Hollow Knight is a metroidvania widely regarded as one of the best games of all time by people, I am someone who has played a lot of Metroidvanias so I will give my fair review if its so-called legendary status holds grounds.
If you do not understand what a metroidvania is, it's simply a platformer with a huge interconnected world where you are encouraged to explore as much as possible, where traversal upgrades which lead to paths once inaccessible is usually how you typically progress in a metroidvania.
Now, Hollow Knight is definitely a game with a ton of content, for someone inexperienced at this genre I say that this could very well be a game which satisfies many for its generous pricing and vast quantity. Now let's go over some positives, I think the world itself has a coherence in how it's connected, the city of tears for example is fittingly at the centre whilst you can get a coherent idea where fungal wastes are from crossroads which makes it quite easy later on to not get lost, which is perhaps something other metroidvanias struggle with. The animations are also very beautiful to look at with a very expressive artstyle, it has a rather vague but simple to grasp story which I think satisfies those who do not wish to get too invested.
Now on to the things I thought were less good, first off the charm system itself which are equippable passive abilities are a fine thing by themselves, however. Having a compass be an equippable passive is a dumb decision for a Metroidvania, the common counter-argument would be that you can unequip it for bosses but that is exactly what makes it counterintuitive, it should have been integrated without the thought of being an equippable passive, but a permanent one that does not take up slots.
The combat was a bit dull in my opinion, and this comes from someone who enjoyed a lot of Metroidvanias. You do not have much expression in combat but I suppose that's why this reaches a wider audience for its simplicity. Where it's fair to critique however is that many enemies and especially bosses are very identical. Many bosses for some reason have two of the same attacks, a lunge attack and a dive attack (Take the mantis lord and hollow knight boss as one of many examples which follow this trend). This makes boss fights very predictable to me, I wish bosses had more spectacle and variation instead of a reskin of the same idea but some slight revamped gimmicks.
People usually call this game difficult but it really isn't, it's about reading patterns and because the patterns are very similar, I think this is something people from the more casual side are declaring, but all in all if you have experience with this genre it's not "ninja gaiden" levels of difficulty, it's average difficulty at best. Which is no issue at all, the critique is not on the difficulty of the game but rather the samey nature of many of the bosses.
The expression of movement is also a little lackluster to me compared to other metroidvanias as really the only thing you will be using is your normal dash and double jump to pass areas, with the occasional usage of the crystal dash. Some may say "but of course you can pogo stick the spikes to traverse" but that isn't exactly my point. My point is that I wish there were more abilities in the toolkit while traversing as seen in other Metroidvanias. But again, that is more of a personal preference.
I think the biggest and most fair critique however is that the map system is flawed. I can get behind the idea that you need to buy maps to access parts of it, and that more of the map is revealed to you when you sit down on a bench and write down the rest of the map. The issue however is that when the character writes down the map it is widely inconsistent. If you barely explored one huge area, take the huge are of the crystal caverns, you will be confused to see that there is an area with rooms below, this creates unnecessary backtracking. A more simpler solution would be to write down the map partially to what has been revealed to the player character's point of view. This is why the grid system from Metroid and Castlevania which have the maps as blue squares, each grid/square gets filled yellow once you fully pass the area which is in my opinion the definitive way of handling maps in a metroidvania.
Overall though I know I wrote a lot of critiques but I still recommend the game, I just don't believe it's the greatest metroidvania as that would put it at a too huge pedestal. For an average player this is definitely an enjoyable experience and you are getting your money's worth with the 15 euro price tag. I hope that Silksong solves some of my critiques of the game.
Final score after getting the true ending: 8/10
