Is Hollow Knight Actually About the Death of Hope?

May 30, 2025

Hollow Knight isn't just a platformer. It's not just a Metroidvania. It's not even just a moody bug-world tragedy with an adorable mask and a sting for a sword. Hollow Knight is something quieter, sadder, and stranger. It's a game where silence means more than dialogue, where atmosphere weighs heavier than plot, and where everything noble seems to have already failed by the time you show up. You're not stepping into an unfolding epic; you're arriving after the credits rolled, long after anyone was left to clap.

And maybe that's the real kicker.

The deeper I drifted into Hallownest, the more it felt like combing through the shattered remains of something once magnificent. Like wandering through an old amusement park that shut down long before my time. The rides are rusted, locked in stillness. The gates hang open, but there's no one left to sell tickets. Faint, warped music still hums in the distance. The lights kept flickering, like they'd long forgotten they were meant to fade. And the people? Gone. The few who stayed just... drifted. Half-lost. Half-clinging. Haunted.

That's what stuck with me. This wasn't a tale of saving a kingdom—it was about wandering through its remains. And the more I sat with that thought, the more a question quietly began to tug at me.

Is Hollow Knight actually about the death of hope?

A Kingdom That Was Doomed Before You Got There

The moment you descend into Dirtmouth—quiet, grey, haunting—you can feel the weight of a world already lost. And not in the "apocalypse is coming" way. In the "the funeral was last week, and you showed up late" kind of way. The air itself feels tired. The wind barely moves. The few remaining townsfolk shuffle through routines they don't seem to fully believe in anymore. Even the light has this faded, brittle quality, like it's been stretched too thin over too many years.

Everything in Hallownest is broken. The monarchy, the people, the infection spreading like a cruel whisper—none of it is fresh. It's all aftermath. The grand experiment of this kingdom, whatever hope or ambition once drove it, has rotted into something hollow and strange. Even your heroic role as the Knight feels less like a grand adventure and more like a sad errand. You're not storming a citadel to save the day. You're wandering the ruins, piecing together fragments of a story whose ending was already written long before you arrived. You're cleaning up a mess someone else made centuries ago, a disaster sealed under layers of failure and denial. You're not saving Hallownest — you're just wandering through its remains.

And here's the bitter truth: you're not even sure that fixing it is the right choice. Sealing away the Radiance—does that make you a savior, or just someone clinging to the fragile illusion that this kingdom still matters? The deeper you go, the harder it gets to pretend you're a hero. It feels less like a noble quest and more like plugging holes in a ship already sinking. Or worse — like you're simply delaying the fall of a realm too proud to accept it's already lost.

There's no triumphant fanfare. No final glory. Just echoes that refuse to fade.

Hope Feels Like a Lie Everyone's Telling

Characters like Hornet or the Seer still cling to something like purpose. And at first, you think they're your guides—your beacons in the dark, pointing you toward some kind of meaning. But they're not really guiding you forward. They're holding onto ghosts. Hornet's fierce, but her path is tangled up in duty, shaped by a dying bloodline that's already crumbling. She fights because it's all she has left. The Seer? She keeps faith in the Dreamers, even as their dreams unravel into nightmares. It's not hope she offers, not really—it's ritual.

Even the charm of the game's most hopeful characters—like Bretta or Zote—is undercut by bitter irony. Bretta worships a myth she's invented in her loneliness. Zote is a myth to himself, puffed up on delusion, more punchline than champion. Neither sees reality clearly, and the game doesn't let us forget it. Their hope feels fragile, almost embarrassing in the face of the world's decay.

Which makes your own journey feel… hollow. And that's by design. The more you move forward, the more it feels like you're playing along in a story that already knows how it ends. No one around you has any real answers; they just cling to their illusions, because letting go means facing the emptiness.

Because what if hope in Hollow Knight isn't real? What if it's more like self-deception? A mask you wear so the silence doesn't swallow you?

The Knight Isn't a Hero—They're an Instrument

Let's talk about you. Or rather, the Knight. They don't speak. They don't cry. They don't seem to want anything. And that's not just minimalist character design—it's narrative intent. The silence isn't emptiness for the player to fill; it's emptiness that's built into who they are. The Knight doesn't chase a destiny. They don't burn with ambition or revenge. They simply move forward, like a wind-up toy set loose in a world that no longer knows what to do with it.

You're a vessel. Literally. Created to be empty. That emptiness is the whole point. Because to destroy the infection, you have to carry it inside you and contain it without breaking. You're not the savior. You're the trash bin. The kingdom's last desperate strategy was to manufacture something that could bear the Radiance's curse without crumbling under it. You are a tool designed to absorb pain and keep walking.

Even your predecessor—the so-called Hollow Knight—was just another "solution." A failed one. They were supposed to be pure, but even they faltered. So the Pale King tried again. Tried with you. Smaller. Different. Maybe better? But even if you succeed, even if you take the burden fully upon yourself, it doesn't feel like triumph. It feels like the latest in a long line of sacrifices. Another layer added to the pile of broken plans and wasted lives.

No cost too great, right? That's what the Pale King believed. That's what justified all of it. The experiments, the betrayals, the endless cycle of trying to fix what was broken by breaking more things in the process.

But somewhere in that bleak cycle, the idea of hope starts to curdle. If everyone's just a pawn in someone else's bad plan, if every noble act leads to another tragedy, then what's the point? Is there even one?

Or maybe that is the point.

Memory Is a Weapon—and a Trap

One of the most genius systems in Hollow Knight is the Dream Nail. At first, it feels like a curiosity—just another mechanic to collect bits of lore and backstory, something to fill in the blanks. But the more you use it, the more it starts to feel like something deeper. A scalpel. A mirror. A confession booth that no one asked for but everyone seems to need. It's not just a tool for understanding the world; it's a way of slicing open its wounds and watching what leaks out.

You poke into the minds of broken kings, fallen warriors, desperate mothers, and aimless husks who shuffle through the ruins like sleepwalkers. And what you find isn't clarity. It's sadness. Regret. Longing that never led anywhere. Paranoia that fed on itself until nothing was left. Everyone is trapped in their own past, stuck in looping dreams that offer no comfort, no escape. The Dream Nail doesn't just reveal thoughts—it exposes how haunted this world is by memory, how deeply its people have buried themselves in echoes of what once was.

Even the Radiance—the so-called final evil you're meant to destroy—doesn't fit the mold of a villain in the traditional sense. She's not some grand conqueror or invader from another world. She's an old god who was abandoned, left to decay in the shadows of a kingdom that chose the Pale King instead. She's a memory that refused to die. A forgotten god clawing her way back into relevance. A dream that curdled into infection. She's nostalgia gone rancid, trying to pull everything back into the golden age that never truly existed. And your job? To kill her. Not out of righteousness. Not out of vengeance. Just necessity.

You don't save Hallownest by offering it a new dream to believe in. You save it, if that word even applies, by burning the old one to the ground.

So... Is There Any Hope?

Okay, okay. It's not all doomscrolling through a bug crypt. As heavy as Hollow Knight feels, as much as the world seems locked in cycles of failure and decay, there is light in the game. But it's subtle. And fragile. You almost have to squint to see it, like catching the glimmer of a lantern far off in the fog.

Characters like the Grimmchild and the White Lady offer moments that feel… tender. Not joyful, exactly, but meaningful in a world that rarely allows itself softness. The White Lady speaks with a kind of quiet sorrow, but there's an undercurrent of care in her words, as though she still wishes for something better even while accepting how much has already been lost. The Grimmchild, in its odd way, is a symbol of rebirth—small, vulnerable, but growing. Their existence suggests that even in a place as broken as Hallownest, life can still flicker in unexpected corners.

Even Hornet, in her best moments, seems to believe in you, even if the world doesn't. She tests you, challenges you, but never truly opposes you. There's something close to trust in her actions, as if she sees in you the possibility of a choice that others before you never had the strength or freedom to make. She's not clinging to hope out of denial. She's daring to risk that something new might finally be possible.

And then there's the true ending—the one that shifts everything. The ending where the Knight doesn't simply become the new vessel, endlessly repeating the cycle of sacrifice and suppression, but where they and Hornet confront the Radiance directly. That ending feels different. It's not about containment anymore. It's about confrontation. About breaking the cycle rather than patching it. About choosing to face the root of the infection instead of burying it deeper.

Maybe that's the tiniest ember of hope. Not rebuilding Hallownest. Not restoring some fake golden age that probably wasn't as golden as anyone remembers. But ending the lie that any of this was okay in the first place. Burning away the rot so that, maybe someday, something new can grow where all the old mistakes finally stop casting shadows.

The Sadness Is the Point—and the Beauty

So, back to the question. Is Hollow Knight actually about the death of hope?

Yeah. In a lot of ways, it absolutely is. It's about how dreams rot when they outlive the people who dreamed them. How noble intentions, no matter how pure at the start, can spiral into cruelty, obsession, and decay. How every attempt to preserve something perfect eventually twists into something broken. It's about how silence outlasts voices, how ruins outlast cities, how failure echoes louder and longer than any fleeting moment of triumph. Hallownest isn't a kingdom waiting for its hero to arrive. It's already fallen. You're walking through the aftermath, piecing together a story whose sad ending was written long before you ever picked up the controller.

But there's a strange comfort in that, isn't there?

Even in all its sorrow, Hollow Knight remains breathtaking. Its ruined towers stretch toward endless black skies, as if trying to remember the stars they once knew. The empty halls whisper with soft melodies and fading traces of life, like old songs crackling from broken speakers. Regret drifts through the air, not to push you away, but to sit quietly beside you, like an old friend who understands the weight you carry. The world feels hollow, but never truly empty. Silent, yet never without life. And somehow, even within the sadness, it never feels hopeless while you remain.

Maybe that's where its real beauty lives. The game doesn't sugarcoat or lean on hollow optimism. It offers no neat endings, no easy comfort. Instead, it invites you to sit with its sorrow, to hold it without needing rescue. And in that bare, gentle honesty—raw yet oddly kind—it offers the truest kind of hope.