Am I the only one who didn't like Hollow Knight?

In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?

In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.

edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.

Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!

> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?

To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.

(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)

In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that I definitely don't like, and personally find somewhat disrespectful to my time.

Same.

So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.

The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."

No I strongly dislike this game too. It’s too hard, I don’t like the movement which feels ‘rigid’ , and it’s super gloomy and depressing.

I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.

You’re not the only one. Hollow Knight is a gorgeous game but it’s difficult to the point of becoming unenjoyable.

I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.

I hated Elden Ring because it felt way too hard and the movement & animations feel very slow. I died to bosses like 100s of times and just quit. HK didn't feel hard at all though, most bosses i beat within like 2-3 tries, maybe 10 tries at most for a few. But yeah I'm not a fan of frustratingly hard games either, it just feels like a tedious chore. It's funny how small tweaks can change what different people find hard I guess.

Same! But it all boils down to what kind of player you are and what you seek in games.

Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.

For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.

Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.

Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.

Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.

And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.

And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.

So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.

Just to comment on the downvotes, I think this (a comment to the effect of "I don't like it" being downvoted) is an understandable if unfortunate consequence of modern internet culture not taking "it's just not for everyone" as a conclusion (especially if this is due to something being too hard).

To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.

This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.

I also didn't like hollow knight despite loving hades and dead cells (somewhat similar) although I only played it for ~ 2 hours

I am loving silksong so far however

There are at least two of us :) I like exploration and I like bloodborne, elden ring, dark souls 3, demon’s souls, dark souls - in that order. Thus, I don’t mind difficult bosses and obscure storytelling.

I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.

It is ok, just not a game for me.

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