I found this game one winter and played it over the holidays. It is so much fun.

Resources

If you do play this game I would recommend not looking up anything about the story or where to go next until you reach your first ending. Yes you will miss some rooms and dialogue, go to some areas too early, take a weird path, or do tasks in an suboptimal order, but it is worth it.

Keybinds

The default controls felt unintuitive, so I moved most of the attack keys to the mouse and focused the left hand on movement.

Setup

In game settings In game settings

Autohotkey Script

Overview

  • Horizontal slash: mouse1 (left click)
  • Up slash: mouse4
  • Down slash: mouse5
  • Vengeful spirit/shade soul: mouse2 (right click)
  • dive/descending dark: mouse3 (middle click)
  • wraiths/shriek: mouse6
  • holding down any mouse button will repeat the attack, but if you want animation cancellation you still have to do it yourself.
  • dreamnail: q
    • you can also set it to a mouse button, but I didn’t bother since movement is disabled while using it
  • charge nail art: shift
    • press once and it will charge up on its own, you don’t need to keep holding it down
  • heal: control
    • if you press and cancel too quickly the game will still register it as a cast
  • left/right movement: e and a
    • pressing left while right is still pressed will override and cause you to start moving left, and vice versa, instead of the default behaviour of standing still. This is useful if you have to turn quickly and do not release your previous direction in time.
  • jump: w
  • dash: space
    • holding down space will repeat the input. This is useful if you try to dash a few milliseconds before the dash cooldown finishes.
  • superdash: alt

Note that the in-game up and down are actually attack modifiers, not movements. They are there as e and s for convenience when navigating UI and not used in combat. Instead, I use dedicated mouse buttons set in autohotkey.

Spoilers below

Trivia

  • How long each attack takes. I couldn’t find any information about this on the internet, so I measured it myself.
    • attack with quickslash: 0.28s (you can interrupt this animation by turning around)
    • shade soul: 0.384s
    • dive startup: 0.25s, the same on the ground or airborne
    • shriek: 0.6s
    • great slash: 0.4s
    • dash slash: 0.25s
    • cyclone slash x3: 0.65s
    • cyclone slash x6: 1.341s
    • dash: 0.275s
  • What is the minimal set of areas you must explore to beat the game without unintended “skips”?
    • dirtmouth
    • forgotten crossroad
    • greenpath (mothwing cloak)
    • fungal waste (mantis claw)
    • city of tear (dreamer)
    • crystal peak (crystal dash)
    • resting ground (dream nail)
    • royal waterway, isma grove (isma tear)
    • deepnest (dreamer)
    • fog canyon (dreamer)
    • ancient basin (monarch wing)
    • kill dreamers

Pure vessel

My favorite boss fight in the game. While it felt a little unfair at first, as I died over and over I actually did not feel annoyed and looked forward to my next attempt. Eventually, I completed radiant difficulty on accident while just playing for fun.

Pure vessel switches attacks very quickly, before you get the chance to recover your dash or reset your position. Many of its attacks have several good countermeasures depending on the situation, and if you make a mistake you can often improvise and still avoid getting hit. It is also relatively easy to stagger considering how much health it has. So as I got more practice, I did not feel like I was just memorizing the one correct response to each attack and reacting in time, but rather taking control of the flow of the fight.

Melonmelody

Unofficial game based off hollow knight’s upcoming sequel. The inputs are a little unresponsive but it’s otherwise very impressive and the art is good too.