Hollow Knight, after like a year of not playing it.
There's so much to love about it, but it's just too obtuse for its own good. I must have spent a good 10 hours just bumbling around wondering what the chuffing fuck I was supposed to do, finding nothing but dead ends and inaccessible places. Since I had no recollection of the already incredibly vague story I had no idea if there was someplace in particular I was supposed to be heading to. When I found the crystal dash all I could think of was "Oh, would have been fun to have had a hint where this was. Or that it even existed in the first place." This game is just crying out for an NPC who could drop some hints about important things in the world, instead of them being left entirely up to the player to discover. Or alternatively you could scale the world back a bit, so that the player won't have like two dozen places to go while needing some ability for all of them. Just a teensy bit more linear progression would have helped there a bit.
It also doesn't help that the game has no system to mark what kind of obstacle is at the end of each inaccessible place, so I ended up constantly wandering back to them in the hopes that whatever I'd just unlocked would maybe help with it. Easily 30% of my around 22 hours have been just wandering around aimlessly. Another aggravation is that the travel distances between different zones can be incredibly long, and the fast travel spots are very sparse.
Before Hollow Knight I also played a bit of Darksiders 2.
It's a game that's about the sum of its parts, but for each individual part I can think of a game that's done it better: the combat is better in Dark Souls and God of War, the loot collecting is better in Diablo, the platforming is better in Prince of Persia, the dungeons and semi-open world are better in Zelda. The standout here is the soundtrack that's actually really good, but it's entirely in the wrong game. The artstyle and graphics have some personality and are pretty well executed, but are in service of entirely the wrong story. And when everything in a game is either average or at odds with itself, the end result is... well, average.
I'm genuinely puzzled about the stylistic choices in this game. I remember having similar feelings about the first also, but I played it like a decade ago and my memory is hazy at best. The story and main character strike such a harsh dissonance with every other element that it feels like two completely different games have been mashed together with little consideration to how well they fit. The main character, Death, looks like an edgy comic book character from the 90s, rides an undead horse named Despair, wields a revolver and dual scythes and cynically croaks every voice line. He's on a desperate quest to resurrect humanity and save his brother from damnation. And yet he's surrounded by these world and character designs out of World of Warcraft where everything has exaggerated proportions and the color palette is really bright. The end result looks like someone dropped a Spawn action figure in the midst of a bunch of Playmobil toys, and it never stops being jarring.
The story doesn't fare much better, since like 90% of the narrative is setting, and next to no story. There's nearly no narrative momentum since nobody is given almost any characterization, and the stakes are far removed from where the game takes place. The vast majority of dialogue is just spent on rather dull worldbuilding, and the few characters that have some personality are little more than stock archetypes.
What's left is the gameplay, which is perfectly fine, save for some aggravating design choices in the combat. Who the hell thought that having to hold L2 for lock-on in combat was a good idea? But like I said, everything it does has been done better elsewhere. Its only claim to fame is that games that combine all these gameplay styles are still quite rare, so it stands out by that merit alone. But it being a sort of jack of all trades, master of none type game also makes it difficult to recommend, because whatever elements I can think of there are other games that do them better.
