgrades for my character - so it’s not so bad.

And, hey, it beats putting that time towards learning a musical instrument or studying a foreign language or volunteering for a charity, right?

Getting lost in imaginary mazes while roleplaying as an insect knight wielding a pin sword fighting cartoon bug baddies: exactly how I envisaged I’d be spending my thirties.

In fairness, it pretty much is.

See you tomorrow.