Hollow Knight: Satisfaction and Challenge

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A few hours into Hollow Knight I was struck by a realisation. I wasn't having fun.

That was followed by an immediate sense of déjà vu. This had happened to me recently in another metroidvania: Iconoclasts. That game also had a fascinating world and great characters, as well as a story that I was eager to follow. Yet the moment to moment gameplay was actively harming my experience. Ordinarily a metroidvania starts with limited options for traversal and as you acquire more abilities, movement begins to feel better and better. I could brush off the initially irritating mechanics as just being the result of starting out, yet Iconoclasts never actually managed to reach a point where it felt 'good' to control my character, Robin. The result was that I ended up grinding my way through the game in order to see how the story played out, rather than because I was actually enjoying the 'game' part of the game. Ultimately, I think that the reason this happened was that I never felt fully in control of Robin at all times. There were multiple points where the action I intended to perform and the action I did perform were different, resulting in death and frustration. Worse, I think that these frustrations robbed me of the satisfaction of seeing the story through. Having slogged my way through the final few encounters I felt relief, rather than accomplishment - which is absolutely not the tone that I think the game was going for. That is especially sad because the ending is really, really good.

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I'd been looking forward to playing Hollow Knight for a long time, especially because of the absolutely glowing recommendation from a friend (incidentally, thanks Rocketu :).  So, when I started noticing that same sense of frustration as I was playing, I was worried. I had been utterly sucked into the lore of Hallownest, so to think that it could be ruined for me by the gameplay was a scary prospect. Unlike Iconoclasts though, there was a point at which a switch flipped. All of a sudden, I was really enjoying the gameplay of Hollow Knight and that was massively contributing to my enjoyment of the other aspects I was enthralled by. I was even more excited to explore new areas and see what awesome bosses I'd get to fight because doing so was fun.

What is most interesting to me, however, was that the catalyst for this was not an upgrade that made my movement more enjoyable. Instead, it was a charm that I had discovered that halved the amount of time it takes to "focus" - the mechanic that allows you to recover health. This small change radically altered my experience of the game. Even more bizarre was that the charm had done nothing to alter any of the things that were causing me frustration. The jumping still felt really floaty and imprecise, the decision to include a corpse rush was still obnoxious (especially when your corpse got trapped in the boss room), and the distance between respawn point and boss fight was often way too far just to take another crack. But this charm made it possible for me to overlook all of these issues.

My question for today then is a very simple one. How did such a small change produce such a large difference in my experience? I think the answer is that the "Quick Focus" charm allowed me to make a mental shift from viewing the challenges as unfair, to viewing them as beatable. Victories stopped feeling like they were down to luck and down instead to my own skill. That meant that my frustration was lessened because mistakes became an opportunity to improve rather than a punishment, and that made victories all the more satisfying. I am aware that this is kind of the point of "Soulslike" games where the difficulty of the challenge is high in order to increase the player's sense of accomplishment, but it is interesting to me that this didn't happen because of me figuring out a better fighting technique or beating a particularly hard boss, which are the moments in which you'd expect this mental switch to occur.

The Knight using the "focus" technique.
Source: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/hollowknight-5.jpg

To unpack this answer more, I think it is worth looking at how "focusing" works in a bit more depth. The Knight's health is represented by the masks on the top left of the screen. The Knight can take five hits at this stage and is then defeated. However, the Knight can recover a mask by spending "soul", the liquid in the big circle. One third of the circle amounts to a single mask, so if it is full the Knight can recover three masks worth. However, in order to activate the focus the Knight must be standing still. By pressing and holding the focus button, soul is drained from the meter and a mask is restored once enough has been drained. Importantly though, this process takes time, and the Knight is completely vulnerable in this state. Additionally, if the button is released before a mask is recovered, the soul that has already been used is gone. That means that if the Knight is interrupted while healing by an attack, or the player mistimes their heal, not only will they take damage but they also lose out on the potential they had to heal later.

This is a pretty clever mechanic. It turns recovery into a risk-reward decision for the player. The player needs to assess whether or not they have time to safely engage their focus and complete it before getting back into the fray. That window can be very tight, meaning that the judgement call becomes a risk as the player may have to cancel the focus early to dodge an attack, or get hit if they mistimed the window. The upshot is that understanding enemy or boss behaviour becomes the key to knowing which openings are safe and which are not. The player is encouraged to learn and observe in order to succeed. Over and above this, Soul is recovered by attacking enemies which pushes the Knight to be active in combat. But that also opens the Knight up to being hit if they are too aggressive. This is what makes combat in the game so satisfying (it's also down to how 'crunchy' everything feels - the sound and visual design contribute to making all your attacks feel like they are weighty and impactful). By creating incentives for players to play proactively, Team Cherry managed to ensure that players are playing in the most exciting and visceral way possible. That's neat.

So, what difference does the "Quick Focus" charm make to this process? Well because it halves the time it takes for the Knight to recover a mask it means that you are able to take advantage of windows between attacks that you would otherwise not be able to. It also means that during the spaces where you could potentially recover one mask previously, you can now recover two. Before finding this charm, I often felt like bosses could "get ahead of me". Basically, they could land more hits in the windows between their openings than I could recover during one. When coupled with unfamiliarity with the controls and the boss patterns, this lead to instances where things felt overwhelming - most apparent to me during the Soul Master battle, where dodging is difficult because of your limited movement. You are hit often so that even when the opportunity comes, a single mask feels like it cannot make much of a difference. That also has an impact on your ability to learn a boss. The less time you spend in each fight the less chance you have to observe attacks, learn patterns, and see new attacks that the boss has. It felt like I was constantly being surprised by what a boss could do and because learning was made slow and the trudge between respawn point and boss room is long, that can make fighting bosses frustrating.

Quick Focus completely changes this dynamic. It makes encounters far more forgiving than they were before as you have more of a chance to keep up with a boss or enemy that is giving you trouble. That means you survive those encounters longer and have a greater opportunity to learn. Essentially Quick Focus reduces the potential punishment of making a mistake in combat by giving you more of an opportunity to recover from it. That has a profound effect on how a challenge feels in the moment. Rather than feeling like a cheap hit or mistimed input completely ruins your ability to continue, I was instead more confident that I could recover and stay on top of the fight. What makes this an especially nice way of helping a player like me feel more confident is that the healing mechanic is still something that needs to be actively used. You still have to pick your moments correctly - you just have more of them. That means that the challenge is diminished for the player, but does not feel as though it has been diminished. It is still ultimately the player that is triumphing over the boss because of the actions they took during the fight. Further, because it is not free to equip charms (the Knight has a certain number of 'notches' to equip charms on and once they are full, they cannot equip more) there is an opportunity cost to picking that charm. This means that while I can lean on it as a crutch while I am learning the game initially, I have a strong incentive to swap it out for others as I get better. By offering a mechanic that I can utilise while I need it but then have good reason to go beyond, Team Cherry have offered an elegant solution to a problem that could have made Hollow Knight far less enjoyable for me. The fact that they did it without compromising the nature of the experience is testament to how well designed the game really is.

Hollow Knight is a great game, but one that I had to grow to love. Thankfully the game has amazing developers that built the tools I needed to reach that point into the game. I am sure there are a ton more lessons developers can take from this game, but for me a super important one is that it is absolutely possible to make a difficult game more forgiving without compromising on the experience.  You don't need to cheat the player out of feeling accomplished when they overcome a challenge, and you might find that when you help the player when they are learning the game, they are going to stick around long enough to master it. My current playtime attests to that.

A pretty pawsome lesson from a totally pawsome game :3