Hollow knight map of hallownest Pc#

Find Iselda in Dirtmouth to fill in your map. He mentions that a map alone will mean little and that his wife Iselda has a store in the village above ground that will help you make more sense of your surroundings. Find Cornifer in each area to access that area’s (incomplete) map. After some puttering about, you run into Cornifer, a cheerful cartographer that offers to sell you a map of the area. Just you and your raggedy nail plummet down into The Forgotten Crossroads, the first big area of Hallownest, and start exploring. When the game begins, you have no map, no compass or markers, nothing. Prima facie, this sounds like a lot of navigational help, but they’re a final state that players have to work towards (if they so choose).

Hollow Knight’s main navigational aids are a map, a compass to orientate the player, and pins/markers to highlight areas of interest in the map such as benches (which are checkpoints), stagways and tram stations (which are fast travel points), shops to buy and sell items, and so on. Hollow Knight breaks this navigational dilemma into individual components and essentially lets each player walk their own customized tightrope.

It’s a tough tightrope to walk - provide too many map markers, waypoints, and HUDs and risk spoon-feeding players to the point of boredom, or provide too few aids and risk players banging their heads against dead-ends and cul-de-sacs in frustration. Plentiful navigational aids are the norm in video games today, almost to a point where they’re counterproductive. In this story, I’ll be looking at how Hollow Knight crafts a navigation system that stays true to these themes of exploration and discovery by making players earn their progress in areas that are taken for granted in other games.

Hollow knight map of hallownest Pc#

Here’s Ari Gibson, co-director of Team Cherry in an interview with PC Gamer: A lot of these decisions we’re making, a lot of the scale and the rooms we build, all of it’s built around this sense of discovery. And Team Cherry certainly kept the theme of exploration as a guidepost while designing the game. You’re a small skull-faced wraith armed with a nail and charged with exploring the decaying, sparsely inhabited kingdom of Hallownest where something has clearly gone wrong. The premise of Hollow Knight is simple and light on exposition.

And you do fall into it literally and otherwise over 40 or so hours, as I descended down Hollow Knight’s subterranean realm of rain-soaked cities, cavernous sewers, and verdant gardens, so did my mind sink into perfecting its laser-precise combat system, deciphering its blink-and-miss story moments, and unravelling its interconnected worlds. I know I’m late to the Hollow Knight party myself, but if anyone out there still hasn’t played this magical arthropod adventure, do yourself a favor and fall into Hallownest - you won’t regret it.