How Long Does It Take To Beat Hollow Knight?
The deceptively simple Metroidvania "Hollow Knight" thrilled backers when it delivered on the promises of its Kickstarter campaign and launched in 2017, but the game never caught much mainstream attention. Despite that, it received strong reviews and became one of the best titles that many gamers missed that year.
What made "Hollow Knight" so special? The developers, Team Cherry, designed an easy to approach world that incorporated combat elements as challenging and rewarding as some of the best "Souls" titles, with some especially hard bosses capping off the game. Those enemies made the game feel tense, but the entire experience was balanced by friendly NPC encounters that made the world feel simultaneously inviting and worth fighting for.
A big part of surviving "Hollow Knight" involves learning how to navigate and explore its massive world, which can take a lot of time. For anyone who is thinking about running through the first game before the sequel, "Hollow Knight: Silksong," comes along, here is how long it takes to beat "Hollow Knight."
You can double your time if you want to find everything
Gamers looking to follow the "Hollow Knight" storyline to its conclusion should be ready to invest some time. Team Cherry announced as much shortly after the game went live, when the team published a Kickstarter update that measured an average playthrough of the main storyline at 25 hours.
Achieving 100% in the game is another matter. Team Cherry found that many players hit that mark in around 40 hours, but individual experiences have varied. Fans on Reddit have listed a wide range of times, with some reporting 35 to 50 hours to beat the story without a guide and others logging up to 80 hours to find everything the game had to offer.
According to the crowdsourced data published on HowLongToBeat, most "Hollow Knight" runs land somewhere in the middle. That site lists the average main story playthrough at slightly over 27 hours, whereas a completionist effort is listed as 60 hours. So while it does seem like there is a high degree of variance from player to player, one thing is certain: making it to the end of "Hollow Knight" will take some time.