I hate references.
Remember when Wario was on SNL?
Or that time Rick and Morty showed up in Space Jam 2? That was so pathetic.
I will never forget this scene until the day I die.
These faceless corporations and billionaires think they can co-op our relationships with
beloved fictional characters just to make us like them. No, thank you. However, if done tactfully,
references can actually be pretty cool. A lot of indie games like to do references and cameos,
but it’s usually to show appreciation for the properties that inspire them. That’s why Meatboy’s
corpse can be found in Ori and the Blind Forest, or why Chozo statues can be found in Guacamelee.
Turning our attention to Hollow Knight, it is a bit more subdued in its references.
Very few things stand out as blatant Easter eggs, which helps Hallownest feel more
believable. But the game isn’t completely devoid of cheeky nods to other properties.
So in this video, we’re going to poke around the world of Hollow
Knight to see if we can find some subtle references to other games and media.
Metroid is a good place to start since that’s an easy comparison to make. A big connection a lot
of people make is the jellyfish of the Fog Canyon and the titular Metroid creatures. Metroids are
artificial lifeforms that suck the lifeforce out of their victims. Whereas the jellyfish
of Hollow Knight are maybe artificial lifeforms that kinda just explode. While they aren’t very
similar mechanically, it makes sense to consider this a reference, seeing as jellyfish would be a
pretty weird thing to put in your bug game for no reason, unless you were paying homage to Metroid.
The more blatant Metroid reference, I think, is the Shade Beast where the Knight gets the
Shade Cloak ability. The way this creature is positioned and how the Knight interacts with it
is very reminiscent of the Chozo statues from Metroid. The Chozo are a race of bird people
who have apparently been to every single planet in the universe. They always leave behind these
statues holding power ups that Samus can use to help her progress through the world.
Next up is Castlevania. Most Castlevania games end with a fight against Count Dracula,
one phase as his normal design, and a second phase where he turns into a giant cookie monster or a
Final Fantasy boss or a 1993 Toyota Camry. Grimm himself obviously takes inspiration from Dracula
in general, but the Grimm fight definitely has some clear parallels to the phase one Dracula
fights of Castlevania. The pillar spikes are very reminiscent of the fire pillars from
Castlevania 3. And the cape attack with the bats is also similar to the fireball attack.
Another Hollow Knight boss, Galien, also appears to draw from the fight with Dracula’s henchman,
Death. Both fights involve scythes flying around the room. This one seems pretty vague,
so it might not be intentional. Also, this boss was created by a backer,
so it could be that the backer was the one making this reference, not Team Cherry.
In fact, backer content is where the most blatant references can be found.
Waldie in the Spirit’s Glade is an obvious nod to the character Guts from the critically acclaimed
manga series, Berserk. And then, there’s the super hidden area Shrine of Believers,
where backers were able to leave simple messages. One message is literally just an
H. P. Lovecraft quote, except they replaced the phrase “human mind” with “insect mind”.
Another message says “Good Luck Skeleton”, which I think is a reference to the messages
people can leave in Dark Souls games. And here’s another subtle Dark Souls reference.
A lot of people claim that Dark Souls had a lot of influence over Hollow Knight. And
it’s undeniable that Hollow Knight did draw a little from Dark Souls,
especially in terms of the respawn mechanic. But outside of the backer content we just covered,
there really aren't any blatant references to Dark Souls. You can make some broad comparisons of the
story between the two games. The main comparison being that they are both stories about discarded
warriors who are tasked with fighting off a curse by sacrificing themselves to prolong an
age of stagnation. So there’s sort of a connection there, but I think Team Cherry
missed the opportunity to put the T-Posing guy somewhere to really cater to Dark Souls fans.
A similar fantasy themed game that Team Cherry actually does mention in their interviews
is Faxanadu. This old NES game is about a traveler arriving at their home town at the base of World
Tree. The protagonist finds that an Evil One has turned all the Dwarfs into monsters who
are now attacking the Elves, and they now have to free the kingdom from the Evil One’s curse.
Team Cherry has stated explicitly that Hollow Knight’s story parallels Faxanadu at the
beginning. There’s a wanderer arriving back to a place they left long ago that is now under some
kind of affliction. So you could consider the opening sequence where the Knight arrives in
Hallownest as a sort of homage to the opening of Faxanadu. But I’ll admit, a character arriving at
a place is such a standard plot point, it’s hard to call this an Easter egg or direct reference.
Another stretch I’ve seen people make regards a certain charm known as Dashmaster. So many
people have pointed out that the Dashmaster charm looks like Sans the Skeleton from the
hit Earthbound-inspired indie RPG Undertale, that it’s honestly insane. The charm has a white face
with black eyes and blue on the sides, a design first made famous by Sans Undertale himself.
Do I think this charm is an intentional reference on Team Cherry’s part?
No.
But would it be so bad to just pretend for a moment that it is intentional?
Yes.
One aspect of Hollow Knight I really love is how Cornifer hums whenever the player is nearby. But
something about this tune sounds oddly familiar.
The main comparison I have seen a lot of people
make is to the Luigi’s Mansion theme. Now to avoid a copyright strike from Nintendo, I can only play
the song for a few moments, but it should be long enough for you to hear the similarities.
[Unknown music, probably nobody owns it, don't check ]
Pretty similar, right? However, the hum actually appears to be inspired
by a theme from Super Ghouls and Ghosts for the Super Nintendo.
[Spooky music]
[Cornifer humming some mad bars]
It’s not an exact match, but it sounds like a legally distinct enough imitation of it anyway.
However, Team Cherry has denied this reference when asked, so
who knows, it might just be a coincidence.
I’ve seen a few people claim that Midwife’s design is actually a reference to No Face
from the classic Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away. I dunno about this one.
I mean, I do see it, and both William Pellen and Ari Gibson studied art and animation at
university. They even have statues of various anime characters such as Lupin the 3rd, Batman
and that annoying ass cat from Digimon in their office. So there’s no doubt they’ve seen Spirited
Away, as it’s one of the most critically acclaimed animated movies of all time.
Their designs are pretty similar, but their designs are also just black blobs with legs
and a mask for face, so it’s not the most unique.
Probably the most defining feature of Midwife is that her mask splits in half, which No Face’s
mask doesn’t do. But it’s not impossible that No Face is where her design came from.
We do see him knitting at some point, so maybe he’s even an inspiration for the Weavers too.
Speaking of… anime, I think I should mention Angel’s Egg, since Ari Gibson has explicitly
mentioned this movie before as an influence. I’ve talked about this 1985 film a few times
on this channel, but I think it deserves more attention. This is one of those “what the fuck
did I just watch?” kinda movies. It was directed by Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame,
and animated by him and Yoshitaka Amano. The plot of the film,
if you could even call it that, is about an unnamed girl living in a dilapidated wasteland,
carrying around this egg waiting for it to hatch. She eventually meets a man who tries to convince
her that the egg is empty, and that she needs to break the egg to truly know what’s inside.
The film is an inversion of the Noah’s Ark story,
so there is rain throughout a good portion of the film. The characters visit an abandoned
city at one point that eventually becomes submerged in the rain, and we see the bones
of several long dead creatures have now turned into stone in the walls. All of these elements
show up in Hollow Knight, even including a fountain as an important landmark in the city.
We can even see these influences from the earliest art created for Hollow Knight, when it was still
forging its own identity. This image evokes the rainy city and stone fossils pretty well. And
the original art for the Hollow Knight soundtrack is so similar to the poster art for Angel’s Egg,
that I think it’s probably intentional. So consider this a literal Easter egg.
Speaking of weird media that Team Cherry might reference in Hollow Knight,
let’s talk about Dune. Dune is a series of science fiction novels centered around political factions
vying for control of a desert planet rich with a valuable mind-altering substance known as spice
melange. The original novel was written in 1965 by Frank Herbert,
and is considered by many to be one of the best works of science fiction ever.
Team Cherry read through the Dune books while creating Hollow Knight, so naturally I started
reading through them myself to find any sort of parallels. I just recently finished the
fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, and while there aren’t any explicit references, there are a lot
of similarities between certain elements of Dune and Hollow Knight that might be worth discussing.
For example, the spice in the Dune novels can give people the ability of foresight,
the power to see possible futures depending on the present. In Hollow Knight, the Pale
King also has a type of presence, although the mechanics of it are left vague. In God
Emperor of Dune a giant wormman takes control of the entire galaxy, and uses his power to force
all of civilization into a sort of stasis where nothing really changes for thousands of years.
This is a little bit similar to what happened to Hallownest after the Hollow
Knight was sealed away, although the details behind why it happens in God Emperor of Dune
are a little different. I would explain it to you, but we’d probably be here another hour if I did.
But there could be one explicit Hollow Knight reference to Dune in that of the Pale King’s
Wyrm form, which is similar in design to Dune’s sandworms, giant beasts that roam the desert
planet of Arrakis. In particular, the ingame Wyrm looks a bit like H. R. Giger’s interpretation of
the sandworms. H. R. Giger is the man behind the iconic Alien design from Alien, but before
that he did some concept art on an unreleased film adaptation of Dune back in the 1970s. This is by
no means the most popular design for the sandworms and I think it’s more likely that Team Cherry
didn’t actually reference it when designing their game. But I figured it was worth pointing out.
There’s one final Easter egg I wanted to mention. This is Dung Defender,
a character who spends his time wallowing in shit. This might be a clever reference to James Corden.
As you can see, Hollow Knight is pretty light on the blatant references,
since half the stuff I mentioned in this video I’m not even very sure about,
but we can still find a few hints here and there. There are probably a few other possible references
that I might have missed, so let me know in the comments section how big of an idiot I am.
But all of this discussion does raise an interesting question.
Are there any references to Hollow Knight in other games? That sounds like a fantastic topic for
someone to make a video about. It would even be a great video for me to link on screen right now.