Quick Facts
| Category | Details |
| Game Title | Hollow Knight |
| Developer/Publisher | Team Cherry (Ari Gibson + William Pellen) |
| Studio Location | Adelaide, Australia |
| Release Date | February 24, 2017 (PC) — console ports 2018 |
| Genre | Metroidvania / action-adventure |
| Platforms | PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One |
| Kickstarter Goal | A$35,000 |
| Kickstarter Raised | A$58,893 (163% of goal, 2,158 backers) |
| Copies Sold | 15 million+ by 2025 |
| First Year Sales | 500,000+ copies |
| Switch Launch Sales | 250,000+ copies in first two weeks |
| OpenCritic Score | 89 — top 1% of all games, 97% recommended |
| Destructoid Score | 10/10 — called it “a masterpiece” |
| Price at Launch | $15 USD |
| Setting | Hallownest — underground insect kingdom |
| Protagonist | The Knight — a nameless, genderless vessel |
| Sequel | Hollow Knight: Silksong — released September 2025 |
Nobody expected a $15 indie game about bugs to become one of the most discussed video game stories of the decade. Two guys in Adelaide, Australia, asked for $35,000 on Kickstarter to make an insect dungeon-crawler and ended up selling fifteen million copies of something that critics called a masterpiece.
That’s not a normal story. And the game itself isn’t a normal story either.
The Surface Level: What You’re Actually Doing
You are a small bug. You have a nail — which is basically a sword. You descend into a ruined underground kingdom called Hallownest. You fight things. You explore. You slowly piece together what happened to a once-great civilization that is now mostly dead, infected, or running on pure tragic inertia.
That’s the surface description and it sounds unremarkable until you actually play it.
Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania — a genre shorthand for games structured like Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where a giant interconnected map opens up as you acquire new abilities. You can’t get everywhere immediately. New movement options and key items unlock new regions. The world is layered and mostly non-linear. You choose where to push next.
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The Setting Is Where It Gets Interesting
Hallownest isn’t just a backdrop. It’s the main character.
The underground kingdom was built by a being called the Pale King — a god-like entity who transformed from a massive pale wyrm into a smaller humanoid shape so he could rule over the insect civilizations beneath the ground. He gave the bugs of Hallownest something remarkable: sapience. Thought. Language. Identity. Under his rule, a sprawling civilization grew — the City of Tears, the Fungal Wastes, the Royal Waterways, the deepest Abyss.
It flourished. And then it didn’t.
The Radiance and the Infection
Here’s the thing the Pale King didn’t advertise: before he arrived, the bugs of Hallownest worshipped a different god entirely. The Radiance — an ancient moth-goddess of light and dreams — had been the original focus of their devotion. The Pale King didn’t destroy her. He just… replaced her. Guided the insects toward worshipping him instead. Gave them so much that they forgot she existed.
That forgetting was not accepted quietly.
The Radiance — unable to be destroyed and unwilling to be forgotten — forced herself back into existence through the only channel available: the dreams of those who had once worshipped her kind. The Infection was born from that refusal to disappear. A plague of light and madness that spread through the minds of Hallownest’s citizens, turning them into frenzied, hollow shells. Attacking anything. Spreading further.
The Hollow Knight: The Failed Solution
The Pale King tried everything. And eventually he settled on an idea that was either brilliant or monstrous depending on how you look at it.
You can’t kill the Radiance. She’s a god who refuses to die. But maybe you can contain her. If you had a vessel — something hollow enough, empty enough, with no thoughts or emotions or will of its own — maybe you could seal the Radiance inside it forever. A living prison. No dreams to leak through. No consciousness for her power to corrupt.
So the Pale King and his queen, the White Lady, created vessels. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Beings of pure void — darkness and emptiness given biological form. Dropped into the Abyss. Left there. Tested for purity. The vast majority were discarded. Thrown away. The survivors crawled up from the dark and scattered across Hallownest.
Eventually the Pale King found one he deemed pure enough. The Hollow Knight. The ideal vessel. Empty. Perfect. The Radiance was sealed inside its body. Three figures called Dreamers were bound to hold the seal in place. Hallownest was supposed to be saved.
It wasn’t.
The Tragic Problem at the Heart of Everything
Here’s the part that breaks people who pay attention to this story.
The Hollow Knight was supposed to be completely empty. No thoughts. No feelings. No love. That was the entire point. A mind with emotions is a mind the Radiance can infiltrate.
But the Pale King raised the Hollow Knight. He was present. He was the father figure in whatever passed for this vessel’s life. And despite everything — despite being literally created to feel nothing — the Hollow Knight developed love for the Pale King who raised them.
That love was the flaw in the plan. An emotional connection in a being that wasn’t supposed to have any. The Radiance found that crack and expanded it. The seal weakened. The Infection started leaking again. Hallownest began collapsing. The Pale King vanished — possibly dead, possibly trapped in his own palace. The Dreamers eventually fell. Citizens of the kingdom died or were infected one by one.
That’s the state Hallownest is in when you arrive.
Who You Actually Are
The Knight — your character — is one of the Pale King’s discarded vessels. One of the failed ones from the Abyss. A sibling of the Hollow Knight who was never deemed worthy enough to be the chosen vessel.
You are essentially a survivor of the sorting process that the Pale King ran. You crawled up out of the void, out of the Abyss, and now you’re wandering through the corpse of a kingdom that forgot you existed. Nobody sent you. Nobody guided you here. You came because something — perhaps instinct, perhaps void resonance, perhaps just the pull of a story that needed someone to complete it — drew you back.
Hornet, a half-spider warrior who serves as your primary companion and recurring foil throughout the game, watches your journey with a specific mixture of wariness and hope. She’s the daughter of the Pale King and the Weaver queen — a hybrid of two worlds, protecting something she understands better than you know yet.
The Endings and What They Mean
Here’s the thing about Hollow Knight’s story that makes it philosophically substantial: there’s no clean answer. There are five endings. Each one asks a genuinely different question about what it means to sacrifice, what makes a life worth living, and whether preserving a dying thing is worth the cost.
The simplest ending has you replace the Hollow Knight as the new vessel — sealing yourself inside the egg with the Radiance, keeping Hallownest’s stasis intact. Technically stable. Also kind of bleak. You’ve just volunteered to spend eternity as a living prison for a god who never wanted to be forgotten.
The “true” ending — or at least the one most players consider the full conclusion — has you fight the Radiance directly in her dreamworld. With help from your siblings who died in the Abyss, you destroy her. The void consumes the light. Hallownest is liberated from the infection. But it’s also fully ended. The kingdom that the Pale King built — everything he sacrificed for — is gone.
Was it worth it to end a kingdom to free it? The game doesn’t tell you. It leaves you sitting with that.
The Team That Made It and Why That Matters
Two guys. Mostly.
Ari Gibson and William Pellen — Team Cherry — started working together through game jams. The core concept for Hollow Knight’s protagonist came from a Ludum Dare game jam in 2013 called Hungry Knight. That little prototype became a Kickstarter campaign in late 2014. They raised A$58,893 from 2,158 backers. Pellen’s then-fiancée financially supported him during development. They worked out of Adelaide. Christopher Larkin joined to compose the soundtrack — which is widely considered one of the best video game scores of the decade.
The game shipped in February 2017 for $15. It sold 500,000 copies in its first year. By 2025 it had sold fifteen million copies. A Destructoid critic gave it a 10/10 and called it worthy of a museum. PC Gamer called it the most beautiful hand-drawn game the reviewer had ever seen.
Metro GameCentral’s only real criticism was that it lacked originality as a Metroidvania. Which is probably the most politely brutal compliment possible — “you did everything perfectly but you didn’t invent a new genre.”
Final Words
Here’s my honest read on what Hollow Knight is actually about beneath all the bugs and combat and gorgeous hand-drawn environments.
It’s about what happens when powerful people — kings, gods, parents — sacrifice others to preserve their legacy. The Pale King created beings specifically to feel nothing, then raised one like a child, then was surprised when that child developed emotions he’d designed out of them. The Radiance refused to be erased from existence because being forgotten is a kind of death she wouldn’t accept. Both of them are tragic figures. Neither of them is cleanly a villain.
And you — the Knight, the discarded vessel, the one nobody chose — get to decide what it all means. Not with dialogue. Not with choices in a menu. With movement. With exploration. With whether you bother finding all the pieces of the true ending or not.
The game sold fifteen million copies not because it’s easy or immediately accessible — it’s genuinely difficult — but because it builds a world that rewards curiosity. Every side character has a complete arc. Every region has its own palette and music and history. The story is delivered almost entirely through environmental storytelling, item descriptions, and brief NPC dialogues rather than cutscenes.
You absorb it. You piece it together. You feel it before you understand it.
That’s rare. At any price point. From any size studio.
FAQs
1. What is Hollow Knight about in simple terms?
You play as a small nameless bug-knight exploring an underground kingdom called Hallownest that has been destroyed by a spreading infection. As you explore you uncover the history of how the kingdom fell, fight increasingly powerful enemies, and eventually confront the source of the infection — a divine being called the Radiance who was imprisoned in a failing vessel.
2. Who are the main characters in Hollow Knight?
The Knight (your character — a discarded vessel of pure void), Hornet (a warrior who watches over Hallownest and serves as both antagonist and ally), the Pale King (the dead/missing ruler who created the vessels), the White Lady (the Pale King’s queen), the Hollow Knight (your sibling who failed as the vessel), and the Radiance (the ancient goddess whose imprisonment is breaking down).
3. What is the Radiance in Hollow Knight?
An ancient moth-goddess who was worshipped by insects before the Pale King arrived and replaced her. Refusing to be forgotten, she manifested through the dreams of her former believers as a spreading infection of light and madness. She’s technically the primary antagonist, though the story is nuanced enough that “villain” is an oversimplification.
4. What is the Pale King’s plan and why did it fail?
The Pale King created vessels — hollow beings of pure void with no emotion or consciousness — to contain the Radiance. The chosen vessel, the Hollow Knight, was supposed to be completely empty. But the Pale King raised the Hollow Knight himself, and that vessel developed love for its father. That emotional crack allowed the Radiance to weaken the seal from inside.
5. How many endings does Hollow Knight have?
Five total, ranging from the simplest (becoming the new vessel yourself) to the “true” ending (fighting and destroying the Radiance in her dream-realm with help from void siblings). Each ending carries different thematic weight about sacrifice and what it means to preserve versus liberate a dying thing.
6. Is Hollow Knight hard?
Yes. It’s a challenging game with punishing bosses, a significant death penalty (you lose your currency “Geo” and must recover it from your ghost where you died), and no hand-holding for navigation or story. It rewards patience and persistence rather than raw reflexes, though reflexes help too.
7. Who made Hollow Knight?
Team Cherry — primarily Ari Gibson (artist/director) and William Pellen (programmer/writer), based in Adelaide, Australia. The team expanded to include composer Christopher Larkin and a few others. The game was funded via a 2014 Kickstarter campaign.
8. How much did Hollow Knight cost to make and how well did it sell?
The Kickstarter raised A$58,893 — modest by any standard. The game launched at $15 USD. It sold over 500,000 copies in its first year and has sold 15 million+ copies by 2025. An indie game made by two people on a shoestring budget becoming one of gaming’s best-sellers is an understatement.
9. What is the Echelon — I mean, what is “the Void” in Hollow Knight?
The Void is the primordial darkness at the bottom of the Abyss — the deepest point of Hallownest. The Pale King used it to create his vessels, including the Knight and the Hollow Knight. The Void turns out to be more than raw material; it’s connected to ancient forces that predate the Pale King and the Radiance themselves.
10. What genre is Hollow Knight?
It’s a Metroidvania — a 2D action-adventure game with a large interconnected map that opens up as you gain new abilities. The genre name combines Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the two games that defined the exploration-focused 2D platformer format Hollow Knight is part of.
11. Is there a sequel?
Yes. Hollow Knight: Silksong was released in September 2025 to critical acclaim. It follows Hornet as the protagonist in a new kingdom. The game was anticipated for years after being announced in 2019.
12. Do I need to read external lore to understand Hollow Knight?
No — but you do need to pay attention. The game delivers almost all of its story through environmental details, item descriptions, brief NPC conversations, and dream sequences. It deliberately withholds exposition. Players who push through without reading the lore tablets often miss what the game is about. The full picture rewards engagement.
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