They Nailed It: The Amazing Art Of Hollow Knight
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Hollow Knight is one of the prettiest 2D games of all time. Let's dive in and take a look at what makes the art in Hollow Knight so special. Afterwards I think it will be pretty clear how Hollow Knight became such a stand out game in an industry over saturated by nearly ten thousand video game releases per year. Thank you steam for diligently curating the games accepted onto your platform.
Let's first break down the artwork into five categories. Listed on the bottom left hand side of the screen will be Art Style, Environment Art, Character Art, Animations, Foreground Elements and Background Elements. Let's first start by discussing the crown jewel of Hollow Knight, the Art Style.
Every piece of art in a video game stems from the stylized art choices the developers decide upon. Hollow Knight created an Art Style that is very friendly to the eye. The style is similar to a lot of cartoons that you would fall in love with as a kid. Many of the insects have round body parts making the creatures relatively easy to draw and animate. Another key aspect to pay attention to are the color choices used for the enemies and NPCs. The colors of these bugs are usually a nice mix. One of the design choices of the developers was to use full colors only, meaning that the bugs could be a number of different colors, but they would not blend any of the colors into one another. Instead the different colors are separated by black lines representing different body parts or pieces of armor. This design choice allowed the developers to save a ton of time while creating the inhabitants of the world, the environments, and the characters.
Every environment that you venture into has a very distinct feel and theme that is adhered too. Here is a quick look between all of the different environments, starting with the Forgotten Crossroads.
Now that we have taken a good look at all of the different zones in Hollow Knight lets double back to the Fungal Wastes. In this zone you will notice that the background elements are almost exclusively mushrooms. Most of the foreground elements also happen to be mushrooms. Hell even most of the enemies in this location are mushrooms. The developers even made the Fungal Wastes contain pools of acidic water to further hammer down the point that fungi like to grow in damp environments. The theme that each zone presents is stuck to like white on rice!
Ok one more example. Lets go to the Crystal Caves. Notice anything particular about this location? What jumps out at you... it can’t be that half the level is made out of freaking crystals is it? Yes once again the developers took the theme of an area and made it the centerpiece of the entire zone. You have enemies that have crystals on their bodies, enemies who are harvesting crystals, crystals that will hurt you if you fall on them, crystals that will.. OK, I'll stop you get the point. Now I'll just shut up and show you some more awesome scenes from this zone.
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Now let's get into the character art. The Characters of Hollow Knight are unique to say the least. The bugs that many of the enemies are based off of have been reimagined to fit the art and playstyle of this masterpiece. Some of the creatures have been created from scratch while others are simple augmentations of their real life counterparts, drawn in the stylized manner that we have all come to love. Take a look at the enemies presented in this game. The diversity of insects and creatures stops the combat from becoming stale. Luckily for Team Cherry there are millions of species of bugs out there so they will not have any problem keeping any sequels jam packed with new insects... which is great news for us because we love all of their different creature designs. The bugs range in strengths and abilities oftentimes having their attack behaviors influenced from the insects capabilities in real life. Insert enemy fighting montage here...