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What's so special about the original Hollow Knight? The intoxicating power of Team Cherry's invisible, insistent guiding hand

With Hollow Knight: Silksong primed for launch and the original game's player count going through the roof, we talk about what made that first game so special.

There's been a wealth of incredible Metroidvania games from small dev teams over the past few generations - Axiom Verge, Guacamelee, Headlander, Ori and the Blind Forest to name just a few - but I don't think any of them compare with Hollow Knight, really. It represents a high tide for the genre that I think even surpasses the achievements of its progenitors, taking the foundational design philosophies of Metroid and Castlevania and sanding off all the rough edges to leave something elegant, perplexing and utterly moreish. You don't even need to be a game design savant to understand the potential for sequence breaks (something Ori and the Blind Forest also understood very well), and by keeping a keen eye on the environment and the map, it feels like Team Cherry almost dares you to skip certain bosses or platforming challenges.

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