Hollow Knight Taught Louise Chase Hard Lessons About Herself And What She Could Do | Winter Spectacular 2025
When you walk into the unknown, are you scared? Do you think you’re able to fight your way to the other side, knowing it might change you?
It could be me talking about my Master’s degree in Creative Writing, or my decision to take full advantage of my ADHD this year and explore events and concerts on my own for the first time in almost a decade, a skill I thought I’d long since lost. But no, this is going to be an article about my first experience playing Hollow Knight and at long last, Silksong.
I’d seen Team Cherry’s metroidvania recommended and highlighted in games lists for years, the soulless eyes of the Knight peering out at me whenever I went into the Playstation Plus menu and redownloaded an Assassin’s Creed title I already owned but couldn’t find the disc for. Whispers of its difficulty roamed the speedrunning videos I would sometimes have recommended it to me, and so Hallownest sat undisturbed.
Then Youtube started to recommend an onslaught of videos detailing how “Dark Souls saved my life” — where the grind and the payoff to difficult bosses people may have spent weeks of their lives battling both on and off screen are praised.
And I am someone who loves a challenge, so I downloaded the original Hollow Knight last November and decided to give it a try.
There’s likely nothing new I can say about Team Cherry’s original masterpiece, but right from that first drop into King’s Path I was enamoured and ready for the challenge laid ahead of me.
Very quickly I found myself searching every corner for its lore and trinkets. I’ve not studied archaeology and museum curation in a few years, but old habits die hard. Over time, these little wanderings led me down many secret paths, finding my way into the ever-expanding world beneath my feet, sinking into the earth and then into the Abyss. Wondering what comes next, and if I was ready for the boss around the corner.
Usually not.
I sat with Quirrel in the City of Tears watching the rain in companionable silence, to the point that now I use the track as ambient music to fall asleep to when I’m stressed or worried. For Silksong, which I began the moment the Playstation store stopped crashing on release day, Bellheart and Last Dive are woven into my heart and soul.
Music has always been the quickest way to get me invested in a game; in the early days, the title screen music for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was 50% of the reason why I pressed Start, and my adoration for Austin Wintory’s stuff, from Journey to Erica to Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, has become infamous among the Quiz Society at my university.
For a game where the protagonist doesn’t speak a word, the knight’s interactions wrote a novel for its audience. I found myself bowing to the Mantis Lords and defeated foes or returning to Kingdom’s Edge and stumbling across the end of Tiso’s tale. Seeing Myla in Crystal Peaks and discovering that she’d become a husk happened the week I received a mark far lower than I was anticipating for my degree. You couldn’t script this emotional parallel, but it was moments like that made me realise that I was learning far more than how to defeat the Pantheons as I continued on.
Listening to the hopes and fears of Hallownest’s inhabitants, I realised a few of my own were being reflected back at me. Staring into the void and wondering who is the person looking back, the sonder-filled thoughts about the people who came before me and the lives they had after.
When I was first stepping my toes into the gaming journalism world one job interview stood out to me: I was told I didn’t play enough video games. I had dabbled a bit outside my usual go-to of Action Adventure but Hollow Knight was the first real test of skill outside of my comfort zone.
And I thoroughly embraced it. Even the infamous moment where I accidentally shut down my PS5 rather than placing it on standby one evening and having my progress through Path of Pain reset to the beginning of the White Palace, I managed to get back to where I was deathless, and continued to the remainder of the route (and even the first attempt of Path of Pain) by sight and without much of a misstep.
I even attempted Steel Soul, HK’s permadeath run you unlock after defeating the titular boss for the first time. I hate primal aspids, if you’re asking how that particular run went. But it added new layers to the world and the lore I had picked up from my first playthrough. Was I a new discarded sibling that had crawled out of the Abyss?
Like Hades before it, the difficulty spike did feel frustrating at times, but it gave me the push that opened doors into something else entirely. In a time where I pivoted from my previous studies into a completely new field for my Master’s and being unsure if I was “good enough” to be part of the class, the determination kept me pushing forward, and trying my damned hardest.
And so what if I missed a Distinction overall by one mark, or took two weeks to defeat bosses speedrunners can demolish in minutes? I did it. That’s the important thing.
It made me feel accomplished. Even if I was roaming all over the place and wandering into boss battles I was far too inexperienced for, sometimes I might surprise myself. I persuaded a friend to pick up HK shortly before Silksong’s release and he surprised everyone in our group of friends by managing to defeat the Hollow Knight on his first attempt.
Since playing Silksong and returning to the original so I could finally check off those final three pantheons, I’ve noticed a playstyle change. I’m slower than when I tackled it all those months ago, standing back and waiting for the right moment to strike. More critical, more aware. The risk-taking part of my brain knows what I’m capable of; there’s no need to rush to the end when I know I will for a fact get there.
My playstyle in games is more emotional responses than tactical approaches. It also means I want to save everyone. Which is not even remotely possible in either of Team Cherry’s games. You have to ask yourself what’s more important sometimes: do you want to learn Crystal Dash, or have Myla? The Kingdom of Pharloom free, or Garmond? It’s a subtle thing, this kind of storytelling, but it made the reality of both the knight and Hornet’s situations all the more prevalent. The road we’re walking is not one without problems or difficult decisions; we can’t have everything go our way.
Speedrunners were partially the reason I got into Hollow Knight, after seeing their determination and passion for a game to spend thousands of hours to finish in mere minutes, while I struggled on a side boss for days on end. But they managed it, so I probably could. And time and time again, I succeeded. I surprised myself both in HK and Silksong by completing bosses on my first attempt, including Sister Splinter and getting within one hit of replicating my friend’s achievement with Grand Mother Silk in Silksong.
HK helped me grow out of the safe little shell I’d been in since the pandemic five long years ago. I learned to take risks and relearn to do things I thought I’d never been able to do again. I impulse bought tickets to a concert for an artist I’d wanted to see perform for years and went alone — and had one of the most memorable moments of my year. I surprise myself by applying for volunteering roles and tasks I didn’t think I would complete, and then see myself at the end of the road, a new side quest finished.
The pure elation of meeting some of the goals and defeating bosses is an ecstasy I’ve not experienced before or since. Maybe the closest feeling was when I summited Mt. Vesuvius in 2016 (something that child!me would never have found possible with her disability — and I managed it anyway).
What do I do with this confidence and skill now? Find a new boss to tackle, complete a side quest that’s been hanging around for far too long. Do something that might scare me: travel alone and unfurl the map of a city unknown to me. Perhaps 2026 will be the year I finally try Dark Souls.
