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I could hear this buzzing and had no idea how to get to it I spent so long trying to get there only to find out I couldn’t yet. For instance, I distinctly remember coming across The Hive. Team Cherry go all-in with the Metroidvania elements of the game, constantly teasing areas of the map for the player that you can’t quite get to yet, enhancing the notion that this is a massive world and you aren’t aware of it in its entirety yet. Yet again, this gives you the sense that you aren’t fully privy to the history of Hallownest. The same can be said for the many scenes of dead adventurers who carry the “Wanderer’s Journals,” which you frustratingly can’t read, but you are given little snippets of information from them when you sell them to a vendor. Why are they all gathered in this one place? Was it a breeding ground for them? What killed them? Your imagination can run wild. Now this kind of scene is both harrowing but also extremely intriguing. For instance, when you defeat two of the Elder Baldurs, you venture into a side room and see the remains of so many of their kind piled up.
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There are countless tableaus of various dead beings that each tell their own story. The visual cues scattered around the world also add to this sense of the unknown or, rather, the sense that you are missing many pieces of this huge puzzle. So many questions get left unanswered, and it keeps you hooked. The world is so big and densely packed with “stuff” that it doesn’t get old for me. This mystique is part of Hollow Knight’s charm and why I am constantly drawn back into playing it I honestly find it hard to get tired of it (apart from when I spend a good few hours on a particularly hard boss). Although it may seem like you have uncovered the majority of Hallownest’s secrets by the end, you most certainly haven’t. Sometimes, it makes more sense as time goes on, but in this case it is entirely left to the imagination, keeping you on your toes. But this kind of mystic babble is scattered all over the world. I have finished this game, spending well over 100 hours on it, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what this means. Their sealed mother, but the common beast. “This border bounds the twisting, scratching things. Take this tablet found in the Fungal Wastes for instance: Throughout the world, there are stone tablets you can read that, more often than not, are very cryptic and written in a very “churchy” language that is designed to be vague while sounding important. This world is teeming with hostile life, yet you are surrounded by environments that indicate this world was once a civilised society.
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Hollow Knight is all about a descent into the unknown, and that descent carries throughout the game you just keep exploring, sinking deeper and deeper into this mysterious land beneath the surface. Ari Gibson, William Pellen, and Jack Vine make up Team Cherry, the Australian-based game developers behind this game-one of the best of the past few years, if not the decade.īut why is it so successful, and why is it different from anything I have ever played? There are so many excellent things about this game, but in this case, I am going to focus on what makes Hollow Knight so special for me on a personal level, as well as what makes it so engaging to play: its worldbuilding. Hollow Knight is so expansive, it’s hard to believe it was constructed entirely by a team of three guys.
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There’s a sense of isolation mixed with a distinct feeling of having just missed something monumental that carries on throughout Hollow Knight, and despite unravelling parts of the story, it never quite feels like you have the entire picture by the end. As you make the huge leap into a town called Dirtmouth, your journey into the unknown begins. You are a bug, a bug that has decided-for one reason or another-to make your way over to a distant town.