I do not recommend Hollow Knight. I feel like the gripes I had about the game preceded the things I liked about it.

First off, I'll talk about what I liked. The music is pretty and fits well with each area you're in. I particularly love the music for the City of Tears. The art direction is also beautiful, and it gives the world a unique atmosphere; you can never go wrong with hand-drawn. The concept is very original, being a medieval game about bugs who wield magic and weapons in a ruined kingdom. The game has excellent boss design, and I think out of all of Hollow Knight's strong points, this is where the game shines its brightest.

Now let's talk about why I can't recommend this game.

The main problem I have is how progression is paced. In certain games, such as Metroid, areas will be unreachable until you have certain abilities unlocked. You get these abilities by exploring the game's world and achieving certain criteria. Hollow Knight takes an aspect of this and makes it incredibly dull by layering wall after wall of criteria needing to be met. To make progression, you will be doing an incredible amount of backtracking through the game's world. Because of the map's size, this become's a drawn out and confusing task, even with a map. To make things worse, many of the things you need to progress are just small items; this means that by the time you've unlocked half the map, you'll be like someone assembling Ikea furniture without any instructions. With certain abilities sometimes getting bogged down with this problem, it was a poor design choice to have an excessive amount of keys and trinkets that go into doors halfway across the map; it's a poor excuse to make the game go longer than it needs to.

Another aspect of the game's sluggish progression comes from the savepoint system, and the lack of teleporting between save spots; something that a game of this size would've greatly benefited from. While a small quantity of places in the game can let you warp between savepoints (You also need to pay a fee of your precious in-game currency to use), you do a lot of walking from area to area. Coming across this point made me realize that most of this game isn't spent with the enjoyable combat situations with tough and strategic enemies. You really spend most of the game fumbling around (Because of the horrendous mapping system), trying to get from point A to point B in a stagnated manner; because of this, I became incredibly bored. The lack of feeling that you are progressing through Hollow Knight hits hard after around 5 hours, telling the player that the scope of this game should've been more compact, maybe smaller.

Other negative reviews on Steam take issue with the difficulty, however, this is NOT the reason I dislike the game; in fact, it has a good difficulty balance. This doesn't go without saying that I disliked the false sense of difficulty that Hollow Knight presents through a more specific detail in its repetitive traversing: the longer treks needed to get back to a boss if you die. It isn't even difficult to return to a boss arena, it just takes a significantly longer time. Dark Souls and Bloodborne have this problem, and while I would say it's more severe, Hollow Knight tries to replicate this exactly; because of this, the flow of the game suffers. It just goes to show that some quirks in gaming need to stay in their own series. It's a shame that there weren't save points right by bosses. That is really the only "complaint" I have with a debatable subject of challenge.

I'm not calling Hollow Knight a bad game, and if it's something you really think you'd enjoy, do some research and buy it. If you're someone who enjoys Hollow Knight, more power to you, I have no desire to rob you of your joy. But if any of the issues I stated above would matter to you, I recommend you play something else.