112% and the last three hours were pure stubbornness
I finished Hollow Knight at 112% last week, eighty-something hours in, and the part I remember is not the good part. It is the two hours where I kept dying to the same attack because I had convinced myself the hitbox was broken.
It was not broken. I was standing one pixel too far forward on the platform, which meant my dash came out late, which meant I ate the second hit every time. Forty deaths to learn something I could have seen in one recording of myself.
The pantheon is a patience test, not a skill test
By the time you reach the last one you can already fight every boss in the game. What you cannot do is fight nine of them in a row without losing your rhythm. The failure state is not "I don't know this moveset", it is "I stopped paying attention at the seventh fight because it is the boring one".
What helped, in order of usefulness:
- Practising the boring fights deliberately, not the hard ones. The hard ones are fun, so you already know them.
- Turning the music down for the long runs. I kept tensing up on the same transition.
- Stopping after three attempts. The fourth is always worse, and it teaches you the wrong rhythm.
What I actually liked
All of it, mostly. The map system that forces you to be lost for a while, the bench that is always slightly too far from the boss, the way the world gets quieter as you go down. I did not like the flower delivery quest and I will not pretend otherwise. Two hours of walking with a fragile item is not tension, it is a delivery job.
Games are good at making you feel competent right up until they ask you to be consistent.
Next up is something short and loud. I have finished three metroidvanias in a row and my sense of direction is now entirely fictional.