Recent reviews by Nanodesu

Interesting setting, revamped combat with cool movement. It is almost an improvement to original Hollow Knight, except for it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tediousness and tryhard difficulty.

Flying enemies have erratic movement patterns, for all the cool movement player has, the bad enemy design actually punishes you for using the graceful movesets with aerial denials, area attacks, enemies randomly dropping or otherwise moving their hitbox into you. (random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ go!!).

Tight rooms with waves of enemies, long runbacks, bosses with movesets that wind up off-screen and kill you, there is very little fun to be had for average player. Also ♥♥♥♥ Greymoor.

EDIT after clearing with 87% and ACT 3:
If you think the game is bad, wait till act 3, it gets worse.
act 3 - go backtrack and talk to a guy who knows things ( ??????)
I had to arm myself with IGN STRATEGY GUIDE XDDD to find which hidden walls I missed that are critical for progression.
The bosses are even worse. (there are ~some~ good fights)
baloon head enemy hitbox.
MANDATORY FARMING.
PURPLE ON PURPLE fireworks XD
cancer dancer
pinstress

runbacks that are equivalent of 2 super mario bros levels
baffling dumb gauntlets, needing to do 3 gauntlets in a row to get a checkpoint, to get another gauntlet so you can finally face the boss. ????
IF YOU GRAB PALE OIL, YOU FORFEIT THE REST OF YOUR FLEA FESTIVAL REWARDS

Boss fights so bad and tedious, the in-game music so underwhelming, that you are better off putting your own playlist if you are gonna die 40 times looking at the same wind-up sequence and post-death taunts. I recommend GODFLESH.

The fanbase stands that this is some stroke of genius, to design 90% of the game to be bad and tedious. I will not buy the DLC because it is most likely to be CBT.
"I thought you were artists, I trusted you"

Good game but 90% boss fights are ass.

I support games like this. I hope the dev team goes through the feedback and improves in their future games.

I praise
+ Cool dark setting.
+ Exactor and Pieta voice acting
+ Umbral is quite innovative
+ I can play as a man or a woman!!
COOL MENU MUSIC. But there was no music in the entire f*cking game???

So what SUCKS?
- Quests dont follow you on the critical path. So you will miss 90% of them because of failed condition.
- Lamp is clunky af
- Ranged is clunky af ( compare to 1 button throwables)
- I didn't even try spellcasting because I did not obtain a catalyst for 10 Radiant in the whole game so I can't try it on mechanical level to know if casting spells is worth or if I need to switch to catalyst , or which button it's bound to (10/10) without first commiting my upgrades.
- Longsword attack buffering?? you can queue yourself into 3 attacks, before you can dodge. WTF???
- Parry would be good if skellymcskellington and everyone else did not have 5 slash attack.
- Chasing blue orbs that make enemies invincible is clunky, unfun.
- Limited item for vestige seeds... You die 3 vestige patches down, and your only currency is now 3 checkponints away. ??? [1]
- Instead of going for upgrades, most reason to visit Skyrest and merchants is for Vestige seeds. [1]
- "Mimics" ffs I had to read the guide after 20 hours because it's not obvious. Items is the msot important way you interact with the world. Once you know the trick, it also has no purpose and is safely ignored. [1] Shine the mimic, hit the mimic??? Make it interactive?? outsmart it??
- Yes soulslike worlds can be connected. But this mesh with every area connected to other 3 just leads to wasting vestige seeds [1] and losing primary objective.
- What is primary objective again???? uuuuh crusading i guess.
- I killed a petrified quest person because of impossible item to pick up next to it. Only the killing blow gave feedback so jokes on me?
- Who is the boss I killed? F*cko Mc F*ckFace X 10. Pieta, Pledged Knight were good. and Last Boss ( for wrong reasons). But nothing Iconic.
- It's dark and depressing and besides Drustan there was no attempt to offer some respite.
- Ending.


It was a slog. But it could've been so good.

[1] "WHATS THE POINT??" was in my mind for every ♥♥♥♥ design decision.

A masterpiece.

This is not the misunderstood masterpiece with bad release timing YT video essays make it out to be.

The GOOD: Music. It's HEALTH.
Some action scenes are well done.

The BAD: (and I compiled this list using steam notes feature while playing)

- Garbage launcher
- 3 cookie pop ups
- Garbage rockstar account whose password I will forget (already forgot)
- jank
- constant interruptions to gameplay
Early game especially jarring and keeps yanking control away from the player
- first hour : 15 minutes cinematic, 5 minutes gameplay, 10 minutes cinematic, repeat (one hour in it becomes ok)
- no storytelling through gameplay like spec ops (if you compare to something released around same time)
- you get shot at, and your shoulder locks on to a target that's obscured by the camera, and you are forced to shoot into emptiness and watch MAX die
- sound randomly dissapeared , meanwhile menu sounds were still there
- have to wait 2 minutes for rockstar launcher to launch the game
- I jumped from a grenade, grenade detonated and spawned me across the wall. because combat shut off the door behind me I can no longer get into the "arena", forcing checkpoint reset
- every cutscene unselects your two handed weapon (sometimes into empty sidearm)
- a car without a driver came and picked me up at end of chapter 10, then appeared in another scene
- every time i start the game "MP3 closed unexpectedly, please retry (did I tell rockstar Launcher is garbage?)
- 400mb update patches, nope it's just rockstar launcher
- the plot revolves solely around kidnappings and its like watching Taken 1,2,3,4,5 in one sitting. There's only 3?? Well Max Payne beats Taken in the amount of kidnappings (is it a Brazil thing?)
- collectible system is trash, as you are always one half-open door away from exploring yourself away from collectibles. No consistency between what door will progress the scene
- encounter design generally sucks, the signature akimbo jump is more often penalized than not. Hiding behind the same cover is enough to clear 90% of levels.
- achievements broken lol

The plot is convoluted at makes little sense. ( Ok I get it, it was foretold in dead sea scrolls)
Credit where credit is due, there is some experimentation in visual style, it's a shame that gameplay suffers from it.

A good video game, what a concept! An absolute titan of a remake.
I have not played the original, but seeing how closely it was preserved blows my mind.
To think that the original preceded Half-Life by 4 years !

Good enough to try. Initially felt a little cheap and misunderstood, but about halfway (which is barely couple hours in) it comes to life.

P.S.: Sword and extra missions as DLC? I feel like a proper melee alternative belongs to the game, especially considering that half my time spent in missions is finding a gun with ANY ammo in it. I'm not buying that.

Great short game, the interactions and dialog with other characters feels natural.
A cozy game with rewarding skill based gameplay that does not treat you like a toddler.

Good game.
But you might come out the other side hating ladders for the rest of your life.

Born too early to explore the universe.
Born just in time to explore the Outer Wilds!