Video games have become an omnipresent form of entertainment. From the dawn of home consoles in the 1970s, to the juggernaut franchises of today, video games have been presenting stories in an interactive and entertaining way that no other medium can successfully match. The closest parallel to a video game is a choose-your-own-adventure book, but while a video game can imitate and, in some form, even become an interactive book, the reverse cannot be true. Video games present their content in a way that cannot be imitated by any other medium, and this presentation lends itself to telling stories in many new and nontraditional forms.
Looking towards modern gaming, many different conventions have spread to production studios and game development teams in order to “properly convey the story” of the game. Standard plot points are connected by either story events or player choice, and cutscenes mix with dialogue to bring the content to the player. However, there is a clear divide between the average game and a truly unique phenomenon, and these extraordinary games are few and far between. What makes them different? Often, the top games push the medium in a unique or interesting new way rather than revamp old conditions and form their own strategies for molding and presenting their stories.
Team Cherry’s under-the-radar indie masterpiece Hollow Knight released in the first quarter of 2017 and found its niche in video gaming culture as a parallel to games like Super Metroid or Castlevania, cementing itself as a staple in the “MetroidVania” genre. It takes many cues from these games, from the vast, sprawling worlds and vicious boss fights of both games to the subtleties in the environment picked from Super Metroid’s art design. While it has not achieved massive commercial success, it has opened to incredible acclaim by critics and those who have played it. Many fans of the game even consider it on-par or better than the standard icons of the genre’s namesake. While the trio of genre powerhouses share many features, gameplay elements, and design cues, something that makes Hollow Knight unique and sets it apart from these other popular MetroidVania titles is the way the plot of the game presents itself.
Rather than spell out exactly what is happening throughout the game like in Castlevania, Hollow Knight opts to tell its story through cryptic clues and environmental objects and settings that is not unlike another immensely popular game: Dark Souls. The type of storytelling is very similar, and the player is encouraged to “explore and discover” what’s going on in that game instead of receiving delivered plot bits through things like dialogue or cutscenes. The crucial points in the story are given to the player through boss fights and cutscenes, but they remain intentionally vague and mysterious, encouraging the player to discover more on their own. There is little dialogue in the game, only occurring after major events within the story. Many of these interactions with other characters are cryptic and the player is left to assume and draw conclusions from the morsels of lore that they are given, adding to their knowledge with the environment around them.
The most obvious element in the game’s production comes from its art style. Hollow Knight features hand-drawn sprites and environments and uses a form of parallax scrolling within the game screens to simulate a foreground and background as the knight scuttles through the depths of the vast game world. The attention to detail within the sprites is enormous, an individual move can have over ten separate sprites drawn to constitute the motion, and the game “flows” with the fluidity of the frames of motion. This attention is spread with just as much intensity to the environments, and much of the game’s story is found within the sprites of the world, in contrast to those of the characters. Rooms will have ornate decoration that shows that it was once a place for royalty. A dungeon-type area has many broken glass jars, revealing just how prolific the owner was at “collecting” specimens. A lake pushed to the bottom of the darkest reaches of the game sources much of the life present within its caves and hallways.
There is a moment inthis regard that exhibits an entirely new way to consume the content within the game. A fast travel system exists, run by a giant stag beetle (appropriately named “The Last Stag”), who will sprint through corridors to assist you in crossing the map with extreme speed and convenience. From the moment you meet the stag, he speaks of the Stag Nest, his homeland, an area of the world long lost as its stagway station has disappeared from all maps. This all is explicitly stated, but in the game the location is revealed after discovering all other stagway stations. If you call the stag to the long-lost station, he will graciously react to your discovery, appreciating the Vessel for helping him to rediscover home, but also lamenting on the emptiness of the nest and realizing that he is the last of his kind.
Exploring the zone reveals that many of the stags have died (or have been killed) by their corpses, environmental sprites that are littering each room in the area, and there is little evidence to form a valid conclusion on what happened there. The player will eventually stumble upon a room with a large, broken egg sitting in the middle of the room acting as a centerpiece and drawing the player’s eye with an “Inspect” option. In context, the situation is depressing and hopeless; the stags are no more. However, upon choosing to interact with the egg, the inspect text describes it as “a broken egg. It’s empty.” With a trademark *blip* an achievement pops in the corner of the screen with a simple title: “Hope.” This moment in the game transcends traditional medium of video games, telling an entire micro-story as built up by the game that finally reaches its head as an external device, separate from the gameplay. The eggs were not destroyed, but instead the stags have hatched. This achievement completely changes the scope of the area and is just one example of many that shows how Hollow Knight progresses the lore and content within the plot without using standard methods and mediums to convey the narrative. One further detail from this area shows how the story of the game is conveyed to the player, in a non-traditional way: Upon returning to the stag, his name has changed; he is no longer “The Last Stag”, but rather “The Old Stag.”
Few, if any, games use the medium in such a way. If a game is pursuing the title of “art,” it will often focus more on crafting the story with deep and thoughtful concepts but traditional convention. Hollow Knight argues against these conventions. Team Cherry has elected to create a game whose art can be found within the gameplay and chose to circumvent a well-spoken story in favor for an experience of discovery that will dictate the narrative long after the characters have ceased speaking.
