Hollow Knight: Godmaster of None

Source: http://teamcherry.com.au/wp-content/uploads/HK_Godmaster.jpg

I have reached the Tropic of Fuckabout in Hollow Knight.

This is a place defined by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation fame) as the point at which a game stops being challenging and instead resorts to merely "fucking the player about". After nearly 100 hours and right at the final step of the penultimate challenge, Hollow Knight has slammed on the breaks and is just fucking me about.

For context, I am currently playing the Godmaster DLC. This is a boss rush mode added to the game that presents you with with 4 sets of 10 boss fights, each one containing a brand-new boss that you haven't seen in the main campaign, followed by a final set of every single boss in the game that culminates in a fight against the toughest boss in the entire game. Initially, I thought this might be quite cool. You take the skills you have acquired along with an expanded arsenal and revisit fights that you'd have struggled with earlier in the game in order to perfect your skills. Your reward is a great new fight to test your mettle against.

This sounds great - in theory. The first two "Pantheons" (the name given to each set) were immensely enjoyable, allowing me to absolutely trounce some of the earlier bosses in the game that had proven difficult at the time and presenting really cool new final bosses to take on. I hit a bit of a wall in the third Pantheon where the game throws two very RNG dependent fights against you in quick succession. Given that you have no ability to heal between each fight, save for the game's in combat healing mechanic, it can be tricky to navigate these battles with enough health remaining to take on that Pantheon's final boss. This is a bit annoying, and I'd have preferred these fights to have been spaced differently, but this is the most challenging part of that particular pantheon. Once I crossed that gap, I found that I could often heal up enough to give me a reasonable shot at the final boss - a really nice fight.

This has all changed at the fourth Pantheon. The spike in difficulty between the penultimate boss of this set and the final one - The Pure Vessel - is unlike anything that you will have experienced in the game up till this point. Previously, the hardest boss I had faced in the game came in the form of Nightmare King Grimm a boss who's battle I came to really enjoy. Because of how fast he is, the battle ends up taking on the appearance of a dance. You have to immediately recognise his intended attack, and respond with the precise counter. It was a very frustrating battle to learn but the run in which you do succeed is immensely satisfying. You end up looking like a speed runner and feeling like a total badass as a result.

It helps that he has an AWESOME design.
Source: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/hollowknight/images/0/09/B_Nightmare_King.png/revision/latest?cb=20180830225152

In many ways, the Pure Vessel is the same. He is even faster than NKG, requiring insane precision. You have an even smaller window to determine his attack and react appropriately and mastery of the cool down on your shade cloak ability is imperative. I have found that if you make a single mistake, the resulting change in your tempo relative to his can absolutely screw you. You have to have all the steps down if you want to beat him. It is a really hard fight, unlike anything I have done in any game.

Taken on its own, it is great and provides a fitting test of the player's skill. But that is the operative phrase: "taken on its own". I have managed to beat The Pure Vessel, however, I have only managed to do it in the separate practice area of the game - the Hall of Gods. This is a chance to take on any of the bosses in the game in a one-on-one practice fight that you can dive into over and over again in order to improve. I complained before that one of the things that really annoyed me about Hollow Knight was the fact that it can take you a long time to get back to a boss in order to retry it if you die. This problem is alleviated in the Hall of Gods. I lose a fight, and am able to immediately jump back in and try again. This is great and really highlights to me how important it is that the Hornet DLC attempts to reduce the time taken to get back to a boss. It would really improve the pace of the game.

I like the Pure Vessel fight in the Hall of Gods. It is absurdly hard but it does feel like it is just about doable for me. But here's the rub. Completing it here is ultimately unsatisfying. The reason is that you know in order for it to count you have to defeat it as part of the Pantheon and here is where the Tropic looms on the horizon. In order to even get a chance to take him on, the player needs to navigate a ten-minute plus stretch of gameplay. I understand the point of this - the idea is that it is meant to make the ultimate battle against the Pure Vessel more intense by adding in the additional punishment of sending the player back to the beginning. But given how difficult that fight is, and how a single mistake can be absolutely fatal, all it ends up doing is adding a ten-minute stretch between each attempt. I have now become so good at the initial 9 bosses that they are trivial to beat. They are no longer forming part of the challenge, they are just busy work I have to overcome to get a crack at the Pure Vessel again. This really sucks and has resulted in me feeling like each precursor fight is just there to waste my time.

I wrote in the last post on Hollow Knight that much of the enjoyment comes from the satisfaction of overcoming the challenge that the game presents you with. What is awful is that upon defeating the Pure Vessel for the first time I was robbed of that sense of satisfaction because I knew that the victory was ultimately hollow (hollow, lol). To all intents and purposes defeating him didn't actually count for my progression. In addition, I have had to waste a number of hours now grinding through the entire Pantheon just to sometimes get completely bodied by him. The challenge has disappeared for me and has been largely replaced with busywork. What makes matters worse is that even if I manage to overcome this Pantheon through sheer force of will, the final pantheon turns that stretch to get to the final boss of the game into an hour plus long stretch that includes NKG and the Pure Vessel. If this is how awful it feels to have to grind for ten minutes between attempts, an hour is inconceivable. The upshot is that I am realistically never going to finish that Pantheon. I just do not have the time and energy to practice enough to get good. To compound how awful that feels for someone that enjoys completing games, there are two endings locked behind that challenge - both of which are claimed to expand the ore of the game by offering the 'true' ending. So not only is the Tropic of Fuckabout preventing me from enjoying the final parts of the game, it is going to deprive me of the satisfaction of seeing the ending.

I started this blog as a way for me to think about game design. I wanted to unpack the things that I was enjoying or disliked about games so that I could really understand why they were contributing to my experience in the way that they did. Hollow Knight has given me a lot to think about. A game that I started off struggling to get into transformed into a game I couldn't get enough of based on a single mechanical change and that you can do that without robbing the player of their sense of accomplishment. That in itself was a fascinating lesson for me, but it has continued to offer much food for thought as I have progressed further. It taught me the immense satisfaction of mastering a seemingly impossible sequence and how in its boss design it can make the player feel like they are perfecting a dance. It also taught me just how easy it is to sour that experience by placing time-wasting roadblocks in the player's way in order for them to get to the challenge.

Hollow Knight is a great game that I enjoyed immensely. It deserved to finish better than this.

Addendum:

The evening after writing this I finally managed to beat the pantheon. While I am absolutely elated that I managed to finally beat the Pure Vessel in a way that really counts, it has not really changed my feelings on the structure of the DLC as a whole. This definitely feels way more like relief than satisfaction and that is a huge pity.