Hollow Knight: The Metroidvania That Out-Scoped Its Own Budget

Team Cherry’s 2017 Kickstarter for Hollow Knight asked for AU$35,000 to fund a modest Metroidvania about a small bug exploring a cave. It raised roughly AU$57,000, a comfortable but unremarkable overshoot, and the three people at the studio — Ari Gibson, William Pellen and Jack Vine — proceeded to build a map with, by most community tallies, well over a thousand connected rooms across a dozen major regions, none of them padding. That gap between the funding pitch and the delivered scope is the first thing worth understanding about this game, because everything else it does well is downstream of a small team that refused to cut the map down to match its budget.

The charm system as the whole design in one screen

Most Metroidvanias gate progression through binary key items: you either have the double jump or you don’t. Hollow Knight does that too — the Mothwing Cloak dash, the Mantis Claw wall-cling, the Crystal Heart dash are all hard traversal gates in the classic mould. But the charm system layered on top is the more interesting idea. Charms are equippable modifiers — more damage, faster healing, a shield that blocks one hit, a spore cloud on kill — slotted into a limited number of Notches that only expand as you find more Pale Ore-forged Charm Notch upgrades scattered through the map. You’re not choosing charms in a vacuum; you’re solving a constraint- satisfaction puzzle where a build for exploring (Wayward Compass, Sprintmaster, Longnail) looks nothing like a build for a boss fight (Quick Slash, Shaman Stone, Grubsong), and switching between them costs real time sitting at a bench.

That bench requirement is the quiet genius of the system. Nothing stops you from carrying a boss-killing build permanently except the mild inconvenience of finding a bench to reconfigure, which means the game never forces the choice but constantly rewards making it. It’s a soft constraint doing the work a hard one usually does, and it’s a large part of why build discussion around this game has stayed active years after release — there’s no single correct charm loadout, just situational ones worth arguing over.

The pogo as the whole combat system

The single mechanical decision that does the most work is the down-strike bounce, universally nicknamed the “pogo” by the community: hitting an enemy or hazard with a downward nail swing launches the Knight back upward, chainable indefinitely against the right target. It sounds like a small combat flourish. In practice it dissolves the usual Metroidvania boundary between combat and platforming entirely — spike-covered rooms become traversal puzzles solved by pogoing off the very hazards that would otherwise kill you, and several of the game’s hardest optional challenge rooms (the White Palace, added as a launch-day secret area) are built almost entirely around chaining pogo bounces off spinning saw blades with zero margin for error. Nothing in the tutorial explicitly teaches you the technique exists at this depth. The game trusts you to discover it, which is a very Metroidvania kind of trust, and then spends its hardest content assuming you did.

Nail arts — Cyclone Slash, Dash Slash, Great Slash — layer onto the same basic three-hit combo, each requiring a Dreamer-guarded scroll to learn rather than a shop purchase, and each meaningfully changes boss-fight positioning rather than just adding damage. Cyclone Slash turns the Knight into a stationary damage pillar that punishes an enemy for standing still; Dash Slash rewards aggressive spacing. Choosing which one to have equipped alongside your charm loadout is the same soft-constraint puzzle the Notch system runs everywhere else in the design.

Hallownest as an environmental essay

The map itself deserves the credit it usually gets, but it’s worth being specific about why the verticality works. Regions like Greenpath, the Fungal Wastes, Deepnest and the City of Tears aren’t just visually distinct biomes stitched onto a shared traversal grid — they’re built with genuinely different rules for how light, hazard and enemy placement interact, so navigating Deepnest’s near-total darkness demands a different attentiveness than the rain-soaked, acid-pooled City of Tears. The Stag Station fast-travel network is deliberately sparse, which keeps backtracking honest rather than trivial, and the game’s habit of hiding a Charm Notch or a Mask Shard behind a route that requires an ability you won’t have for another ten hours is the exact tension every good Metroidvania is chasing: the “I remember there was something here” feeling that turns the whole map into a mental to-do list.

Dirtmouth, the hub town above Hallownest proper, tells the same grief story through population rather than architecture. It starts nearly empty — a handful of NPCs, a bench, a stag station — and stays that way regardless of how much of the kingdom below you clear out, functioning as a monument to a civilisation that already ended rather than a settlement the player is meant to help rebuild. The few characters who do pass through — Iselda the map-seller, Sly running his shop out of a collapsed shell, Elderbug simply watching the road — read less like a settlement rebuilding than survivors keeping a vigil. Compare that to a game like Ori and the Blind Forest, which resolves its own environmental grief through visible restoration, and the difference in temperament becomes obvious: Team Cherry never intended Hallownest to heal, and Dirtmouth’s refusal to grow is the clearest single piece of evidence for that intent in the entire game.

Where the difficulty argument gets tested

The Path of Pain, the Radiance’s true final confrontation, and the optional Godhome content (added later as free post-launch expansion) are where Hollow Knight stops being generous and starts being an endurance test, and it’s fair to note the difficulty curve isn’t perfectly smooth getting there. Several mid-game boss fights — the Mantis Lords, Hornet’s first duel — spike sharply relative to what the traversal difficulty has prepared you for, and a player who came in expecting a gentler exploration game can bounce off that wall hard. The nail-upgrade economy (Pale Ore traded to Nailsmith Sheo) is also thinner than it should be for how much the late game asks of your damage output, which pushes a lot of players toward a small set of “correct” charm builds rather than the wide-open experimentation the Notch system otherwise encourages.

The ancestor

Hollow Knight wears its Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night lineage openly, and Team Cherry has said as much in interviews. What gets undersold is how much of the game’s atmosphere — mute protagonist, hostile beauty, a civilisation you’re excavating rather than visiting — is closer to Ico and Dark Souls than to either Metroidvania touchstone. I’ve made the wider argument for the genre’s map-as-memory-device design in the metroidvania canon, and Hollow Knight is the entry that most fully commits to letting environmental storytelling replace dialogue almost entirely — Hallownest’s grief comes through entirely in its empty thrones and mass graves.

The bosses carry the same restraint. Hornet, the Mantis Lords, the Broken Vessel, the Hollow Knight itself in the fake ending — none get a line of dialogue explaining their motivation, and the game trusts the player to build a reading of each from arena design and attack pattern alone. Hornet’s fight is fast, aerial and reactive, mirroring her role as Hallownest’s last active guardian rather than one of its dead. The Broken Vessel’s arena is a birthing chamber choked with orange goo, and the fight plays like watching something being born wrong. That’s the whole achievement of the game’s writing restraint in one sentence: it delegates characterisation to spatial and mechanical design so consistently that a player can come away from Hollow Knight with a strong emotional read on a dozen characters who never speak a single line of audible or subtitled dialogue.

The verdict

For a three-person team, Hollow Knight delivered a Metroidvania with more content, tighter movement and a more coherent aesthetic vision than studios ten times the size have managed since. Its difficulty spikes are real and its nail economy could stand a second pass, but neither undoes what the charm system and the map design get right. What’s easy to forget, years on, is how much of that scope arrived after launch and for free: The Grimm Troupe (2017) added an entire optional storyline and boss gauntlet, and Godmaster (2018) layered on Godhome, a standalone arena mode collecting essentially every boss in the game for players who wanted the combat system tested at its hardest without the exploration wrapped around it. Team Cherry never charged for either, which retroactively makes the original Kickstarter overshoot look like the least generous thing the studio ever did with this game.

It’s on PC, every current console and Switch, runs beautifully on all of them, and the sequel it spent years making everyone wait for only exists because this one earned the patience.

Spoilers below

The Pale King’s failed attempt to contain the Radiance — an ancient moth deity worshipped before Hallownest’s founding — inside the body of a “vessel,” a hollow husk with no will of its own, is the plot’s central tragedy, and the Knight you play as is one of many failed vessels, distinct mainly in being nearly, not entirely, hollow. That imperfection is framed as both the character’s flaw and the only reason a player character with agency exists at all. The true ending, reached via the Dream Nail and a sequence of unlocked lore fragments, replaces the standard confrontation with the Radiance with a much longer, harder fight against her true form, and closes on the Knight sacrificing itself to seal the infection for good — a quieter, sadder note than the credits-roll triumph the basic ending offers, and the one the game clearly considers canonical.