In contrast even Lost Lace phase 4 or Karmelita phase 3, which are both completely cracked out, have reliable healing windows (assuming you can keep your chill long enough to take advantage of them)
To compensate for that the bosses have zero chill. Most start with tight healing windows that just straight up vanish after they move to their phase 2 pattern.
Huge swaths of enemies can actually just be face-tanked: they die in 3-4 swings, during which you will take 1 damage, and then you will heal the one damage with the 3-4 soul you got killing them.
I do have to concede: the bulk of Hollow Knight is significantly easier than Silksong for the simple reason that 4/5 enemies are some variety of Goomba, just walking into your sword. The biggest risk on most screens is getting spooked and losing your chill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
