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Dan Olson

@foldablehuman.bsky.social

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Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 17h

You can almost see the moment that they realized a vertical wall of spikes is basically an elevator.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 20h

I would say they did borrow that, for the most part. I think Last Judge is the only critical path boss up to the spider queen ending that has any real notoriety, and even that is mostly the run back. But then because that's *an* ending they made Act 3 the "prove it" act full of "prove it" bosses.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 21h

That sounds really good, I'm gonna put that on.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 21h

Yeah, 'cus Souls games, by and large, start you off with a strange but definable top level objective: you're a weird zombie thing that feels compelled to go stick your hand in a fire for reasons you don't fully comprehend, something something end of the world.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

And this is part of what makes HK a compelling thing to break down for me, is that you can almost palpably feel the team getting more and more confident, more and more ambitious, as they went on.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

contact at folding ideas show dot com

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

Then once you get out past that, very literally in the game's geography, Queen's Station, Mantis Village, City of Tears, the game actually kicks into gear and things start ripping.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

So in my brain it maps out as Forgotten Crossroads as this proof of concept, can we mechanically build a satisfying Metroidvania world puzzle? Big center loop, optional boss off to the side. Then Greenpath is this teaser where you're chasing Hornet. That's your pitch package.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

Now the actual criticism: I don't think the flow of HK's early game is good. I think it's actually pretty weak. The Crossroads are almost *too* self-contained, the rest of the game is just kinda attached to them off side paths. There's also a lack of narrative purpose.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

Because when Ari and William sat down to found Team Cherry and make Hollow Knight their aspirations were basically "maybe we could be the next Braid or LIMBO", they did not know the end from the beginning.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

And to be clear this isn't like "oh, brah brah brah, this game sucks", it's just an observation, I find these manifestations of *how* games are made to be inherently interesting.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 22h

I got some heat in my original HK thread for saying "I can feel the early-access-crowd-funded-ness" but I feel like I can explain that better now. Forgotten Crossroads is basically a demo, a self-contained proof-of-concept loop that the rest of the game is attached to.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

Started a fresh Hollow Knight save, and the first Hornet fight is like a child's crayon drawing of what would become the Lost Lace fight.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

lol

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

I still need 2 more eyes + I assume a kill w/ the spear + the final confrontation with Chronos, so I'll probably get around to that on Thursday.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

I still haven't beat Sword Saint. Maybe that's what I need to pivot my Skong conditioning into, while I'm still in peak form.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

It was messy AF, extremely sloppy transition just on the edge of what I'd consider for a reset, but when it came down to the wire my phase 4 play was a clinical exercise in applied violence.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 1d

After a week on Hades 2 I decided to square this away and prove to myself that my True Ending victory wasn't just a statistical fluke.

Silksong 100% Game Completion screen with Steam achievement

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 2d

The two routes are great, they add a lot of variety to the game, but they also introduce friction in terms of trying to do more than one thing at a time: sometimes things line up, sometimes they don't.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 2d

Wait, no, it's 6 and 6.

To that end I basically learned to ignore the bounty board for these last few runs needed, which unfortunately makes those runs (Surface esp.) feel very chore-adjacent.

But I also don't want to just follow the bounty board until I happen to get what I need.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 2d

The bounty system gets a little odd in the back quarter of the campaign where you're comfortable enough with the mechanics that you can run at least a few levels of fear while working on the 5 and 5 wins needed to roll the credits, but the bounty only sometimes lines up with the path you need to run

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 2d

Criticisms:

Way too stingy on seeds then drowning in seeds.
Projectile collision on Surface Boss 4 is weird and the fact they can't be deflected sucks.
Broker needs two slots that rotate various zone resources for any zone you've beat: doing a surface run for one piece of driftwood feels bad.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 2d

This changed everything.

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 4d

I am subtracting a point for forcing me to choose between frog and kitty

Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 5d

This year is just win after win for fans of diegetic music.