HEY GUYS. Hollow Knight To be really good. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I mean, out of all the people who’ve played it, who I’ve steadfastly ignored because it’s just not my kind of game, and because Ori and the Blind Forest – a fairly similar platform metroidvania game – is it too hard for my poor little hands?
Well, the mistake has been corrected, at least. I finally played Hollow Knight. In fact, I played it for 28.5 hours, a pretty buggy amount of time. And there’s a lot to be said for that all-day play value! The melancholy, the sound work, the music, the cuteness… but instead, as you can tell from the title, I want to talk about how Hollow Knight contributes to a legacy that has existed since the old days. The first day of the game: The need to take notes.
These days, there are very few games that require a notebook to understand, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is perfectly reasonable to expect a game to give you all the information you need inside itself, except for games like Harvest Moon, Muleand Stardew Valleywhere a notebook is where you write down all the things you can’t remember, like gifts, catalog entries, shopping times, fishing locations and times.
I usually play games with a notebook, but that’s just because I usually evaluate them and I need to record things like “this is so boring” or “every time X happens, the Switch fan starts making a very loud whining noise”, so I can include them in my review. me.
But rarely can I use a notebook to scribble frantically, try to piece together mysteries, figure out narratives and map out – and even though that sounds tedious and likely stress potential, but that feeling Massive nostalgic, back to an era when games told you NOTHING, manuals sometimes told you something, and ASCII illustrated game instructions printed from the internet in sheets of paper your parents’ expensive printer.
Hollow Knight, at least for me and my partner (we’re playing it simultaneously – him on TV, me on PC), is an excellent note-taking game. The in-game map is great, especially with the added complication of having to first find a map creator in each new area, and then create a map, but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know that. It’s not a shortcoming – it’s a game about mysteries, exploration and discovery, and it doesn’t want to reveal all its secrets.
So we made an offscreen map, making large scale replicas of Hollow Knight’s corridors, towers, and all of its little metroidvania bits (you know, when you’re walking past something very obviously, you need to be able to go through this area) for our own use. There are a lot of cracks in metroidvania like Hollow Knight, and sometimes it’s just really nice to be able to not only place a generic “come here” pin the game gives you, but also to physically note that you can guess the area needs the dash/swim/shoot ability.
An added bonus is that my partner, who actually draws the map, did a really nice job. Each map is a grid of thin, smooth lines, annotated with thoughts and symbols, with little stories that we’re trying to piece together. It’s an art object in itself, and I always enjoy looking at the finished document after a game worth keeping, filled with notes, scribbles, doodles, and secrets like a diary. .
I envy people who can quickly create notes and turn them into beautiful diaries, like Dark Souls player Cora did, recording the results on Reddit:
Or even Polygon’s writer and pen lover Nicole Carpenter’s Bullet Diary of Hitman 3which she says will help her get into the game in a whole new way:
“I’m using [the journal] to keep track of the story quests and challenges that I’ve completed (or wanted to finish in the end), but that’s also where I write down the essentials to remember – the little bits of the story that I have forgettable, like security codes or tiered plans. When I play the game, I find myself learning the “language” of Hitman 3attention to the small but vital details – things that seasoned Hitman players can automatically choose. “
I’m terrible at paying attention to both small details and larger patterns, instead focusing on more pressing issues like “don’t die” and “screaming a lot about how hard the game is.” “. Taking notes and using my partner’s map helped me understand the game more, just like Nicole did, in a way that the game guide, or map printout, could never do.
It used to be like that when I was studying for the exam. I would spend a whole school year having things go through my head, and not bother trying to grasp them, because I know my brain much better suited to taking my own notes, in my own time and in my own style. There are studies on how Taking notes leads to better recall, which isn’t really surprising – but for me, it’s not just the act of taking notes; the fact that I have control over them.
Like I said at the beginning, there aren’t many games these days request notebook. Honestly, Hollow Knight doesn’t really ask for notes either. But taking notes is so simple, so meditative, and a great way to completely connect with a game, which I can do. all play a laptop game from now on.
We’ve chosen a theme for the poll that will define next month’s game – brain puzzle game with unique mechanics! Whether you’ve played a bit (and struggled) or you haven’t played these before, we think it’s considered a game backlog…
Let us know in the comments if you’ve played and enjoyed Hollow Knight, and if you’re taking notes too!
