Hollow Knight Wiki

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is a hand-drawn 2D Metroidvania action-adventure from Team Cherry, the three-person studio of Ari Gibson, William Pellen and Jack Vine, first released for Windows on February 24, 2017 and later brought to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The player controls a small masked Knight who descends into Hallownest, a vast underground kingdom of insects that fell to a plague called the Infection, and works down through its ruined towns, aqueducts and buried palaces toward the source of the sickness. Combat is built on the Nail, a single melee weapon upgraded at the Nailsmith, plus Soul-fuelled spells and healing, while progression comes from movement abilities that open previously unreachable routes. Forty-plus charms equip into a shared eleven-notch budget to reshape the Knight's combat and mobility, and the map fills in only as Cornifer's charts are bought and explored. Four free content packs added bosses, charms and the Godhome boss-rush mode after launch, and the 2025 sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong continues the story from Hornet's side.

• Nail Combat and Soul: the Knight's only melee weapon is the Nail, upgraded four times at the Nailsmith in the City of Tears, and every landed hit banks Soul that is spent either on a slow heal (Focus) or on one of three offensive spells.
• Charm System with 11 Notches: more than forty charms compete for a shared eleven-notch budget and each one rewrites part of the kit, so builds are a capacity puzzle rather than a fixed class, with overcharming possible at the cost of double damage taken.
• Interconnected Metroidvania Map: Hallownest's zones join through ability gates such as the Mantis Claw wall climb, Monarch Wings double jump, Crystal Heart super dash, Isma's Tear acid immunity and the Shade Cloak, and shortcuts open as the player loops back through old rooms.
• Map and Bench Loop: Cornifer sells a zone chart for Geo, the Knight fills it in by walking, and benches are the only place to save or change charms, so death returns the player to the last bench and leaves a Shade holding their Geo and Soul to be reclaimed.
• Geo Economy and Merchants: Geo from enemies, relics and boss rewards pays for charms and notches from Salubra, Nail upgrades, map pins from Iselda, the three Fragile charms from Divine, and Sly's shop stock, which makes exploration the real income stream.
• Dream Nail and the Dream World: the Dream Nail reads the thoughts of the living and the dead, opens the graves of the Dream Warriors, the White Palace and Godhome, and its Dreamgate places a reusable fast-travel point anywhere on the map.
• Boss Fights and Godhome: the campaign's bosses return in the Hall of Gods with Attuned, Ascended and Radiant variants, and the five Pantheons chain them into boss-rush runs that end at the Absolute Radiance.
• Multiple Endings: the ending reached depends on the Dreamers, the Void Heart and the optional content completed, running from the base Hollow Knight fight through Dream No More and Embrace the Void to the two Godhome endings.
• Free Content Packs: Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood and Godmaster were all released at no cost, adding bosses, charms, the Grimmchild quest line and the boss-rush mode that the current version ships with.