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.

Day 145: Hollow Knight again

We're all caught up with metroidvanias, then? Good.

The genre never exactly went away, but there's been a definite renaissance over recent years, with fledgling indie developers finding the concept well suited to small-scale game production, and mechanics from the genre filtering into more modern titles, with Dark Souls especially transposing the sense of isolation and the journey into the unknown into the shell of a 3D combat RPG.

In fact, of late it's like metroidvanias have become the pulled pork of videogames. Or, no. The Belgian saisons of videogames: a cult style thrust into the spotlight as the current in vogue choice for buyers who want to seem more discerning than the mainstream. Not quite the dry-hopped fruit-bomb IPA of the gaming world, but only a few rungs below.

Do you know what I'm saying? Not the spiced pumpkin latte, but perhaps the flat white.

So Hollow Knight, a Kickstarter-funded metroidvania from indie devs Team Cherry, is nothing if not obvious. Add in elements popularised by Dark Souls (borrowing from the thing that borrowed, thereby closing the circle) - such as the exact same death mechanic, the slow process of channelling your healing ability, a succession of punishing boss encounters, an overall sense of haunting loneliness and melancholy, and neutral characters met amidst the desolation who offer enigmatic, poetic, forlorn words in your ear - and you've got precisely the videogame that a 2017 videogame concept generator on the internet would spill out as a maximum amalgamation of cliches.

Except who the hell cares, when it's done this damn well? Yes, on paper it sounds laughably generic, but in reality it steps so confidently, speaks in its own assured voice, gets the basics so right, that it comes fiercely alive.

Hollow Knight is a microbrewed hipster saison so classy that it gives Saison Dupont a run for its money. It is pulled pork that you actually want to eat. It is a metroidvania almost as good as Super Metroid on the SNES, and in some regards it is better.

The wistful, elegiac soundtrack is wonderful, always of-a-piece, yet with each area completely distinct. Ambient noises are beautiful, scuttling limbs, buzzing wings, sounds muffled through walls of dirt, the plop of water droplets, the hiss of toxic lakes. And the visual design is just sumptuous. There’s the sense of regret and isolation and lamentation of Dark Souls, but none of the dirge. The drained and deathly blues and greys of the first few areas are perfect, but soon give out to lush and verdant caves, glittering crystal caverns, decaying fungi patches. The world of Hallownest is beautifully realised, and not half as isolating as it first appears. There’s a vibrancy and sense of life beneath the surface, uncovered as if turning stones in a forgotten shed to reveal a teeming insectoid realm.

The game feel is great. Your nail, your character's little sword, has a vicious, snappy swipe to it. Movement is precise, jumping has the right amount of float. There’s a dash that you can perform in mid-air, and a wall-climb that’s as satisfying as anything in Mario, not least because you have to wait a number of hours before you find it, going the long way round, then when you’ve got it those previous obstacles turn into an open playground. The sense of progression is well managed, with lots of backtracking through older areas, and what starts as a ghost town on the surface slowly comes to life as you meet or rescue denizens in the depths who begin to populate the abandoned buildings up top. This parallels your own journey of development, upgrading your strengths and abilities, coming back to once-feared enemies and now dispatching them with ease. But pushing forwards you always feel strained, your nerves taut, facing an unknown constantly more difficult and stressful than you want it to be. Which is exactly right.

I’m maybe a third, halfway, through the game currently, so I can’t say for certain, but so far Hollow Knight has been one of the better gaming experiences I’ve had of recent years. It’s good enough that I’m playing it right now in preference to Breath of the Wild, and I’ve yet to finish that on Switch. 

Man, that’s a hell of a game though. Bravo Breath of the Wild. Bravo Hollow Knight.

Day 144: Hollow Knight

Day off, lying around recovering. Watched Barfly on Netflix, Mickey Rourke doing his shuffling, grinning, bum-poet best impression of Charles Bukowski. Watched a few episodes of Orange is the New Black, which mixes Lost-style flashbacks and that dramedy tone of Desperate Housewives and Weeds and Six Feet Under and all the rest - mixes that stuff, that I'm less keen on, with a refreshingly honest and often moving approach to adult issues, and I'm left still uncertain whether I like the show or not.

It is, however, perfect background noise for when I'm playing on my Switch. I've been playing a lot of Hollow Knight recently - a sumptuous, confident, mechanistically elegant metroidvania set in a haunting underground insectoid world of dripping leaves and squelching moss-lined walls and noxious fungus patches and little hissing pools of fetid water.

... But what's a "metroidvania"? It's a genre of videogame that takes its name from two iconoclastic series of the 8- and 16-bit eras - Nintendo's Metroid games, and the Castlevania series by Konami.

Metroidvanias typically involve exploring a strange and hostile environment with a mixture of platforming and combat challenges. You enter a new area and it's a maze, rooms with lots of exits, and you want to make sense of the space, gain dominion over it, but it's too large. There's maybe a path to the left, a path to the right, some ledges you can climb with another path higher up, and a bizarre well in the corner in a structure like a dragon's neck. Which way should you go? You venture a little down one path, and it opens onto a new room, with yet more pathways off from it. Is this even the right way? You head back, try another path. It winds downwards, past enemies, and you have to leap across little platforms to avoid a fall to your death. You make it across, but then this way too branches into multiple rooms, all with their own exits. You go down one, down another, you're hopelessly turned around, lost, anxious. And you haven't forgotten that higher path in the first room. Should you have gone that way?

And these aren't welcoming passageways, either. They're creepy, slimy, littered with skeletons and strange alien symbols. The music is imposing. It's like you're descending into a creature's lair, into the underworld, down into the catacombs of your own subconscious mind. You hate it. You want to head back to the surface and to safety.

But you force yourself to press on. You pick a path at random, and push forwards, facing whatever is in your way. You leap chasms, fight nasty enemies, travel ever onwards. And gradually you make sense of the space. Most of the potential routes actually finish in dead ends, or in obstacles you cannot yet surmount - canyons too wide, ledges too high, lakes of lava or barriers of stone you are too weak to break - but that you will need to return to later.

So mostly you find yourself channelled in one direction, with perhaps optional side journeys with a risk-reward factor you have to weigh up, a little loop through a difficult section with extra health or ammo at the end, and a drop back onto the main path after that. And maybe the main path is like a larger version of this loop, with a fearsome boss at the end, and some new ability offered if (when) you defeat the boss - boots that let you climb up walls, say, and you use the boots to climb up out of the room in which the boss was housed, and you find yourself appearing back out of the dragon-neck well in that very first room, having completed a circuit, descended into the unknown, faced your fears, and returned with treasure.

And now those boots will let you access some of the routes that were previously inaccessible - and the whole loop begins again, and slowly you start to map out the world, bring order to chaos, defeat bosses, hoover up trinkets, and the strange becomes the familiar, and you make this inhospitable world your home.

And then you push far enough and you find a passageway that looks different from the others, with strange flora growing from it, and arcane etchings on the walls. You go through, and you're in a brand new zone, and the enemies are larger, you haven't fought them before, you don't know their attack patterns, and you don't recognise anything, and you're lost, and scared - and the whole process begins anew.

And on you go, deeper and deeper, or higher and higher, to the centre of the game's world, to the final boss, and to victory over whatever in the universe glances out at you from the dark and makes you want to hide under the covers.

And that's a metroidvania. A hybrid of platformer, exploration, role-playing and action-adventure game, traditionally in 2D, about navigating a complex maze and upgrading your abilities so you can push further into that maze.

I was meaning to talk about Hollow Knight, but as ever I've waffled too long in the preamble, so I'll have to do that tomorrow.

Early night now because working with Steve again in the morning.

Ta ra x