Hollow Knight is a niche indie game beloved by a subset of gamers, but their love runs with a deep otherworldly passion. Hollow Knight is a metroidvania devised by and ultimately released by development team Team Cherry in 2017.
In Hollow Knight you play as the Knight, or the Ghost, a small dialogue-less player-character whom throughout the playthrough you come to know as the potential sole saviour of the world that you explore and unlock.
Your goal in Hollow Knight is to guide the Knight throughout an underground kingdom of bugs plagued by a mysterious disease and learn both how it became this way and perhaps work towards repairing it.
Throughout Hallownest, the kingdom in which Hollow Knight takes place, there are several locations of the map which are not immediately available to you; some are unlocked through new abilities, others require key items, and more still require the player to approach the location from a different direction and hit a lever so that they might pass through entirely.
In the speedrun ‘Kronk%’ runners aim to hit every permanent lever, defined as a lever that opens up passages and does not revert, as quickly as possible. This is named as an homage to the scenes in The Emperor’s New Groove, and ultimately throughout the subsequent series, where Kronk iconicly pulls the wrong lever resulting in Ysma falling through a trapdoor.
Pull the lever, Kronk… Wrong lever!
This category can be seen on Speedrun.com under ‘Hollow Knight Mods’ and is currently championed by player Quatopine with a LTR time of 1h 08m 14s
One hope for this category extension is to see the mod implement an audio clip which plays with each lever flip. This, however, is unlikely to be perfected as the clip would need to play prior to the player hitting the lever and thus requires predictions that could easily desynchronize. For now, we can enjoy some streamers’ dedication to the craft by attempting to use hotkeys in this way, such as Skurry’s run here in which the runner presses their audio hotkey prior to flipping the lever in attempts to sync Ysma’s voice commands.
Hollow Knight is currently available for download on Windows, Switch, Xbox, and Playstation.
Hollow Knight is a niche indie game beloved by a subset of gamers, but their love runs with a deepCOMICONRead More