izigame.me

Hollow Knight is a game with several layers and whether it's good or bad you can "complete" the game and left absolutely unaware about a whole world beneath your feets.
At the beginning I wasn't impressed by visuals especially after playing Ori but the more I played the more I liked it. And these words describe the entire game. At some point - let it be after 100 hours - you suddenly realize you just love everything about the Hollow Knight.
I haven't played any souls-like games so I can't compare but the so-called souls-like elements don't play a key role in the game and practically add nothing to what makes it authentic. I've never died on the way to my shade so never lost any geo nevertheless also find it a little irritating and time-consuming. Its approach to narrative through dialogues and descriptions kept me intrigued but for full understanding of the lore I referred to Wiki and YouTube whether because of natural cons of the approach or that I am not a native speaker I don't know.
My first blind play-through took 30 hours and my completion was around 60%. I didn't experiment with charm builds, used neither spells no nail arts. I thought I took my time to explore every corner and I left the game a little bit disappointed. After a while I chanced upon a video and there were locations, bosses and stories I'd never seen, let alone spectacular skill of the content creator however he was struggling and sweating really hard. So I came back and found out about several endings, the path of pain, the Godhome, etc.
The most beautiful thing about the game in my opinion is an absolutely fair learning curve. There are a lot of bosses I thought I'd never beat in a reasonable training time interval but you try a boss, you struggle, you practice, eventually win, feel more skilled and suddenly the next one is felt very doable. Repeat. Somehow this system with your gradual development just works perfectly and I doubt it was intentional to be this perfect. Let me explain, almost every game has gradually increasing difficulty but generally it's linear development conditioned by a story. One the contrary, in the Hollow Knight you mostly choose an order of boss fights in a minimal ending path and any bosses in any other extended paths, let alone the Godhome. So my point is the gradual development system perfectly works in this chaotic conditions of the Hollow Knight. Thus it makes you highly addicted and grindy. I got all achievements, the path of pain and all Radiant bosses but luckily could manage to stop myself from trying all pantheons with full bindings. As regards the achievements they do not reflect the difficulty of the game. It's a good milestone to close the chapter and to stop embracing the grind but nowhere near to fully complete the game nor be very good at.
I don't want to be that guy and really don't mean to devalue other people experience but if you are a newbie and considering to play the game I highly recommend you to not read reviews of the players with playtime below 70 hours at very least no matter they are positive or not. In most cases they just scratched the surface thus had no opportunity to discover all content. And if it's below 30 hours and something about charms, fight system or bosses' difficulty then sadly they have no any idea what they are talking about. I am speaking with no bad intentions it's just I was on their place too.
Absolutely amazing game. One of the best metroidvania. Look forward to Silksong.