Hollow Knight's creators didn't want to be constrained by the 'metroidvania' label, but they accidentally set a standard that every game since—even Silksong—has to reckon with

In a 2017 interview about the making of Hollow Knight's map, designer William Pellen told me that Team Cherry "shied away completely" from describing the game as a metroidvania. Artist Ari Gibson added that they didn't want to "let a genre dictate" the decisions they made about Hollow Knight's design while they were making it.

And yet judging by its place on Steam, Hollow Knight is not just a metroidvania, a specific subgenre of adventure game defined by nonlinear exploration and gaining new abilities that gradually grant access to more and more of the game world. It is now the Metroidvania.

Sorting the user-applied Metroidvania tag by rating on SteamDB, Hollow Knight is on top at 96.08% positive, just a hair above Dead Cells. By followers it's also #1, with its upcoming sequel Silksong close behind at #2. You have to scroll down to 12th place to find Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by its director. (Actual Castlevania games are even lower down the list).

By peak players? First place again thanks to a recent surge, beating out EA's triple-A Star Was Jedi: Fallen Order.

At 15 million copies sold, Hollow Knight is not far behind the lifetime sales of the entire Castlevania or Metroid series, which both started in the mid 1980s. While the 150-odd games tagged Metroidvania on Steam that predate Hollow Knight show the genre was already starting to blow up in the mid-2010s, the more than 1,350 that have been released since make it a pretty clear inflection point. Like Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight is the rare successor to eclipse its inspiration so totally it became the new de facto template to follow.

Post-Hollow Knight

(Image credit: 505 Games)

It's certainly changed my own tastes. After playing Hollow Knight, I didn't spend much time with Bloodstained before bailing on its garish art and clunky platforming. When I dug out an old cartridge for the Game Boy Advance's Metroid: Zero Mission, I had fun, but its comparatively tiny world (and combat that mostly let me stand still and spam missiles) felt downright quaint in comparison.

There are plenty of others I've enjoyed: Death's Door, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth—but in the same way Baldur's Gate 3 really did raise the bar for other RPGs, Hollow Knight landed such a bullseye nothing I've played since has sent me head over heels.

In just the last couple weeks I've been playing Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, an absolutely beautiful platformer from the makers of Streets of Rage 4. There are bits of Shinobi that are really impressive: the pencil sketch flair of screen-clearing ninjutsu ultimate techniques that evoke '80s anime, the way it layers in a repertoire of spin attacks, divekicks, launchers, and finishing moves with just two attack buttons and smart timing. Shinobi looked at every game in history that uses momentary freeze-frames to sell the impact of an attack, and called them cowards—there's more hitstop in this game than in an Old Testament smiting. God wishes he could swing a katana as dramatically as Joe Musashi.

If combat were the sole focus of Shinobi I'd be raving about it nonstop, but instead I'm with my GamesRadar+ colleague Dustin Bailey, who criticized its "blind jumps over gaping abysses" and "hitboxes around instant-death obstacles that are often inconsistent."

If you've played even a few Metroidvanias, you probably have some old wounds from the one where the spikes on top of a platform would prick you as you tried to shimmy up a wall that sure looked like it was safe. Or from the enemies placed to knock you off ledges mid-platforming challenge, which would leave you with enough health to keep going if the game didn't insist on respawning you at the very beginning of the sequence. Or from a flashy chase sequence that has you dodging through an obstacle course with flames licking at your heels… that's a lot less flashy the fifth time you do it because you double-jumped at the wrong time.

Shinobi's guilty of all of the above, and it also awkwardly tries to fit the best bits of a Metroidvania—backtracking once a ground pound or wall-climb ability lets you explore previously inaccessible paths—into linear stages. I appreciate the attempt to make revisiting each level engaging, but after a while it becomes clear that you should either wait until near the end of the game when you have all the traversal powers unlocked, or come to terms with each return visit granting you access to a too-brief excursion with a chest waiting at the end. Warping to the nearest checkpoint and doing a three minute platforming bit for each reward ends up feeling perfunctory rather than adding new wrinkles to an interconnected world.

By the time I got to my third spike maze in Shinobi I started to wonder if I'm just bored of 2D platformers altogether. But I think it's more that the proliferation of Metroidvanias has made me much pickier about context.

And on to Silksong

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

Hollow Knight has spike mazes and wall jumps and moving platforms you have to hop between just like every other platformer; Team Cherry did not invent some galaxy brain new way to do jumping better than everyone else. But man did they make bouncing across spikes on the tip of your weapon feel exhilarating.

And dang, the atmosphere of that forlorn kingdom, the subtle changes to the environment as one zone bleeds into the next.

And what a thrill it was to get lost in each new area, trying to grasp how each room fit together, until I could find wandering mapmaker Cornifer and finally see my surroundings mapped out. Hollow Knight just gets it all right, and for dozens of hours.

That's a high bar for any game to live up to. Even Silksong. In the years since playing Hollow Knight and many of the games inspired by its success, I haven't found another so utterly absorbing. With Hollow Knight's popularity Team Cherry unintentionally set a two-pronged trap for every game that followed it.

(Image credit: Red Candle Games)

Make a good enough Hollow Knight clone, some thought, and you might see a fraction of its riches. But even the games that land great combat or great platforming are often missing the defter touches that made Hollow Knight so memorable, from its map system to the friend you can sit beside on a bench for a moment of quiet reflection. Out of that monster list of followers, I think the list of true standouts is surprisingly short:

Rain World for compressing a complex, nuanced survival sim into the shape of a 2D platformerAnimal Well for its focus on inventive puzzles within puzzlesNine Sols for truly nailing meat and potatoes metroidvania design—and the parry

Other games have been lured in by the genre seemingly being more popular than ever—so popular that surely players who like them will be happy for even a taste of that nonlinear exploration. But post-Hollow Knight it's hard for games like Shinobi to apply a light dusting of metroidvania ideas without looking a bit meager in comparison. While not as dire, it reminds me of the RPG-lite blight afflicting so many triple-A games with loot systems they'd be stronger—or at least more distinct—without.

If Silksong does actually manage to meet the higher expectations Hollow Knight brought about, I think it'll paradoxically be because of how much Team Cherry focuses on feel over genre, as Ari Gibson told me back in 2017: "Do you make a conscious decision that you're making something that is a metroidvania, and build off the conventions of that? I don't think we ever did anything like that. We just said we're going to make an adventure in this big world, and let's build an interesting world with lots of things to discover and see, and hopefully keep people engaged throughout."