tapevulture You know, I can’t remember who said this anymore, I think it was either one of the IC people or a related associate/guest/recurring guest. The narrative limitation you’re referring to here is a great example of if not a symptom of the perhaps potential and potentially slowly building problem of game writers thinking that “story” and “lore” are the same thing. I really love Hollow Knight, and yeah, I think I also love the setting and the “lore” as it were too, but I don’t really have much praise for its story.
Why does the player character want to become the new hollow knight? Well, in my frank assessment, I think it’s primarily because that sequence of events evoke the aesthetics and emotional impact of the ending(s) of From Software games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Mind you, there is a fairly satisfying amount of work put into the Lore of Hollow Knight and I think the setting they created would be able to encompass a story that plays out like this. Again, though, in my opinion, where it fumbles is in the execution of putting the player in an interesting role in the story. That’s also taking into account that I’ve seen more of the less accessible parts of the game than yourself. That stuff is kinda just more lore and not more story. You can end up playing out a more narrativistically satisfying conclusion, but yeah, I did just make up the word “narrativistic” for a reason.
Still, I also ended up feeling more or less like that was also kind of like the punchline, in a way. It is a setting and presentation that puts in work to be worthy of as vaunted an adjective as “elegiac,” and it takes itself very seriously most of the time, but also, like, it’s little tiny bug guys. Maybe Team Cherry would find this insulting, but I appreciated it in the sense of how it was simultaneously itself and unabashedly so, while also a deadpan parody of itself whether that was intentional or not. It presents this possibility where, like, there’s a new Dark Souls setting every few metres if you go outside. If a deer dies tripping over a log in the forest, once the megafauna are done picking it over it’s going to create the rise and fall of multiple little bug empires and kingdoms and dynasties and mystical lost ruins and legendary heroes over the next few weeks, ’cause bugs live for like 72 hours. That’s enough content for Hollow Knight 3 several times over. Which is I think why I still overall forgive it for being a little melodramatic and sappy about it all. They’re just little bug guys! The actual timeline between Buggymandias and Percy Blythe Carapacey is like 2 months.
Anyway, yeah, I still really love Hollow Knight but I’d still be one of the first to say the intricacies of its story are completely uninteresting to me. It’s fun to explore and discover things but I really don’t think Team Cherry quite figured out compelling narrative reasons for it all. Actually, I think it’s at least a little part of why I’m excited for Hollow Knight: Silksong, I’m happy to give them a real shot at writing a game with a protagonist who, you know, speaks, and has a personality, and possibly has motivations and objectives of her own.
