Hollow Knight Is Designed to Make You Feel Bad | Design Delve
Added 2025-09-01 15:02:53 +0000 UTCThis week's episode of Design Delve is now available!
Comments
This is exactly the sort of post that keeps me coming back to Design Delve. I love finding out how the magic happens, be it an analysis of how a novel is structured so all the plot threads get resolved, or of a piece of music to see how the different instruments combine. Hollow Knight isn't for me, and for that matter I don't care for platformers, but it's fascinating to see how little choices like jump speed and knockback can affect the feel of a game.
arensb
2025-10-16 02:16:19 +0000 UTCHollow Knight is my comfort game. I grew up playing platformers and metroidvanias, so I fell in love with that aspect immediately. I love how you can also use your nail to hit solid spikes and gain some momentum. I make HK responsible for my love of 2D Souls games now. Everytime I go back to it, I enter a really zen state of flow. Which is funny to say for such a brutal game (it is hard) but I feel immediately relaxed playing it now.
David C
2025-09-03 16:23:50 +0000 UTCI did the same, then came back to it 3 months latter when I found the developers built a immorality feature into the files. After that I just went about and enjoyed the game.
whitney
2025-09-02 23:20:53 +0000 UTCI quit HK shortly after getting the Manís Claws. The skill requirement got to be too much and it wasn’t fun anymore.
Eric Schwenke
2025-09-01 19:19:30 +0000 UTC
