There are lots of reasons why I bounced off any number of games, but the reason I stopped playing Hollow Knight remains possibly the strangest I’ve ever had. Now, with Hollow Knight: Silksong finally, still-slightly-unbelievably in our hands, I’m thinking about returning to Hallownest for the first time in years – but only if I can shed the rancid karma from my last time playing it.
The year was 2018, and I’d been playing Hollow Knight on my Nintendo Switch. Obviously, this was something special, and while I’d missed out on its original release, I’d been quick to pick up the handheld version, and even quicker to get fully sucked into its world. So, facing the prospect of a three hour flight home, I knew exactly how I planned to fill the time.
It’s been seven years, and for reasons that will soon become clear I no longer have any memory of exactly where I’d got to in this doomed Hollow Knight playthrough. But I do know that after I got off this plane ride, I never played Hollow Knight again, and that it was not really Hollow Knight’s fault.
Hollowed out
The first sign that something was wrong should have been when I sat down in the middle seat. This is always bad, but when you’re six foot, 220lbs, and flying with a budget airline, it is even worse. This dreadful human puzzle was complete when two burly men sat down on either side of me. I’m sure that in reality, these two figures were completely normal-sized, but my memory has warped them into titans who proceeded to crush me into my seat for the next three hours.
Undeterred, I pulled out my Switch and continued from wherever I’d previously left off with Hollow Knight. Even squished as I was, this might have been fine had my two companions, both dressed in business suits, not pulled out laptops and started doing their day jobs on the plane. I did my best to focus on the game, but I couldn’t help feeling just a bit like a little kid playing with toys while the grown-ups around me did their real work.
And then I got stuck. I don’t remember what boss I was fighting against, but I do know I couldn’t beat them. This was not a particularly long flight, and I’m sure that I was only struggling with this battle for significantly less than an hour. But again, my memory has warped and twisted this event so that it feels like I was trapped in boss fight purgatory the entire way home.
This was, I think, the single worst gameplaying experience of my life. I was squashed uncomfortably between two people trying their best to be proper adults in proper suits with proper jobs, all while I failed to win at a video game. As I did so, I got increasingly flustered and increasingly warm, but trapped in a weirdly professional environment, I had neither the physical space nor the social confidence to either crash out or cool down. To make matters worse, I was getting late, and the harsh airplane light was juxtaposed against an autumn sky darkening as quickly as my mood.
I like to think I defeated that boss. Honestly, I don’t remember, and I don’t really want to dig out my old Switch save to check, but I do know that I didn’t finish Hollow Knight, and looking at the list of bosses I do remember beating, I don’t think I even got halfway through it. I also know that I’ve never picked up that Switch version since late 2018, and I’d rather redownload the whole game on PC than even begin to revisit the experience I had back then. And the worst part is that I’m loath to check out Silksong without finishing Hollow Knight, so if I want to be in on arguably the hottest game of the year, I’ll have to go back and start the first game fresh. The only factor that seems to be in my favor is that my brain has purged almost any gameplay details from my mind since this fateful day, so when I inevitably crack and go back to Hallownest, it’ll be as if I’m experiencing it for the first time.