Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is a 2017 action-adventure Metroidvania developed and published by Team Cherry, released February 24, 2017 for Windows, with Linux and macOS following in April, and console ports arriving on Switch in June 2018 and PlayStation 4/Xbox One that September. It holds a Metacritic score in the high 80s to 90 depending on platform, and stands as one of the most acclaimed and influential entries the Metroidvania genre has produced in the last decade — made, for the vast majority of its development, by a team of exactly three people.

It’s also the first half of a story that took far longer to finish than anyone expected. Its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, didn’t arrive until September 2025 — more than seven years after it was first announced — making this entry’s own legacy inseparable from one of the longest, most-memed waits in modern gaming.

Technical Specifications

Three People in Adelaide

Ari Gibson and William Pellen met through Adelaide game jams, bonding over a shared love of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Their first collaboration under the name Team Cherry was Hungry Knight, a small Ludum Dare jam game from 2013 about a bug-eating character — a design that, reused almost wholesale, became the silent protagonist of Hollow Knight itself. A separate jam attempt, built around the theme “Beneath the Surface,” missed its deadline entirely, but the underground concept behind it stuck, and became the seed for Hallownest. Team Cherry launched a Kickstarter campaign for the full game in November 2014 with a modest A$35,000 goal, which the campaign cleared within 48 hours on its way to a final total of A$57,138 from just over two thousand backers. The core team for the bulk of development was Gibson, Pellen, and technical director David Kazi, with composer Christopher Larkin handling sound — small enough that when the game needed extra voices, William Pellen’s mother stepped in to voice several characters, including the White Lady and the Mantis Lords.

Hallownest and the Infection

The game is set in Hallownest, a vast, ruined underground kingdom of insects and bugs, once ruled by the god-like Pale King. Long before the Pale King’s reign, the kingdom worshipped the Radiance, a moth deity whose followers were displaced when the Pale King established his own rule. By the time the player arrives, Hallownest has collapsed into ruin, its inhabitants driven mad or comatose by a spreading plague known as the Infection — the Radiance’s own influence, reasserting itself after centuries of dormancy.

The Knight, a Vessel

The player controls the Knight, a small, silent, horned figure who descends into Hallownest with no explanation given up front. The game gradually reveals the Knight to be a Vessel — a void creature created by the Pale King specifically because it lacked a mind of its own, intended as a container pure enough to seal away the Infection permanently. That sealing already happened once, with a sibling Vessel — the game’s own title character in the more literal sense — bound in the Black Egg Temple at the heart of the kingdom, setting up much of what the player spends the game uncovering.

Hornet and the Cast of Hallownest

Hallownest’s remaining inhabitants give the world most of its personality despite the Knight never speaking: Hornet, the Pale King’s adoptive daughter and the kingdom’s protector, who challenges and later aids the Knight; the wandering scholar Quirrel; cartographer Cornifer, whose map-selling shop appears throughout the world; the oblivious, self-important knight Zote, who became something of a community joke in his own right; and Grimm, ringmaster of a traveling troupe added in a later free update. Hornet in particular would go on to become the playable lead of Silksong nearly a decade later.

Charms, Nail, and Soul

Progression runs through three interlocking systems: the Knight’s Nail (the basic weapon, upgradable at a forge in Dirtmouth), a pool of Soul built by landing hits and spent on healing or spell attacks, and Charms — equippable passive modifiers with a limited shared capacity, letting players build meaningfully different playstyles around the same core kit. Combined with an intentionally cryptic, largely unmarked map that players fill in themselves with Cornifer’s purchased map pages, it’s a structure that rewards exploration and memorization over hand-holding, in keeping with the genre’s Super Metroid and Castlevania roots.

Four Free Updates

Rather than charge for post-launch content, Team Cherry released four substantial expansions to the base game entirely free between 2017 and 2018: Hidden Dreams added new boss encounters accessible through the Knight’s Dream Nail ability; The Grimm Troupe introduced Grimm and an entire new questline and area; Lifeblood reworked several existing fights and added new content around the Lifeblood Core; and Godmaster, the largest of the four, added the Godhome superboss-rush arena and the game’s hardest optional content, along with a new true ending. The decision to keep all of it free became one of the most frequently cited examples of Team Cherry’s reputation for treating its community generously — a reputation that would matter again years later.

Multiple Endings (story spoilers)

Hollow Knight’s ending depends on choices and content completed across the playthrough. The default ending has the Knight seal itself away in place of its failing sibling, containing the Infection at a personal cost. A second ending, reached by finding the Void Heart charm, lets the Knight embrace its Void nature and destroy the Radiance directly instead. The hardest-earned ending, unlocked through the Godmaster content, involves defeating a version of the sibling Vessel known as the Pure Vessel and points toward a more definitive resolution — though, in keeping with the game’s general approach to story, none of the endings explain themselves outright.

Reception

Critical reception was strong from launch and only grew warmer with each subsequent port — several Switch reviews specifically argued the portable version was the definitive way to experience it, bundling all the free content updates in from the start. Sales followed a similarly steady climb: roughly 500,000 copies by November 2017, a million on PC alone by mid-2018, and past 3 million by the end of 2020, eventually pushing well beyond 4 million as the game found a permanent home across every major platform.

Silksong and the Kickstarter Promise

The original 2014 Kickstarter had promised a small connected-but-separate expansion following Hornet; over years of development it grew into a full, standalone sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, which finally released September 4, 2025 to reviews nearly as strong as the original’s. Team Cherry marked the occasion by honoring their original pledge tiers to the letter: every backer who contributed A$10 or more back in 2014 received a full copy of Silksong for free on their platform of choice, more than a decade after making that promise to just over two thousand people. Silksong’s launch also gave the original game a genuine second commercial wind, with Hollow Knight reportedly selling upward of 200,000 additional copies a week for three straight weeks as new players worked backward into the first game.

Where to Play It Today

Hollow Knight is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux via Steam and GOG, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and — as of a February 2026 rerelease — natively on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Every version includes all four free content updates by default.