And eventually, I’ll come back for you, Deepnest.įollow Patrick on Twitter.Deepnest Walkthrough Heading into Deepnest Then, I kept going, because there are more places to find, bugs to slay. It was like coming up for air, after a few seconds too many underwater. When I escaped Deepnest, I put my Switch down, and nearly howled at the moon. There is no reason for you to suspect the exit is so close, and so you run right past salvation. Once you fall into the hole, if you make your way to the right-seriously, it’s right by the entrance-there’s a way back up. In Deepnest, you eventually learn the exit was staring you in the face. Where else to go but down, right? Again, Team Cherry anticipated this. That’s what prompted me to go further into this hellish den of bugs. See, generally speaking, when you enter a new area, the exit(s) are far away, forcing players to trudge along, explore, and die. It’s then I discovered a brutal joke Team Cherry hid in the level design. (Humorously, when you come across the mapmaker, he confesses to being too scared to go any further, and cannot provide a full map!) A few hours later, I’d more or less seen much of what Deepnest had to offer, but still no no escape! It’s at this point you begin to scan the map and look for tiny corridors you may have missed. I did, eventually, find a map maker, and sketched out the depths of Deepnest, providing some relief. I spent three hours making my way around Deepnest, and never got comfortable. Contrary to Blighttown, it’s well-designed, meant to push the player’s buttons because Team Cherry is trying to subvert your approach to playing the game. I say infamous because it was not particularly well-liked upon release for a variety of reasons: it was dark, the frame rate was abysmal (we’re talking single digits in an era before PC versions), and maze-like.Įven with a real framerate, Blighttown still sucks? Deepnest does, too, but in the sense that you’re miserable. There are legit reasons to compare Hollow Knight to the Souls games, and in this specific situation, I couldn’t help but think about Team Cherry doing their own take on Dark Souls’ Blighttown, probably the most infamous area from any Souls game. If I came back, I’d be starting all over again. Though dying would allow me to leave Deepnest-the game sends you back to the previous checkpoint-I would lose all my geos in the process, and without having found the mapmaker, all of my progress would mean absolutely nothing. I was audibly yelping during the moments where enemies would catch me off guard, and I’d be down to a single life, without a checkpoint in sight. There is almost no way the developer, Team Cherry, didn’t explicitly set this trap, a way to push players away from playing it safe, forcing a position of risk. It’s hard to express in words how dark this area is. “Welcome to the Deepnest,” Hollow Knight cackles, “Good luck.” Further off, the stomp stomp of something much larger, the kind of creature you’d normally be game to take on, but right now, courage is precious. All around, the whispers of a million insect legs chatter against the rocks, as they explore the dark, on some mission of their own. You’ve in a basement with the lights off, and only a lighter to flicker off the walls. In other areas of Hollow Knight, you can see the area around you, but here? Not a chance. A lot of Hollow Knight works like this: encounter unfamiliar thing, figure it out, move on.īut then, while exploring an otherwise innocuous area, I fell into a deep hole, with no way to escape. Each area has new dangers, aesthetics, and enemies, but it remains comforting to follow a procedure that’s reliably worked out in the past. You start out without a map, resulting in a lot of blind walking from one room to the next, making notes in your head, and hoping the next section will bring the familiar hum of the game’s mapmaker, who you can pay a few dollars to chart the locale. Hollow Knight knows this, and the moment you’re feeling safe, it kicks you in the teeth.Įarly on, there’s a familiar cycle to finding a new area in Hollow Knight.
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