No-Kill Run: The Dream Nail
The dominant verbs in videogames seem to boil down to attack and kill, often in tandem In the series No-Kill Run we’ll be looking at mechanics in games that provide meaningful interaction with NPCs and the scenery without being overtly destructive.
Hollow Knight came out in February of 2017. I happened upon it by chance months after it’s successful Kickstarter and later release, and went into it mostly blind. What I found easily became one of my favorite games of all time, with its wide and expansive world, satisfying combat, fluid movement controls, and loveable cast of characters. The bugs of Hollow Knight inhabit the Hallownest, a melancholy husk of a once great kingdom.
Part way through the game the player gains an interesting ability called the Dream Nail -- a secondary weapon that “cuts through the veil between dreams and waking.” In practice the Dream Nail is meant to collect Essence (a mostly optional resource/collectable that is essential for obtaining two of the game’s three endings), though it also creates an interesting way to interact with the denizens of Hollownest. Charging the Dream Nail and striking another bug with it allows the character to listen to their thoughts. Since the kingdom has fallen to a strange and ravenous infection, the Dream Nail invites the player into a unique if disturbing and grotesque view of the state of things. Sometimes bugs issue sharp calls for destructive violence; other times they hold regrets, doubts, and anxieties; and still others, shockingly deft observations by minds one would think degenerated and lost to the kingdom’s infection.
In effect the Dream Nail functions as a sort of environmental storytelling tool. The most surprising example of the Dream Nail’s use is that some of the dead bugs littering the kingdom can be struck to reveal their thoughts at around their final fate, usually hinted at by something in the environment. My favorite example involves a living bug named Willoh who you meet relatively early on in your adventure. She seems to be fixated on snacking on a fungus that her giraffe-llke neck reaches for to just out of frame. When the player revisits the area much later with the Dream Nail and a few traversal upgrades, you find Willoh snacking on what appears to be a fungus similar to one that shoots deadly explosives in a previous area as well as the corpse of a bug whose final thoughts were “Not..food…” huddled in the opposite corner. Striking Willoh with the Dream Nail from this vantage point reveals that she’s also considering eating the Knight, musing to herself “This little creature looks tasty. I wonder, should I eat it? The others around here were awfully bland.” It’s a mechanic that takes an otherwise unremarkable, inoffensive NPC and creates a delightfully macabre scene for curious players.
