Hollow Knight – Secrets of the Abyss

This post will contain heavy late game spoilers, so it's best to ignore this if you haven't played Hollow Knight yet. I'm just talking about a part of my personal journey through the game here, which is all about an area that I found very atmospheric, but also slightly annoying: the Abyss.

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Hollow Knight is all about diving deeper into the world of Hallownest and once you've reached the Ancient Basement you already feel like you've reached the bottom. That is until you open the door into the Abyss, where you descend into the darkest depths of Hallownest.

The enemies down there are very basic, with the Shadow Creepers and Shades, but the atmosphere is so oppressing that it can leave a mark on you. I will never forget the first time I went down there, not knowing what awaited me, all shrouded in black fogs and droning noises. But what awaits you isn't so bad. It's not meant to be, since you're essentially returning to your place of birth. And the Metroid reference at the end made it all the better.

During the endgame you will go down there a second time and enter even deeper and darker territories, just when you thought you've seen it all. But I ended up going down there more than once and it's a long way back up, unless you're smart enough to use the Dreamgate to portal yourself out of there once you're done. I can't even say how many times I've climbed out of the Abyss, because I kept missing things and kept looking for things that I might have missed down there.

For starters, it took me quite some time to realize that the locked door halfway down doesn't require you a special key or stone, where instead it's a Lifeblood puzzle, which leads to the Lifeblood Core. At least you don't have to go all the way down for this one...

Afterwards, I've still went several times down there just to check that I haven't missed anything, but I couldn't figure anything else out. But when I got to the end of the game, where I was trying to get everything done outside of Godhome, I was stuck at 106 of 108%. I've gotten all Mask Shards, all Vessel Fragments, all Charms, all Small Keys, and what not, where I was at a loss about what I was still missing.

Well, one percent was from getting 2400 Essence and talking to the Seer one last time. That felt somewhat unnecessary, but whatever. And the very last thing that I was missing was one of the spells, the "Abyss Shriek", which I didn't realize until I watched some Hollow Knight gameplay on Youtube and saw those gigantic upward spells that people were using.

And you guessed it, it was hidden down in the Abyss, as the name indicates. It's a bit of a cryptic puzzle and I have always been suspicious of the room where you can obtain it, because it was a dead end with seemingly nothing in it. I dismissed it as environmental story telling, where I first thought that this is where the knight hatched. But this wasn't the case.

The hint in this room, where it says, "Our voices... will cry out... again...", when you use the Dream Nail on the pedestal / the egg, also didn't really do it for me, because I didn't connect it to the Howling Wraiths spells, which you have to use here in order to upgrade it to the Abyss Shriek. Well, yes, you're supposedly "howling" with that spell, but I never thought of this attack this way...

Anyway, this would have been nice to have for fighting the Radiance for the first time, but I was able to beat the final final boss without it eventually. So, I climbed out of the Abyss once more, confident that this was it and I'm finally done with the place. Well, I wasn't...

The Hunter's Journal was also missing one entry, where I was at a loss for quite some time. At first I thought it was an optional boss, but there was nothing in the Hall of Gods that didn't come from the Pantheons. And I was sure that I've beaten everything Hallownest at least once...

Then I realized that it might be another creature that can't be beaten, where you have to find the journal entry elsewhere, like the Goam or Garpedes. And of course I couldn't find the Void Tendrils in my journal, so I had to descend to the Abyss one more time to find it.

And it's not like I've completely missed the room where you can find the entry. I saw it once from the outside, thought that I somehow had to open the grate in front of it, where I couldn't find a solution. So, I left the place with the Shade Cloak and called it a day. And then I forgot about it. Well, you can get into the room from the other side and just get the entry, so it's just a very basic Hollow Knight secret room. It's nothing out of the ordinary and it was entirely my fault that I kept missing this.

After all of this, going down into the Abyss became some sort of running gag for me during my first playthrough. Needless to say that I will heavily optimize things in future playthroughs, so I will only have to go down there twice...