Game Wars: Hollow Knight vs Ori and the Will of the Wisps

One is a brilliant take on the Metroidvania genre, taking inspiration from the God games themselves and pulling it off instead of feeling like a lackluster attempt with a story that 100% didn’t make me want to cry. 

The other is a movement masterpiece with an art style to rival the best in the entire industry with a story that 100% didn’t make me want to cry at all. 

Welcome back to my rapidly deteriorating mind, where we compare two similar games based on categories important to their design and give each a percentage rating out of a hundred at the end.

The categories today are:

1. Movement
2. Combat
3. Level Design
4. Story

So without further ado, let’s get into it.

Game Wars: Hollow Night versus Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Movement

Based on what I said in the intro, the first category should be obvious. Ori has a better movement system. 

That said, Hollow Knight’s also a competent competitor in this category. 

Both games are responsive, fast, and fluid. Ori takes this category because of how the developers approach each game’s genre. 

Team Cherry decided to focus on combat, building the game around challenging dynamic bosses more than platforming.

Moon Studios, on the other hand, especially with the first story game, focused much more on movement than combat, and they continued that trend just to less of an extent and will of the wisps. The result is a unique movement system that stands as the best in the entire genre, but lackluster bosses that rely more on you mastering said movement system rather than dynamic combat.

This isn’t necessarily bad, though, because when I say lackluster, that’s entirely subjective. Some players might enjoy the movement-centric fights that Ori provides more than the combat-focused ones in Hollow Knight, but now I’m drifting into combat territory. 

Regarding movement, Ori has more options than in Hollow Knight, allowing for more exciting ways to tackle the platforming challenges presented and making them harder than in Hollow Knight without being too much to ask. 

For most players in Hollow Night, you virtually have four things you can do in terms of movement. You can jump, double jump, dash, and super dash, that’s it. In Ori, you can jump, double jump, dash, grapple Burrow, launch Flash, and Bash, all of which are used in unique ways to increase the variety and challenge of the platforming.

On the other hand, Hollow Knight uses platforming more as a background mechanic instead of using enemy placement and variety to steadily increase the challenge throughout the game, at least for the most part. However, there are a few sections when the platforming enters “this sucks ass territory,” I’m looking at you, path of pain. 

So it’s clear that Ori has the better movement system.

The devs built the game around it, and it shows. The way ORI moves through the environment feels so seamless, yet still challenging somehow that it picks up all the slack this game has in the following category compared to Hollow Knight. 

Combat

Aside from FromSoftware games, there isn’t a combat system in any genre I enjoy more than Hollow Knights. The sheer variety of bosses and enemies allows for almost endless replayability.

If Ori is the master of movement in the Metroidvania genre, then Hollow Knight is the master of combat. 

Not only that, but the boss quality is so high it’s almost comparable to this shit. 

You got Grimm, three sisters, pure vessel, radiance, asshole Radiance, false night, and broken vessel. Trader Lord Hornet, collector, mantis Lords, and motherfucking Zote. 

And that’s just off the top of my head. 

On top of that, you have a well-fleshed-out talisman system that drastically varies combat. At a glance, Ori has a lot of options for combat as well, but in reality, you won’t ever use most of them. 

I played the entire game without switching off the Sword, Bow, and Heal combo. Ori also has a system similar to Hollow Knight’s talismans, but only a few are useful. 

The secret to having a game’s various mechanics not feel stale is building particular challenges around said mechanics to nudge the player into trying everything the game offers.

It’s a fine line to walk since if you pigeonhole the player into only being able to progress with one mechanic, it becomes even worse than having none of the mechanics feel unique. 

For example, let’s look at Grimm. He’s designed to have the player use the shadow dash to position during his cloak pillar attack and to pogo swipe off of him to deal with his dash effectively. 

If you realize this when you’re fighting him, the fight becomes way more accessible. That said, you can fight him without these things and still win. It’s just a lot harder. 

This is the game nudging the player into trying every mechanic it offers without forcing them to use something they don’t want to. 

In Ori, on the other hand, the move variety feels like devs are trying to answer Hollow Knight’s success instead of continuing to focus on the thing that made Ori special: the movement.

The result is a shallow combat experience that needs to do more to differentiate from start to finish. So on one side, you have Hollow Knight, basically the Souls of Metroidvania, and on the other, Ori, which is kind of like the God of War of Metroidvania in combat. 

In other words, diet Dark Souls. 

Hollow Knight takes combat by a fucking Baker’s kilometer. 

Level Design

Moving on to level design, this is a much more competitive category than either of the prior and will primarily come down to what you enjoy about world design.

Visually, Ori is a much more impressive game. I mean, they found a way to make a spider look pretty. Need I say more?

All right, fine. 

The color scheme is just so vibrant in order compared to the dull gray colors that Hollow Knight is plugged with. 

You can argue that with the atmosphere of the game and the fact that this fucking masterpiece was made by three people, the color scheme makes sense, which is true, but if we look at the visuals in isolation, it’s not even a contest.

On the other hand, the world of Hollow Knight is much more expansive and has better interconnectivity between zones. 

Ori feels linear for a Metroidvania, only having one path you can progress down at the start of the game. 

Hollow Knight lets you have free rain right off the rip. Of course, you can’t access certain areas immediately because of the lack of movement upgrades, but it still provides more options out the gate than Ori.

Hollow Knight has a much bigger world and is more enjoyable overall with the NPCs and secrets you can find strewn around it. 

Will of the wisps, again, tries to answer Hollow Knight by adding more NPCs and a hub area for you to rebuild. But Hollow Knight did both better.

So we have another case of the games focusing their efforts on different things, Hollow Knight on the structure and Ori on visuals, and both games doing what they set out to do very well. 

For level design, it’s going to come down to what you place more emphasis on. Do you find graphics and atmosphere more important, Sony ponies, or do you care more about the expansiveness and environmental storytelling? 

If you’re the former, then Ori slaps the shit outta Hollow Knight; if you’re the latter, then Hollow Knight spins. 

Objectively, it’s hard to say either game-level design is better, considering they both did what they set out to do very well. But this is my opinion, so fuck objectivity. Hollow Knight wins.

Story

To bring back the God of War, Dark Souls comparison. Ori has a much more classically told story in how it’s delivered, the same as God of War.

Hollow Knight chooses to tell its story in large part with the environment and things that inhabit said environment – more like the Soul Series. 

Now I’m going to be straight. I hate exposition. It feels lazy and unsatisfying. But luckily neither game falls into that trap too much. Ori is a bit more than Hollow Knight. But Ori is far from the worst, and regardless, some people like that type of storytelling. 

So this will depend on how you feel about exposition and what type of story connects with you more. 

I don’t want to ruin the stories for anybody who hasn’t played the games yet, but I will say that if you enjoy the Soul series, then play Hollow Knight. If you prefer happier stories, then play Ori.

Hollow Knight is a story of sacrifice, corruption, and hardship. Ori is one of overcoming fear and saving a friend. And sacrifice.

Both have their place, and both have their audience. 

I prefer the Hollow Knight story, but Ori managed to take a type of storytelling I’m not a massive fan of and make me enjoy it. And for that, I have to give the writers props. 

Will Smith is apparently in this game, but who knows? Ori took a very cliche story trope, finding a lost loved one, and actually made it interesting and the ending totally didn’t make me cry. Trust me, I didn’t cry. 

Then there’s Hollow Knight, which tells a story about a sort of manifest destiny that makes itself more apparent as the story progresses.

Both stories were better than 90% of AAA games that release. So if you’re a story buff in video games, you can’t go wrong with either. 

If you like a story to be told to you rather than piecing it together yourself, then Ori and the Will of the Wisps wins. 

If you like a mystery that you must watch a youtube video to understand, then you must give it to Hollow Knight. 

From my perspective, Hollow Knight tells a more intelligent story, and Ori made me feel more complete. Upon finishing. I had no questions about what I had just experienced. Hollow Knight, I had to beat it a few different times and in a few different ways to fully understand it. 

Some people will hate that, and others will love it because it allows for more replayability. 

So for a story, I have to give the nod to both games. It’s not the primary aspect, but both are more than passable. 

Conclusion

So which game is the better game overall? 

I have to give it to Hollow Knight. 

It tells a more intelligent story. It’s longer, has better bosses, better level design, at least in terms of layout, and has some of the best DLC to release for any game in recent memory. 

Don’t get me wrong; I thoroughly recommend playing both. But if you only have the extra cash for one or the other, Hollow Knight will offer you a better experience for your money. 

I give Hollow Knight a FromSoftware territory, 98%, and Ori a very respectable 87%

Hollow Knight wins.

Silksong is never coming out.