Review - Hollowed
A great tragedy has destroyed your village and taken the one you loved. The only thing left to do is to try to reclaim what has been lost. Hollowed is a recently released free-to-play game from Project Polish Productions. It is an extremely impressive piece for being completely free. There is narrative depth throughout the entire experience with engaging, if not terribly challenging, puzzle solving.
The gameplay is that of a 2D platformer with an extra perk. The player runs and jumps along the linear plane, moving the very typical left to right. In order to solve various puzzles that range from traversing difficult obstacles to racing to outrun some danger, the player has a ball that is attached to their character. Instead of just controlling the main character, the player has to use both analogue sticks of the controller to simultaneously move the character and the ball. The ball can then change into one of four colors, each of which has it’s own special properties from swapping positions with the player to seeing things that aren’t really there. The system is fairly simple, but allows for decent depth in the puzzle solving.
While it might seem difficult to control two entities at the same time, it wasn’t often that bad. The ball is always tied to the character when it has to be moved, so the two never move in completely different ways. Utilizing both entities became a simple matter very quickly except in certain areas that were intentionally made to be difficult. The color changing was also quite nice as each color had very different abilities that immediately showed their value. Coupled with environmental cues to indicate which color needed to be used at any time, the use of any individual color wasn’t difficult, only using them in combination was a challenge.
The graphics in Hollowed are honestly impressive. There was nothing particularly weird of overly simplistic about the art, which is usually a problem for games with little to no budgets. Instead, the world was colorful, vibrant, and full at all times. Key aesthetic choices, such as going for a less realistic and more animated to look to the world, masked almost all of the usual issues present in free-to-play game aesthetics. The only issues were the occasional animation errors where the player would play the falling animation while on the ground. I have seen the same bugs in much more pricey experiences, so it’s actually a plus for Hollowed that that was the only buggy element of the game. Both the art and the animation were spot on, even if you ignore that the game was free.
Now on to the narrative. Hollowed managed to create a surprisingly well thought out narrative that existed as an integral element of all of the game’s systems. Essentially, Hollowed is about the main character dealing with the loss of a loved one. The duality of the character and the ball is no cheap gameplay trick, but instead stands as a narrative element in and of itself. The ball is a physical manifestation of the main character’s loss. This can be seen in the fact that each of the four colors corresponds to one of Ross and Kessler’s stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). The color’s corresponding abilities reflect this metaphor, such as the red ball that is anger and focuses on bursts of quick, fiery action. The parallel to the stages of grief also extends into the world itself as the player passes through a physical manifestation of each stage with puzzles that include all of the colors, but tend to focus on the color that corresponds to that area.
The symbolism extends even farther into the challenges that the player has to face. The denial stage focuses on seeing elements of the world that aren’t actually there. They are hidden until the player basically looks into another world to make them physical. Anger has puzzles that focus on quick action to avoid dangerous pitfalls and having the player’s abilities often put themselves in dangerous positions. Bargaining focuses on literally changing places between the player and their grief. Finally, depression has the grief become a physical burden to the player. It is truly impressive how thorough the developers were about threading the narrative of Hollowed throughout the entirety of their experience. Few other games have achieved such a holistic design.
Finally, the game leads up to a final decision which I won’t spoil, but definitely falls right in line with the game’s theme. Each ending shows a different way to overcome the grief in question. What I will say is that there are no punches pulled in the ending, with the consequences of each ending being played out realistically. I cannot commend the narrative of this game enough. It does a masterful job of merging gameplay and story into a single entity in a way that only a small handful of games has ever achieved.
Overall, Hollowed is an incredibly well thought out experience. It plays out it’s core theme of the five stages of grief in it’s gameplay, world, and story. Every element shows a clear link to the theme without falling into the trap of being overly didactic. In terms of gameplay, the puzzles were well thought out and had enough variance to keep the player thinking through the entire experience. There were no serious outstanding bugs, the only issue I ran into was some animation errors that can be just as prevalent in ten dollar games. The fact that this game is free is not apparent in the game itself. It could easily have been a piece that I would gladly have paid money for. With it’s impressively holistic design and immense polish, there is no reason that anyone shouldn’t play Hollowed.
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