Hollow Knight drops a small knight with a nail for a sword into Hallownest, a ruined kingdom of insects, and leaves the player to work out the rest. The ruins are full of things that want to kill you, the secrets are well hidden, and the bosses are hard. It came from Team Cherry, a handful of people in Adelaide, South Australia, and it became the game Wireframe would later call “an instant modern classic”.
Its roots were modest. The horned knight first appeared in Hungry Knight, which William Pellen, Ari Gibson and Rohan Fraser made for the Ludum Dare 27 game jam in August 2013. A Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2014 raised A$57,138. The finished game, released for Windows on 24 February 2017, was much larger than that budget suggests.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Team Cherry, Adelaide
- Directors: Ari Gibson and William Pellen; technical director David Kazi; music and sound by Christopher Larkin
- Kickstarter: launched 19 November 2014; raised A$57,138, more than one and a half times its target
- Released: 24 February 2017 (Windows), followed by macOS and Linux, Nintendo Switch in June 2018, and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
- Free content packs: Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood and Godmaster
- Sequel: Hollow Knight: Silksong, 4 September 2025
Hallownest
The player is a nameless knight searching the halls of Hallownest for the Pale King. Fusion’s Simon Butler, reviewing the PC version early in 2019, found “cold, empty villages, tome-filled libraries, perilous mines with thorn-filled walls”, and a world “so superbly crafted that you know there are more stories to tell of the strange denizens of this bug-bound world”. The look is hand-drawn: “crisp and clean” characters in front of “finely detailed backgrounds”.
It plays as a Metroidvania, a game in which new abilities open up parts of a large connected map that were out of reach before. Butler described the moment it starts to work on you: the jumping is “platforming 101”, until “you encounter the first platform strangely beyond reach. Then you start to suspect that somewhere there are power-ups.” Enemies drop geo, the currency, and shopkeepers sell charms that change how the knight fights, “but nothing comes cheap”, so the player keeps going back into “the danger-filled nooks and crannies” to earn more. Benches act as save points, places where, in Butler’s words, the knight can “sit and rest your tiny bones”. Team Cherry’s own store page promises “over 130 enemies” and “30 epic bosses”.
The difficulty was part of its reputation. Butler, who called it “one of the finest titles to appear in many a moon”, admitted that it was “repeatedly crushing my feeble gaming skills”, and that he had spent “way too much time on a boss I know full well I should trounce in a heartbeat”. Wireframe noted that it drew on FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series for “its imposing, mysterious world and deliberate combat”. The developers themselves pointed elsewhere. “I hadn’t actually played much of Dark Souls when we were making the game,” Pellen told MCV in 2018; the team named Zelda II, Faxanadu, A Link to the Past and Majora’s Mask among the games that shaped its sense of discovery.
Updates and console versions
Team Cherry kept adding to the game for free. Four content packs, Hidden Dreams, The Grimm Troupe, Lifeblood and Godmaster, brought new bosses, quests and abilities. Godmaster, the last and largest, was still being made under the working name “Gods and Glory” when MCV spoke to the team in July 2018. The Nintendo Switch version was released during E3 in June 2018, and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions followed. On 5 February 2026 Team Cherry released new versions for the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, free to existing owners.
Silksong
Hornet, a character from the first game, was promised as a playable character as a Kickstarter stretch goal. The idea grew into a full sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, set in a new kingdom, Pharloom. Wireframe described players “pining after” it in 2022. It came out on 4 September 2025.
Sources
- Fusion issue 4, 2019, pp. 5–7: Simon Butler’s review of the PC version (the Pale King, Hallownest, the graphics, geo and charms, the bosses, benches, the quotations).
- Wireframe issue 19, July 2019, “Soulsvania” panel: Hollow Knight draws on the Dark Souls series. Issue 61, March 2022: “Part Soulslike and part Metroidvania”, “30 or so hours”, “an instant modern classic”, Silksong as a “DLC-turned-full-sequel”, released 2017.
- Marie Dealessandri, “When We Made… Hollow Knight”, MCV/Develop, 31 July 2018 (web, secondary): the team, the game-jam origin, A$57,138 on Kickstarter at the end of 2014, the influences and Pellen’s quotation, the Switch release at E3 2018, the Gods and Glory pack, Hornet as a stretch goal. https://mcvuk.com/when-we-made-hollow-knight/
- Jini Maxwell, “From Ludum Dare to Pharloom”, ACMI, 5 September 2025 (web, secondary): Hungry Knight made by William Pellen, Ari Gibson and Rohan Fraser for Ludum Dare 27 in 2013, the Kickstarter launch on 19 November 2014 and its $36,000 target, Silksong’s protagonist Hornet and the kingdom of Pharloom. https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/from-ludum-dare-to-pharloom/
- “The Making of Hollow Knight”, Game Informer, October 2018 (web, secondary): Pellen and Gibson entering game jams together; Hungry Knight at the 27th Ludum Dare, “held in August 2013”. https://gameinformer.com/2018/10/16/the-making-of-hollow-knight
- Team Cherry, “About” page (web): a small team in Adelaide, South Australia; Ari Gibson and William Pellen as co-directors; console releases and Godmaster. https://www.teamcherry.com.au/about
- Team Cherry, “Hollow Knight arrives on Nintendo Switch 2, PS5 & Xbox Series X|S”, 5 February 2026 (web). https://www.teamcherry.com.au/blog/hollowknightupgraded
- Steam store page, Hollow Knight (web): release date, Windows, macOS and Linux requirements, the four free content packs, “over 130 enemies” and “30 epic bosses”. https://store.steampowered.com/app/367520/Hollow_Knight/
- For the release of Silksong on 4 September 2025, see the Metroidvania entry and Team Cherry’s announcement it cites.