I beat the Radiance today which, aside from Path of Pain (I think I am having controller problems there?) and Godhome, means I have largely beat Hollow Knight.
And I am sure it's passé to complain about The White Palace. I am sure exhausting number of tears have been expended on how much it sucks, and an exhausting number of pratty 'I have no real world skills just video games' git-gud types have pontificated on how you should just do it and be good, actually, it's easy, but what I don't seem to see anyone talking about is that The White Palace is boring and ugly as a place.
It sucks as a map. The monochrome wears out its welcome even faster than the awfulness of Deepnest, there's nothing to see in the place, nothing feels revelatory, there's no one to talk to, there's no surprising secrets to casually stumble upon (Path of pain is not casual), or rather because the secret rooms are the same monochrome as everything else they're unmemorably samey, it is inexplicably full of thematically baffling giant buzz saws that are extremely noisy are irritating to listen to, and at the end of it you get to the king at the top - who, at this point, you should have known was going to be there.
The parts I loved about Hollow Knight were not the bosses, or the combat, or the sometimes tiresomely obscurantist dialogue (it certainly wasn't the 'lackadaisical spike hitbox' precision platforming) It was the exploration. The sense of there always being something new around the corner, a fun new area to explore, the giddy excitement of a new map. Even Deepnest, the second most unpleasant place to navigate in the game after WP, at least feels thematically rich: this is a place where things went really wrong. The failed tramway, the abandoned village with its mad cultists, Hornet kneeling by her mother's grave in the depths of the den, the strange mask maker and the mad ATLA reference in the basement trying to eat you. What's in White Palace? The same buzz saws, the same wingmoulds, the same white courtiers who are just there for soul farming, and the same empty rooms with covered furniture— oh and some lamps, which you light because this is the thing the level design requires you to do to progress, and later you might go 'I think the Radiance is a moth so I guess you're attracting it with the lamps?' but this doesn't feel revelatory, its just met with a shrug because white lamps making more white light in the white palace full of nothing but a skeleton was a visual pile of nothing.
The White Palace is a dream given form, but what a strangely dull and lifeless dream it was for the bug that raised up the City of Tears.
(Or maybe the kingsmould outside the palace whose dream I guess we're specifically entering was a really boring guy. The kind of guy who dreams of precision platforming in a completely featureless white space. Loved buzz saws. Kind of guy who talks a lot about carpentry; has never actually done carpentry.)
