I recently went back to do my second complete playthrough of Hollow Knight and man… it’s still so damn good. Even as I’m 90 hours into its sequel, I can still confidently say that the first Hollow Knight is a special game.
While I love the two Ori games, I don’t have a background in any of the other so-called great Metroidvanias of yesteryear, so it’s okay to take this with a grain of salt – this is easily the best Metroidvania that I’ve fully completed.
Hollow Knight is like a wagyu steak cooked to perfection. It controls beautifully, the movement is fluid, the combat is engaging, and the world is imaginative. If it ended with just that, it’d be a pretty good game, but this steak, dare I say, comes loaded with SAUCE.
This game is so wonderfully handcrafted. The bugs of Hollow Nest are a plenty, but they wouldn’t be the same without Christopher Larkin’s earworms. His compositions maintain this perfect balance of hummable leitmotifs and atmospheric sound beds. Each area of Hollow Knight is filled with character voices, textures, and game sounds that enhance Team Cherry’s world and visuals in a way that’s genuinely awe-inspiring.
The visuals, too, are deeply fantastic. Character animations are of course polished, but its the world and special effects that impress me the most. The transition from The Forgotten Crossroads into Greenpath is an early game marvel. The color palette shifts from blue to green, as flora and fauna from Greenpath start to emerge. Another breathtaking moment occurs in the City of Tears, as you scale an ancient building, you find a bench near a large window. The rain pours on the glass during your brief respite. It’s beautiful.
It’s hard not to glaze this game too much. The many citizens of Hollow Nest leave their own impact. Whether its Cornifer and his humming chant leading you to your next map or his wife, Iselda, who greets you with the same tired, unenthusastic “bapanada”, in the same way a retail worker on a slow business day would react while they’re scrolling their phone. This world of characters expands in exciting, and sometimes frightening ways, the more you progress in the game.
Now I’m not much of a lore guy. I appreciate well crafted worlds, but I’m usually a gameplay-first kinda guy. Even so, I found myself constantly dream nailing friends and foes alike, searching for new dialogue and meaning. The world of Hollow Nest hosts just the right amount of ambiguous environmental storytelling. You can honestly choose not to interface with the story at all, but if you so wish, you can comb through every dialogue option, item description, and hidden lore tablet in the game like an archeologist would. I still don’t understand all of Hollow Nest’s secrets, but what bit I have pieced together is just as impressive as HK’s more obvious offerings.
As a gameplay-first kinda guy, I am a huge fan of HK’s combat and gameplay loops. Each area has a ton of secrets to find and exploring is almost always rewarding. Sometimes entire areas are hidden behind secret entrances. This can sound daunting at first, but once you understand HK’s ways of exploration, it becomes quite the thrilling hunt.
Combat is where the game truly shines. Hollow Knight has around 50 unique bosses, with the majority of them being fun to master. Once you’ve beaten the game, you can gain access to the Godhome, one of HK’s free DLCs. The Godhome is home to every boss in the game. In the Hall of Gods, you can fight each boss three times with different parameters:
- You fight the boss the exact same as you did in the main game
- You fight a more difficult version of the boss with an amped up health pool and potentially a different arena
- You fight the more difficult version of the boss and you die in 1 hit
The Hall of Gods is a mixed bag for me, but I appreciate my time with it. As of now (November 2025), I’ve beaten the more difficult version of every boss in the game, except for one. (We’ll talk about that in a bit.) I’ve also beaten about 75% of these bosses without getting hit.
For some of these bosses, it was a fun challenge to learn them hitless. For a game that has such a fluid move set and tight controls, learning how to master these fights was a reward in and of itself. For some of these bosses though…
It was a slog and a half.
I’ve been incredibly positive up to this point in the review, but it has to be said – not every boss in Hollow Knight is good enough to master.
This is especially the case for a bulk of the game’s earliest fights. Bosses like the Vengefly King, Massive Moss Charger, and Soul Warrior are an absolute joke. On paper, it’s not a bad idea having them here in the Hall of Gods. If anything, they act as a good warm up before tackling the game’s more interesting bosses. Unfortunately, Godhome doesn’t end here.
The other major attraction of Godhome is its Pantheons. In Pantheons 1-4, you are tasked with fighting 10 of Hollow Nest’s foes back-to-back, with only one checkpoint at its halfway point. Die at any moment and you’re forced to retry the Pantheon.
Pantheon 1 is relatively simple. Many of these bosses are like the aforementioned Vengefly King and Massive Moss Charger. These act as easy fights to get you comfortable with this Boss Rush format. The cool thing, is despite the monotony of most of these fights, once you’ve finished the first 9 fights, you’re rewarded with a brand new boss – Brothers Oro & Moto. These guys, who previously were regular NPCs in the main part of the game, prove to be a bit of a challenge.
The same goes for Pantheons 2 and 3. These Pantheons include more difficult fights throughout the game, but with enough practice, you’ll quickly find your way to Paintmaster Sheo and Great Nailsage Sly. These guys are all fun fights and getting through the Pantheons was totally worth the effort to unlock them.
Problems begin to occur with Pantheon 4 though. In 2019, my first playthrough of Hollow Knight ended here. I had managed to do everything else in the game, but Pantheon 4 was such a grueling task, that my save file would forever be stuck at 111/112%. This Pantheon had almost every single majorly difficult boss fight from the main game. These were bosses that had taken hours to beat the first time, but now I was expected to beat them all back-to-back without dying once. At the time, it was an impossible task, especially when this gauntlet ended with Pure Vessel, a souped up version of THE titular Hollow Knight.
Years passed, and in 2025, I started a new playthrough in anticipation of the official release of Silksong. This time, before I even tackled the Pantheons, I spent a ton of time in the Hall of Gods mastering these fights individually. Fortunately, this was the move and after having a decent success rate at beating Pure Vessel, I returned to Pantheon 4 and beat it! It was exhilarating.
I now had only one task left to complete…
Pantheon 5…
Pantheon 5 is the stuff of nightmares.
Pantheon 5 is a huge ‘what the hell were they thinking?!’
Pantheon 5, or The Pantheon of Hollow Nest, forces you to go toe-to-toe with every. single. boss. in. the. game.
There’s a few checkpoints, so it’s not entirely sadistic, but given the amount of effort it took to beat Pantheon 4 the one time, means that Pantheon 5 is no laughing matter.
It saddens me to say, and it’s the sole reason I haven’t put out my review of this game yet, but I have not beaten Pantheon 5 yet.
I’ve tried. I’ve tried a lot. The final stretch of bosses is one thing. (It was a major thing.) Eventually I went to the Hall of Gods and just fought Zote, Pure Vessel, and Nightmare King Grimm back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-ba-
Bosses like Markoth and Uumuu are easy enough on paper, but their RNG creates just the right amount of chaos to end a run super quickly.
Zote is the devil. I swear, he is the actual devil incarnate. Somehow the devil converted himself into 1s and 0s and was implemented into this game and his name is Zote. I got so mad at Zote one time, that I started venting about my real life problems. Not just problems that I know are solvable, but problems that I know are most certainly, undoubtedly UNSOLVABLE. Zote broke me and yet, with enough practice, I somehow managed to beat his more difficult fight without getting hit. I still don’t know how I did it.
I’ve returned to Pantheon 5 more than a dozen times at this point. The whole ordeal is 50 minutes, and that’s if you manage to get towards the end. In all my attempts, I’ve reached the final final boss exactly one time.
This unlocked Absolute Radiance, the most difficult boss in the whole game.
If Zote was the devil, Absolute Radiance is somehow the devil’s devil. Like if the devil somehow had a devil on one shoulder and a more evil devil on his other shoulder, Absolute Radiance would be that more evil devil.
After a few hours of attempts, I have managed to beat Absolute Radiance exactly one time. After a few more hours of attempts, I have not managed to beat her again.
Here is the issue I currently have. I know Absolute Radiance is beatable. I have beaten her. I know that it’s possible to grind this fight into the ground so much that I may even be able to beat her hitless eventually. Then, and only then, would it feel worth it to attempt Pantheon 5 again.
But here’s the thing… I’m playing Silksong now. There’s other games I want to play. There’s other things I want to do. I don’t want to fill my time up with endless attempts against Absolute Radiance right now.
Will I beat this Pantheon eventually? Maybe. It’s certainly possible.
Will I beat it soon? Probably not.
Not only would I have to master Absolute Radiance, but I’d also have to still perform well against the other incredibly difficult bosses. And if I screw up even one time, I’ll have to might the damn Vengefly King again. I’m so sick of fighting the Vengefly King! Not to mention, after putting in 90 hours in Silksong, my muscle memory is probably all out of whack now.
I hate this situation. I had fully planned to do everything Hollow Knight had to offer on this recent playthrough. I’ve even done the Path of Pain. It took roughly 5 hours. It was tough. I didn’t much care for it. But it wasn’t the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in a video game. I beat Super Mario The Lost Levels this year. That was worse by far.
Either way, I have to leave this task unfinished for the time being. I may also have to acknowledge that I probably won’t tackle Steel Soul Mode, which accounts for two of my five unacquired achievements. Steel Soul Mode requires you to beat the game without dying. It’s possible that I could do this, but do I really want to take on the challenge right now?
No. I don’t.
And that’s tragic, because Hollow Knight is without a doubt one of the best games I’ve ever played. I’ve enjoyed my 370+ hours with it, even if some of those hours were spent fighting the same boss over and over again trying to avoid even an inch of damage. My journey has been tumultuous at times, but please don’t mistake that for hatred or disdain. I truly love this game and I wouldn’t have played that much if I wasn’t having fun with the challenges I was presented with.
Anyways, game is goated. Go get the Mr. Mushroom ending. Mr. Mushroom is the goat. Love that guy.
Your Everyday Nerd 
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