My perspective on Hollow Knight has shifted pretty dramatically in the past few weeks. I went from having heard the name once or twice to dumping about 60 hours of my life into it and calling it one of my favorite games. I can get pretty into crazy-hard games if they hit me the right way, and oh boy howdy did Hollow Knight hit just the right spot. Every piece of content, every enemy, boss fight, and area is ferociously well crafted. The progression is precisely tuned to help you figure out what you need to do and how to get better and do it.

I could talk about Hollow Knight’s gameplay forever, but people who are better at it than me have already done that, so what I want to focus on here is the game’s narrative. I initially just saw it as a whole lot of esoteric filler, but as the game continued to suck me in, it turned out to be one of my favorite game narratives I’ve seen in a while. I’m gonna focus on Hollow Knight exclusively for a minute before tackling the renowned compendium of narrative that is Skyrim.

Hollow Knight’s narrative is all about discovery. I have no idea who I am or what has happened to me, and I’ve spent most of the game exploring and investigating the past, rather than directly intervening in the future (though I did get to make important choices eventually). The game got me invested in the narrative by making my player character’s emergent journey of discovery into my own personal journey. There are no quests or objective markers, just the occasional hint from an NPC on where I should go. I’m seeking out and and piecing together the history of Hallownest through tiny pieces of lore, so I can ultimately make an informed decision about its future.

And Hollow Knight is pretty tight-lipped in how much lore it gives me at a time. At the start of the game, all I had was “Hallownest was a great kingdom, but has fallen into ruin. ” From there it’s up to me to start exploring the world and piecing together the clues of what Hallownest was and what happened to it. Enemies were one of my first clues about that. I started noticing the orange glow of certain enemies’ eyes, as well as the orange droplets produced when I hit them. It stands out distinctly from the otherwise very cool blues and greys of the rest of the color scheme, and was my first hint about the enemies being “off”.

This detail, observed in conjunction with their behavior and bestiary descriptions (once I unlocked  them), made it pretty clear to me that these bugs have been taken over by some kind of “infection”, reducing them to base instincts. This is about all I could determine about the doom of Hallownest until very late in the game.

Most NPCs don’t seem to have a very clear picture of what happened to Hallownest either, and the few ones that do are generally either very hard to find, or have their information locked behind some sort of test or trial. The primary example of this is Hornet, a roaming NPC who you also fight twice as a boss. She assumes that I have some kind of motivation beyond just exploring, and ends up revealing a lot of background about who I am through what she accuses me of.

Most other methods of lore delivery require me to actively pursue them. I read the minds of certain NPCs by using the “dream nail”, unlock bestiary descriptions by killing certain amounts of a particular enemy, and find ghost bosses that talk about their previous lives.

This style of narrative works together very well with Hollow Knight’s metroidvania gameplay. Metroidvanias are all about exploring the world to find new pickups, areas, and abilities, and piecing them all together to overcome different challenges. This journey happens in tandem with the piecing together of lore. Every bit if information I find is tiny and cryptic, and I can’t really make anything of any piece on its own. I never really get an ‘aha’ moment, where the I finally learn the truth. I cobble together what I’ve learned to generate theories, and reshape them to accommodate the new information I keep finding, until I finally have half a clue of what’s going on. Hollow Knight makes me work for its lore, which lets it use the lore itself as a reward, rather than as a guide.

This is a stark contrast to how “narrative heavy” games tend do this.

Skyrim has so much story in it. And not just through the volume of Elder Scrolls history and events, but the fact that Skyrim’s story is present in every person, every village, every random object you come across. It’s this fundamental principle of giving in Skyrim’s narrative that highlights the primary contrast in storytelling styles.

This difference is that Skyrim is very forthcoming with info about its world. The opening of the game involves a direct choice between following an Imperial or a Stormcloak, which made me very aware of the relevant civil war that is currently in progress. I was prompted to enlist in the respective side of whomever I chose to follow, and within the same interaction was told to find the next person in the main dragon-related storyline.

Most any interaction I’ve had  with an NPC is like this. The citizens of Skyrim usually have a great deal to say about whatever political drama is currently happening, and are often wrapped up in a few different story threads.My struggle to understand the game world comes not from a lack of detail or information, as in Hollow Knight, but from parsing and putting together the wide variety of perspectives I hear from NPCs, many of whom have drastically different opinions about the same topics.

I can develop my own emergent narrative with NPCs as well. I recruit followers, improve or degrade my standing with individuals, and even get married if I want to. This tends to be where a lot of players go to make their story unique, engaging with the people rather than the grander events that the people are talking about.

And that content can be found in a multitude of other places as well, by reading books, finding random world events, or looking pretty much anywhere the I might expect to find it. Skyrim presents a tremendous amount of narrative and then uses it to inform me about the decisions it then presents. I’m expected to synthesize what I’ve learned into my decisions of which quests and storylines I pursue, and then in turn into the choices those quests themselves present.

Like any good RPG, Skyrim tries to give me as much choice as possible in how I approach its problems. This ranges from the decision to use an axe or a fireball against a dragon, to whether I should side with the invading Imperials or the racist Stormcloaks. It strives to make my choices feel unique, and provides those choices in everything from how to save the world, to how to greet a shopkeeper. It answers the question of how to engage me in its world by giving me as much world as it possibly can.

Audience Expectation

Hollow Knight’s gameplay and general aesthetic have attracted a lot of fans of the Dark Souls series. Its narrative bears a strong resemblance to Dark Souls as well, in that it’s delivered piecemeal, so people who enjoy that sort of investigative story will likely settle well into Hollow Knight’s tale of the fallen kingdom. Most other metroidvanias also feature a dark gritty world grounded in some kind of calamity, and they will often reward the player with additional story info if they branch off from the main path. Hollow Knight’s gameplay attracts fans who will be familiar with its storytelling techniques.

Bethesda RPGs are something of a host unto themselves in terms of the vast breadth of narrative each one contains. Fans of RPGs tend to really enjoy exploring and absorbing everything they possibly can about the world, and Skyrim has an exceptional volume of world to take in, even for a Bethesda RPG. The region of Skyrim, and its political drama, is likely already familiar to incoming fans of the Elders Scrolls series. Skyrim builds on the expectations that players will have coming into it with a bountiful abundance of lore and choices to make.

But which is better?

In their own right, these games are diametrically opposed in how they approach narrative. Hollow Knight’s story pulls me, it’s always slightly out of reach, it makes me work to find it and it never quite tells me everything. Skyrim’s story pushes me, giving me as much info about the world as I could possibly need, and letting me choose how I let it affect my decisions.

Hollow Knight works because it teases. The gameplay alone would pull me through, but the fact that it keeps promising me more answers and then bringing up more questions gives it a relentless sense of momentum that’s utterly intoxicating. I found a temple with mysterious symbols, and then I started seeing those symbols pop up everywhere. I eventually figured out that each symbol represented a person, but then needed to know who they were, and then why their symbols were there, and so on. While this momentum does keep me moving, it can also be a little frustrating. I’m never totally satisfied with the new information I’ve uncovered, since each discovery presents a new question to be answered. There’s also very little narrative agency until close to the end, and while there is a sense of agency in exploring and discovering, that’s the only way I can engage with the world for that part of the game.

Skyrim works because it’s blunt. I know most of the time who I’m talking to, what they want, and how they feel about what I’m doing. If I’m making an uninformed decision, it’s because I somehow haven’t talked to any of the 20 NPCs with an opinion about it. If I’m not sure whether to kill this werewolf, most of the people in the guild I got the quest from will have a piece of trivia about his life, or a personal story involving them and what kind of person they are. While I’m never at a loss for context, the sheer volume can often be overwhelming. There are so many options for where to go and what to do, and I can easily lose track of why I’m clearing these skeletons out of this one specific dungeon. It can often be hard to boil down the stew of all these character’s motivations into my own player character’s motivation.

Okay but really which one is better

Fans of these games want very different things out of their game narratives. Ultimately, which game is “better” comes down to a matter of personal preference, so I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong if you like Skyrim more.

Hollow Knight doesn’t give agency because it doesn’t need to. I know everything my tiny adorable character knows, and I can’t worry about my grander noble goal until I’ve satisfied my personal desire to find what that goal should be. Skyrim straight up tells me that I very much should care about saving the world from Alduin, and I just…don’t. It does give me other things to care about. Countless things. So many things that ultimately what I end up caring about most is leveling up skills and finding some more cool armor. If you want to get me to care about whatever’s at stake in your story, you have to be selective with what information is presented and how it is presented.

Every piece of Hollow Knight’s story is an exciting reward. Skyrim treats its story like like overstocked fruitcake and gives me fifty things to give a shit about, totally indifferent to which one I pick. I know that a lot of my feelings come from my preference for clear direction in a game, but look at Mass Effect, or any Bioware title really. I’ve got a tremendous amount of flexibility in how I progress through that story, and the games take the time to connect me with characters give me the right amount of context without overburdening me with choices.

There are ways to give narrative agency without losing sight of your story’s goal. Hollow Knight only offered me one large-scale choice, but I didn’t base my decision on reams of NPC rants, I based it on my own feelings that developed as I explored and engaged with Hallownest.

Also Hollow Knight’s bugs are cuter.