Hollow Knight: Godmaster

Godmaster (originally called "Gods & Glory") is the final expansion of Hollow Knight and also the most extensive, or at least the most time-consuming. With almost 40 different bosses in the game prior to this update, it really lend itself to offer some sort of boss rush and boss challenge mode. Godmaster offers exactly that, but in the most glorious way possible.

With boss challenge modes in Nintendo games you often just have some sort of menu, where the most recent example was the last update for Metroid Dread. The Boss Challenge and Gauntlet in Ocarina of Time 3D also comes to mind. It's simple, but does its job. However, with Hollow Knight Team Cherry wanted something more, where it introduces a whole new area and a story expansion, which all revolves around battling boss in many different ways.

But first things first. The update starts by adding two new "rooms" to the world of Hallownest. One houses a special enemy, which hides a new Small Key. And the other is the Junk Pit, where you can find a cocoon, which can be opened with any Small Key. This releases the Godseeker, a creature with a complex mind, which has been roaming Hallownest in the search for "gods", the most powerful beings around. And these gods all turn out to be the bosses you've already fought and beaten during your journey. You also obtain the Godtuner, so that from now any new boss will be documented by yourself.

If you enter the Godseeker's mind via the Dream Nail, you will arrive in Godhome, where the majority of the expansion takes place. There you can participate in multiple Pantheons, which are essentially your typical boss rushes. But since Hollow Knight has so many and also many difficult bosses, this got split up into four parts, each with eleven bosses in total:

• The Pantheon of the Master
• The Pantheon of the Artist
• The Pantheon of the Sage
• The Pantheon of the Knight

They will unlock gradually, once you've beaten (most of) the bosses that are waiting inside. But in addition to the bosses that you already know, the Pantheons also introduce some new variants of existing bosses and always end on a completely new boss, which you haven't faced at all before. Some of them are familiar faces from Hallownest, however, where the names of the Pantheons already give you an idea what to expect. Sadly, there is no "Pantheon of Hunter" for whatever reason, where this would seem like a no-brainer.

Anyway, having new bosses at the end may feel frustrating at first, because – unless you are a natural talent at this game – you usually need to learn bosses before you can beat them. And in this case you would have to repeat all ten bosses that came before...

Luckily, you can practice all bosses inside the Hall of Gods. This is a collection of all the individual bosses of the game in the form of statues, where you can replay any boss at any time. They will unlock once you've beaten them in the main game. The exception to this are the new bosses in the Pantheons, where they will unlock once you've faced them once. So, you can practice them here at your own pace, before you try again inside the Pantheons, which will save you from a lot of frustrations.

 All bosses in the Hall of Gods also come in three difficulties:

• Attuned
• Ascended
• Radiant

The attuned bosses are essentially the same as you would find them in Hallownest, but they do have more health, so they don't fall as easily against your late game equipment. These are also used for the Pantheons.

The ascended versions will cause double damage, but they also have more health, and in some cases the battles were modified in certain ways, where usually this means that the arena has additional hazards or got changed entirely. One of the early game bosses also gets duplicated for a very tough challenge.

Finally, the radiant bosses are the same as the ascended versions, but it's "Dread Mode", meaning that you will die in a single hit. You will have to truly master each boss in order to beat this, which can require hours of learning in some cases, but this new challenge also offers new possibilities...

Certain Charms in the game will become useless during the radiant battles, like anything that helps you with healing, but there is one Charm that really shines in this mode and that's the Grubberfly's Elegy. This is the Charm that makes you shoot "sword beams" – or let's better say "nail beams" – at full health, like in a traditional Zelda game. Since its advantage gets removed after a single hit, it's usually not very useful during the main game, except for the Delicate Flower delivery quest, where you are not allowed to get hit if you don't want the flower to break (by the way, the Godmaster update also let you obtain more of these flowers, so you can bring them to different people for different effects and reactions... which may be important).

And since you are also not allowed to get hit during radiant boss battles, you will basically always have the nail beams and therefore the Grubberfly's Elegy becomes a very good choice, because it gives you so many more possibilities to hit certain bosses. Also, since healing does nothing, you are free to use all your SOUL on spells, so you will undoubtedly have a bigger focus on ranged attacks. But there is more...

The Charm system in Hollow Knight has a special trick, where you can "overcharm" when equipping your last Charm, meaning you can put on a Charm that takes more notches than you have left. Doing so will cause you to take double damage, so it's usually too much of a risk during the main game. As for the radiant boss fights, however, this doesn't matter, so you can make good use of this mechanic for even stronger Charm builds than before, completely without any downsides.

So, while the radiant battles are among the most difficult challenges in the game, it's still interesting due to the different setups that you will be able to use freely. From the weakness of dying from a single hit come new strengths... Which is quite unusual for a game.

Some of the radiant bosses are an absolute nightmare, however, mostly due to them being very spammy with projectiles or summonings, where it's just not enough to learn them. Those feel ill balanced for this mode, but the majority of bosses is actually quite fun to master, because you always have the possibility of dodging their attacks. And beating all bosses on the Radiant difficulty will unlock something special, so it's worth for more than just shiny icons on the statues and a menu.

After having practiced all the bosses individually, it's time to get back into the Pantheons. Beating all of them unlocks the "Pantheon of Hallownest", as one final challenge, where you have to beat almost all bosses in a row. While they still have the health and damage values of the "attuned" bosses, they will make use of the more difficult arenas of the "ascended" versions this time for even more of a challenge.

Things then end on a more difficult version of the secret final boss. Of course. By the way, the actual final bosses of Hollow Knight don't appear in Godhome, only their stronger variants. But you can replay them at any time anyway at the end of the game, like in your typical Metroid or Zelda.

If you still don't have enough after all of this madness, the Pantheons also offer four different Bindings, which will make your life harder in different ways:

• Nail Binding
• Shell Binding
• Charms Binding
• Soul Binding

The Nail Binding will reduce your nail's damage to a maximum of 13 (the best nail normally does 21). The Shell Binding will only allow you to have a total of four Masks, which is one less than at the beginning of the game. The Binding for Charms disables them completely. And the Soul Binding only leaves you with a maximum of 33% SOUL, so that you only get a single heal or spell cast at any given time.

You can choose to do them all at once, where the symbols at the gate to the Pantheon will have a radiant glow to them. But to truly see every secret within Godhome it's "enough" to complete each Binding individually.

I'm personally not the biggest fan of late game challenges that cripple you on some way, where the DLC for Breath of the Wild was a huge offender in this category. But the main difference is that these are only additional challenge on top what you already have at Godhome. And this place makes complete use of all your endgame equipment and abilities at first. It's where you truly will show what you're made of in this game. The Bindings and the radiant boss fights then offer some additional challenge beyond the "normal" stuff, just in case you're seeking for more.

And yeah, it's a lot to do. It's so much that Godhome feels like a whole game within a game, where you can spend as much time here as with the entire rest of Hollow Knight. Which is probably why Team Cherry also added the Godseeker Mode in addition, which unlocks after beating the first three Pantheons. In this mode you only have Godhome and nothing else. You start with all meaningful upgrades from the main game, so you have all abilities, all Mask Shards, all Vessel Fragments, all Charms, and all Charm Notches.

So, if you just want to get into boss fights, then this mode is a good choice. The only downside is that it gives you the Grimmchild over Carefree Melody and you also don't get to use Kingsoul, where ideally this mode would offer you all possible Charms. Salubra's Blessing, which refills your SOUL while sitting on a bench, also isn't available, but it's not really needed anyway, because all benches inside the Pantheons are next to a hot spring. And the Hall of Gods doesn't allow you to take SOUL into the fights.

 

Conclusion

Well, since the core of Godmaster is really just replaying the bosses in all sorts of ways, this can be considered as massive padding. But it's all optional content and it's well done for a boss challenge, where the game really wants you to keep playing it forever. If you enjoy the boss battles in Hollow Knight, then Godmaster can entertain and challenge you for a long time.