exploration

03 Oct, 2025

In February and March of 2017, respectively, Hollow Knight and Breath of the Wild were released. In both you play as an androgynous little guy who doesn't have much to say, exploring the ruins of a once-great kingdom; in both games, the game was about exploration, in a way which is often not the case in other games. You can explore in a lot of games, of course, and are often encouraged to do so, but in most it's optional, a reward for the curious. Not so in Hollow Knight and Breath of the Wild. I have always found it fascinating how different these games' approaches to the matter are. Expect some very light spoilers for these games.

Would You Still Love Me If I Were A Bug?

Though the early game is relatively forgiving, Hollow Knight depicts a hostile world. You are given no real direction apart from the standard "well, it looks like I can go here", and though you eventually receive a more explicit objective, you are still ultimately driven by your curiosity.

If you're unfamiliar with the basic conceit of a Metroidvania¹, it's this: you are given a 2D platforming world² to explore, and as you explore you unlock new abilities (usually especially movement abilities, such as a double jump and a dash) which allow you to explore more of the map. Since the game is driven by exploration, you are forced to search for the critical path. Some games in the genre offer more guidance than others, but that's the basic idea. And often you are able to "sequence break," accessing areas you aren't "supposed to" by using your tools in unexpected way. Some sequence breaks are intended, others are discovered by clever players.³

In Hollow Knight, as in most games of the genre, you start with a very limited toolkit: you can move, you can jump, you can swing your nail. (It's a sword.) You drop into the starting area, the Forgotten Crossroads, with little guidance other than it seems to be the only path available to you (and an NPC suggesting that others have gone down there before), and at first you have no map, no idea how big this place is or what could be here. Exploration is dangerous: if you die and can't find your way back to the place where you died, you lose all the money you were carrying before you died. So the player is encouraged, at this point, to make safe choices while exploring.

Then you find a friendly fellow selling maps, and suddenly you at least have an idea of where things are. ⁴ He's sketched out a lot of the area, but not all of it. Armed with a map, it's much easier to find your way back to where you died; it also shows you exits you might have missed, and gives you ideas for where to explore next. Even with your limited toolkit, the Crossroads starts to feel like you can tame it. You explore more, you find some exits to other areas that you can't access quite yet, and then you finally find the ability that lets you move on to the next area that is open to you, the Greenpath.

The thing is, you don't have a map for the Greenpath. And there are new enemies here, and they're harder to deal with, and there's new terrain hazards. So the cycle begins again: we explore, looking for safe places in this area. New benches to rest at, our mapping friend, maybe some shortcuts that will ease our navigation should we have to come back. And each time we do find one of those things, the area feels a little safer, a little less dangerous. Then we find our next movement upgrade, and that lets us get to the next area--and unlocks some new places to explore here, and makes traversing it more easy. And so on, and so on.

The game starts out fairly linearly; the first three areas are more or less required to do in order, but after the third area, the game opens up, and so too does the difficulty of navigating. Previously the movement abilities we found would clearly unlock the next area, but that quickly stops being the case: now it becomes a question of remembering those previously inaccessible exits from earlier, or, occasionally, of which path you will take.

This is where the game truly shines. The core cycle of find a new area, explore to try to find places of safety in it, find a map, explore the area thoroughly, keeps the moment to moment exploration interesting while you are slowly building up a map of the entire world, finding ways the areas interconnect, finding secrets. There are so many little secrets, little events that will happen differently if you went to a different place at a different time or in a different order. While many find the lack of ready guidance frustrating, for me that is the charm: this is your journey. You explored Hallownest, and learned the shape of it.

What A Wild Time

Breath of the Wild is not a Metroidvania (and wouldn't be even if "2D platformer" isn't more or less baked into the definition). You get all⁵ of your traversal abilities early on; once you have all of them, the world is your oyster. But while the world of Breath of the Wild is also a sad, ruined kingdom, the focus of the exploration here is not the hostility of the world: it's the sheer joy of discovery, of climbing a hill and seeing something in the distance, saying "I wonder what's over there," and just going and checking it out.

You are very nearly always rewarded with something, and it is very nearly always something useful. New weapons, treasure, cooking materials, Korok seeds⁶ shrines that help you power up; wherever you go, if something catches your attention, chances are it's got something you want. The much-maligned weapon durability system (your weapons break fast; like, really fast) actually ties into this, because unlike many games where you will eventually just find a weapon you like and never have a reason to switch off, you are in constant need of new weapons.

The durability system is an example of friction, of the game giving you a problem that you always need to overcome; a shiny new sword in a chest helps relieve some of that friction. Finding more food for cooking helps make combat easier (fighting enemies is a pretty good source of new weapons, and is sometimes necessary to explore); finding money lets you buy more arrows and ingredients and armor at the next shop. So you never stop feeling like you are being, not just rewarded, but rewarded with something that is almost immediately useful, when you explore.

One of the most notable features of this game is that there are very few items that are completely unique⁷. I have seen people note this as a weakness of the games, but it has a very sizable benefit for what the game is trying to do: you never have to fear that you are missing something. You are never punished for failing to explore a specific area.⁸ In vast open-world games like this, this is an amazing relief.

Even the game's big collectibles don't offer you a counter indicating how many you're missing; the game at no point wants you to feel pressure to do any exploring you don't want to. You stop receiving any benefit from Korok seeds long before you get all 900 of them. If you are still out exploring, it's because you want to, not because the game has given you a checklist.

There is one major exception to this: the game's story is told primarily through memories; over the past 100 years of being in some sort of stasis chamber you have lost your memories, and have been given several photographs of specific locations which might unlock those memories. You know how many photographs there are and can peruse the memories as cutscenes once you have them. But I find that this mostly gives us guidance for exploring--something to do besides simply wandering around or heading straight to deal with the main story.

You will piece the story together in a different order depending on where you go first, and that will shape your perception. Once again, this is your story: the story of how you explored a broken kingdom.

Exploring Our Conclusions

Very little in either of these games is required. Breath of the Wild famously lets you just run straight to the final boss and kill him without doing pretty much anything else; the story is the story of Link trying to become strong enough to do that. Hollow Knight has a few more things on the critical path before you can get to the end, but it is considerably less than the amount of things you likely did on your playthrough.

It's hard to imagine the Breath of the Wild approach working in Hollow Knight. Part of that, I think, is that it's much more reasonable to ask people to thoroughly explore in a 2D environment; but part of it is that they are trying to do different things. In Hollow Knight, because there are entire areas that are easily missed, your exploration carries this immense weight. There are multiple endings; if you want the good ending, you need to scour every inch of this kingdom. You need to understand what you're doing. Here, I appreciate that there are secrets that I might not discover without a guide, because that makes everything I did discover feel earned. And because the game is about exploring, and because the fights can be very difficult, the fact that maybe there is a tool that will help make that next fight a little easier or make exploration a little less dangerous around that next corner feels like a good motivator to keep looking.

The open nature of Breath of the Wild means you're not going to miss some secret breakable wall that leads to an entire area of the game you could potentially miss. You might miss a few puzzles here or there, but the game guides you to anything important. There's no "good ending," there's just a bonus cutscene for finding all the memories. You don't need to scour the landscape or come to a deep intimate understanding of Hyrule and its lore. You just need to explore until you're ready to fight Ganon.

Both approaches work, I think--if they didn't I wouldn't be writing about these games eight years later. But these games highlight the ways you can use the player's curiosity and drive to create very different experiences, and to me they really showcase what is powerful about games as a narrative device. We aren't just being handed a story, we're going out and finding it. We're making it our own. While the actual "plot" of either game is fairly thin, in terms of "written things that happen," the act of exploring, the secrets to uncover, accomplish something that really can't be accomplished in any other medium, and is sometimes rare even in gaming. It's easy enough to make a game that's a series of disconnected cutscenes strung together by segments of gameplay, but games that focus on exploration like these two (and so many other great games after them) are uniquely suited to weaving it all together into a cohesive whole.

(And if you're curious, yes, I think Silksong is a worthy successor to Hollow Knight and does a great job of making exploration feel just as tense and rewarding as the original game did.)

#essay