You explore a large, connected underground insect kingdom, fighting with a simple nail weapon and slowly gaining new movement abilities that open up areas you could not reach before. Boss fights demand real precision and pattern memorization, and losing sends you back to recover dropped currency from where you died. It looks calm and painterly but is genuinely tough in places, so patience with dying and retrying matters.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
The short version
Team Cherry built something that rivals the genre's best with a fraction of the marketing, and its reputation as a modern classic is entirely deserved. Dense, mysterious, and quietly devastating.
In the hands
The nail-and-spell combat is unforgiving but fair, demanding you learn boss patterns through repeated failure rather than grinding stats. Some players will bounce off the difficulty, and that's fair too.
Look and sound
Hallownest's hand-painted gloom and Christopher Larkin's mournful score create one of the most atmospheric worlds on the system. It's a shame more games don't trust silence this well.
The long haul
Dozens of hours of exploration, secret areas, and brutal optional bosses for a shockingly low price. A must for metroidvania fans, though newcomers to the genre should expect real friction.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You play a small silent bug knight dropped into the entrance of Hallownest, a ruined underground kingdom, armed with nothing but a nail you swing like a tiny sword. You move with the left stick, swing your nail with one button, and jump with another, and the opening area teaches you basic platforming and combat against slow, simple enemies before the map opens up into branching tunnels. Early on you'll hit dead ends you can't cross yet, a gap too wide to jump or a wall too high to climb, which the game expects, since finding a new ability later will let you come back and get through.
Most of your time goes into exploring these interconnected tunnels, drawing your own sense of the map as you go, fighting increasingly tricky enemies, and occasionally facing a boss guarding an important path forward. Beating a boss or finding a new movement ability, like a dash or a way to climb walls, opens up whole new areas you couldn't reach before, and a full playthrough tends to run twenty to thirty hours for someone exploring at a normal pace. Optional charms you find and equip let you tweak how your character plays, for example trading health for extra attack power, so you can lean into a style that suits you.
The combat and platforming get genuinely difficult in the back half, with some optional bosses and challenge areas that will test your patience severely. Dying sends you back to your last rest point and leaves your collected currency at the spot where you died, so you'll need to fight your way back to reclaim it. If you enjoy piecing together a big, moody world through exploration and don't mind a real challenge along the way, this is one of the best examples of that kind of game.