Hollow Knight

It took me years to come to grips with the fact that it's okay I don't like Hollow Knight, and that also doesn't make it a bad game.

I wanted to like it so much. On paper, it's everything I should love. I love metroidvanias; I love platformers; I love indie games; I love the visuals and atmosphere; I love the music. It feels like the game should have been made just for me. The thing is, it wasn't. It was made for people who love all those things, and also Dark Souls. There is no in-between. It's for people who love all those things, and also grueling, punishing, unfair challenges. I don't. And that's okay. And that also does not make it bad.

I never actually played Dark Souls, but I did play Bloodborne. Unlike Hollow Knight, I did actually learn to love that game by the end. I still hated significant portions of it, and find restarting it from scratch to be infuriating all over again. Bloodborne was only truly fun for me once I upgraded everything and had an OP build. It still has endless instances of what I feel like are bad game design—the same kind that plague Hollow Knight around every corner—but other people like getting constantly fucked over in video games, to put it bluntly.

A lot of people get dopamine from conquering an absurdly, brutally difficult challenge. A lot of the time, I don't. If I am genuinely angry at how mechanics are designed, and if it feels like very few errors are actually my fault rather than the game's, I don't get that dopamine. I just feel hollow.

I do love many difficult games—Celeste is my favorite game of all time—but there's a difference between a game that builds you up and encourages you to improve, and a game that kicks you while you're down, over and over and over and over and over again. If I complete a challenge in Celeste that takes me hours, I feel awesome. If I kill a soulslike boss that felt genuinely impossible and unfair, I just want to cry. I barely even feel accomplished. But who am I to take joy from those who experience it differently?

These games... it's fine if they're not for me. They're for others. I still have games I love as much as I feel like I should've loved Hollow Knight. It's okay that it's not for me. Nothing's ruined.