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Hand-drawn adventure Hollow Knight comes to Switch
The Steam hit is bringing its unique brand of Metroidvania to the Nintendo console – we speak to the team involved.
Indie game development is such an accepted part of the industry these days that it's no longer a shock to learn that the 30-hour epic you just soldiered through was created by a team of people which numbers in single digits, but even so, the diminutive size of the studio behind Hollow Knight is striking. Just three individuals are responsible for creating this gothic 2D Metroidvania title at Australia-based Team Cherry: Ari Gibson handles art and animation, William Pellen is in charge of design and David Kazi is on technical duty, while the haunting soundtrack was outsourced to Christopher Larkin.
Despite the tiny size of the studio, Team Cherry have created something truly special. Hollow Knight launched on Steam in February to glowing reviews which compared it to the best Metroidvanias the genre had to offer, as well as making connections with the dark and captivating work of director Tim Burton. Set in the seemingly deserted town of Dirtmouth – previously occupied by countless insect inhabitants – the game places you in the role of a insect warrior who ventures into the underground world of Hallownest to discover the secret which has so cruelly emptied Dirtmouth of its inhabitants.
The comparisons with Burton's enviable body of work are obvious and valid; Hollow Knight's insect-like characters and foreboding environments wouldn't look out of place in one of his famous stop-frame animated productions. The hand-drawn artwork is exquisitely animated and the main character packs in a surprising amount of charisma for such a small sprite. Despite the heavy reliance on muted colours in the gameworld this is a startlingly handsome game which really needs to be witnessed in motion to get the full impact.
However, for all of its visual trappings, it's the way in which Hollow Knight embraces and refines the tried-and-tested Metroidvania blueprint which makes it truly noteworthy. "Early games like Super Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda II and Faxanadu were all big influences on the inception and development of the game," Team Cherry's William Pellen tells Red Bull Games. These are games which give a huge sense of scale, and that's what Hollow Knight replicates so perfectly.
"The big thing uniting all those games, the key element we were interested in reproducing, was the sense of going on a grand adventure in a strange land full of monsters and funny characters and secret nooks and crannies," Pellen continues. "We really like the feeling of forging your own path in uncharted territory and having to face unknown dangers."
This sense of exploration is keenly felt at all times in Hollow Knight. As is the case in other examples of the genre, your character begins their quest with basic abilities but is able to pick up new powers and augment their current skills to drastically improve their chances of survival when facing the game's increasingly potent enemies. Filling out the map becomes an almost obsessive compulsion and each new skill offers the chance to back-track and reveal a part of the world that was previously off-limits.
It's a setup which will be instantly familiar to fans of Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – the two games which birthed the term 'Metroidvania' – and Team Cherry weren't interested in tinkering with this ideal for the sheer sake of it. "The blueprint we use is pretty similar to the classic one," admits Pellen. "Our focus was on expanding the scope of the genre and refining existing ideas rather than introducing anything revolutionary."
Few games are truly innovative these days, and it's often the case that many modern classics borrow elements from several different titles in order to fuse them together in a way which is somehow more than the sum of its parts. Hollow Knight is no exception; the game's currency, known as Geo, is lost when the player dies. However, should they manage to tirelessly fight their way back to the spot where they perished they can retrieve their lost Geo – a clear nod to FromSoftware's punishing but beloved Dark Souls series.
Getting the game into the hands of players wasn't easy with such a small team, and without crowdfunding we wouldn't even be talking about Hollow Knight right now. "The game wouldn't even exist if not for the successful Kickstarter campaign, so it was very important," say Pellen when asked about the impact of the game's funding drive. "It allowed us to properly form the company and work on the game full-time, as well as bring Dave Kazi on-board."
As has been the case with countless other Kickstarter campaigns, the people who made the difference by backing the project were involved in varying capacities, from supplying invaluable feedback to actually contributing key ideas to the final product. "Working with backers has been fun; it was really interesting getting their ideas and working them into the world of Hollow Knight in ways that hopefully seemed natural," says Pellen. "Some of the game's best characters and enemies are backer additions."
Hollow Knight's combination of tight action, engaging exploration, solid mechanics and gorgeous presentation have made it one of the most talked-about Steam releases of 2017, but console owners need not feel left out as Team Cherry recently confirmed that the game is headed to the Nintendo Switch.
"Working with Nintendo has been great," reveals Pellen. "They've been supportive the whole way through. Stepping us through their processes, including us in important updates, featuring us during showreels, helping us out with equipment, and so on." Despite reports suggesting that the game coming to PlayStation 4 was a done deal, Pellen reveals that Team Cherry are only currently "looking into" the possibility of a Sony release, but have nothing solid to confirm at this moment in time.
While some may be tempted to ask if there's any more life left in the Metroidvania genre after so many new takes on the concept, Hollow Knight is proof positive that there's still plenty of entertainment value to be extracted from this tried-and-tested blueprint – and with the impending Switch release, the game's weird and wonderful world should hopefully reach a much wider audience.
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