STEAM BACKLOG - HOLLOW KNIGHT
I first opened up hollow knight sometime in 2021, where I proceeded to make about eight hours of good progress in the game. I had defeated mantis lords without a nail upgrade, acquired dive, c-dash, many fancy tricks. Despite that, I eventually put down my controller and went "Its good, but I just dont like it." Three years later and a metric shit-tonne of videos watched from beloved Hollow Knight youtuber, fireb0rn, and I had the itch in my skull to give it another chance.
This time, I chose to approach hollow knight from a different philosophy- I believe that my experience in Rain World gave me the ability to truly understand and have the patience for a game such as this. Instead of sitting around thinking "and where now?" as the game does not give you clear direction at all, or at least very rarely, I would open up the map and look for any passages I may have failed to explore as I had ran through the many areas. Not only did this result in me already having received 90% completion upon completing the first ending of the game, but I also gained a much greater appreciation and love for the world I was exploring. While a lot of "core" areas were spoiled to me, the true heart of hollow knight was never spoiled. All the little details that expand this world and add beautiful depth that one rarely sees in an any% speedrun route, those were what made me fall in love with the game.
While I continue to play through the many challenges of the game, and begin considering doing speedruns JUST for the achievements, I've already crossed it off of the backlog list. After all, the rule of the backlog list is not games beaten, but games played in general- and I sure as hell sunk ~20 hours in the span of two days into the game.