Finishing Hollow Knight leaves a specific hole. It's not just that the game is great — it's that it's great at several things at once, and most games are great at only one. The hand-drawn melancholy, the precise combat, the vast interconnected world, the way it trusts you to find your own way without a quest marker in sight. So "what to play after Hollow Knight" is a harder question than it looks, because the honest answer is "it depends which part of Hallownest you can't stop thinking about." This list, from the team at Tyrian Games, sorts twelve games by exactly that.
We pay close attention to Hollow Knight because its lessons reach well past the metroidvania. The thing it does with atmosphere and readable, fair combat is something we've chased in our own game, which is dark in a very literal sense. More on that below. If you specifically want Hollow Knight's tone in roguelite form, we have a dedicated games like Hollow Knight roguelite list too.
TL;DR
- The obvious answer is Silksong whenever it ships, and it's worth the wait.
- For the combat: Nine Sols and Blasphemous 2.
- For the melancholy atmosphere: Ender Lilies and Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
- For the "world full of secrets" feeling: Animal Well and Tunic.
- For Hollow Knight's tone in run-based form: Dead Cells — and HAWKER in September for the dark-world-and-precise-combat combination.
The twelve
1. Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry, when it ships). The actual answer, and we won't pretend otherwise. Hornet's adventure has been the most anticipated game in the world for years. Whenever it arrives, it is the thing to play after Hollow Knight. Everything else here is for the wait.
2. Nine Sols (Red Candle Games, 2024). A "Taopunk" action-platformer with a deflection-based combat system that scratches the precise, demanding itch Hollow Knight's bosses left behind. Gorgeous hand-drawn art, a genuinely affecting story, and the best combat on this list. The strongest single recommendation here.
3. Blasphemous 2 (The Game Kitchen, 2023). Pixel-art metroidvania drenched in Spanish Catholic horror imagery. Tighter and more readable than the first game, with three weapon paths and brutal, satisfying bosses. For the player who wanted Hollow Knight grimmer and bloodier.
4. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (Binary Haze / Live Wire / Adglobe, 2021). A melancholy metroidvania with a haunting piano score and a ruined dark-fantasy kingdom. The closest match for Hollow Knight's specific sadness — the beauty-in-decay feeling. A sequel, Ender Magnolia, has continued the lineage.
5. Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Moon Studios, 2020). The most beautiful game on this list — luminous, fluid, and emotionally direct where Hollow Knight is restrained. More forgiving and more guided, but the platforming and art are sublime. For when you want Hallownest's craft with a warmer heart.
6. Grime (Clover Bite, 2021). A surreal metroidvania built around a parry-and-absorb mechanic, set in a world of living stone and flesh. Strange, stylish, and combat-forward. An underplayed pick for fans who want something genuinely odd.
7. Animal Well (Billy Basso / Bigmode, 2024). A metroidvania made almost entirely of secrets, built by one person over seven years. If what you loved about Hollow Knight was the constant sense that the world was hiding something just out of reach, this is the purest hit of that feeling available.
8. Tunic (Andrew Shouldice, 2022). A little fox in a big, cryptic world, with an in-game manual you assemble page by page. Captures Hollow Knight's trust in the player to figure things out alone. Tender, mysterious, and quietly brilliant.
9. Hyper Light Drifter (Heart Machine, 2016). Wordless, atmospheric, and precise — a top-down action game that shares Hollow Knight's confidence in silence and its demanding combat. A mood piece with teeth, and a clear influence on a generation of indies.
10. Death's Gambit: Afterlife (White Rabbit, 2018/2021). A Soulslike metroidvania with heavy combat and a sombre tone. The Afterlife update transformed it into a genuinely strong recommendation. For the player who wanted Hollow Knight to lean further toward Dark Souls.
11. Dead Cells (Motion Twin, 2018, still updated). Not a metroidvania but a roguelite that captures Hollow Knight's precise, weighty combat in run-based form, with metroidvania-flavoured traversal. The bridge for fans who loved the fighting and want endless replayability. More in our games like Hollow Knight roguelite list.
12. HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026). Ours. Not a metroidvania, but a folk-horror roguelite that shares two of Hollow Knight's loves: a dark, ruined world rendered with care, and combat that has to stay precise and readable even at its most punishing. You scavenge the ruins of Ysward by day and survive a combat system that inverts at night, where the dark makes you stronger and more vulnerable at once. If Hollow Knight's atmosphere and fair-but-hard fighting were what hooked you, we built HAWKER in that spirit. Wishlist on Steam.
What Hollow Knight got right
Hollow Knight's combat looks simple and is anything but. The genius is readability: every enemy telegraphs, every hitbox is honest, and every death feels like your mistake rather than the game's cheat. That fairness is what makes the brutal difficulty feel motivating instead of insulting. You never rage at Hollow Knight; you rage at yourself, and then you get better. That contract — hard, but always fair, always legible — is the hardest thing in action design to get right, and Team Cherry nailed it.
The second thing is atmosphere through restraint. Hallownest is melancholy without ever telling you to be sad. The music goes quiet. NPCs say little. The story is buried in lore you have to dig for. The game trusts mood to do what most games use cutscenes for, and that trust is exactly why the world lingers in your memory for years.
The third is the joy of an interconnected world. Hollow Knight's map is a single continuous space that folds back on itself, full of shortcuts and secrets that reward exploration with that perfect "oh, this connects to that" click. It never holds your hand, and the discovery is yours because of it. The games above each inherit one or two of these three strengths; none inherit all three, which is why nothing has quite replaced Hollow Knight.
Sort by what you loved
The useful version of this list: pick by the part of Hollow Knight you miss most.
You loved the combat. Nine Sols first, then Blasphemous 2 and Grime. For run-based combat, Dead Cells.
You loved the atmosphere and sadness. Ender Lilies and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. For folk-horror dread in a ruined world, HAWKER.
You loved exploring a world of secrets. Animal Well and Tunic, the two best "the world is hiding something" games in years.
You loved the difficulty. Death's Gambit: Afterlife and Nine Sols will test you the way Hallownest's hardest bosses did.
You just want more of literally that. Silksong. Wait for it. It'll be worth it.
A first-hand Hawker example
Hollow Knight taught us the rule that nearly sank our night combat: difficulty is only fair if it's readable.
HAWKER's central combat idea is that night makes you more powerful and more vulnerable at once — you push into darkness to charge your abilities, but the dark is literally harder to see in. For a long time we leaned too hard into the "harder to see" half. Our early night phase was genuinely murky, and we told ourselves the murk was atmospheric. Then we watched players die over and over to attacks they never saw coming, and they weren't getting better the way Hollow Knight players do — they were just getting frustrated, because the deaths felt random instead of earned. We'd confused "dark" with "unfair," and Hollow Knight is the game that proves those aren't the same thing.
So we did a hard pass on readability in the dark. Enemy telegraphs in the night phase now use light itself — a wind-up glows, a strike throws a brief sharp shadow, the most dangerous attacks announce themselves with a flare you can read even when the rest of the screen is murk. The darkness still reduces your information; that's the tension. But the lethal information always comes through, so every death is once again your mistake and not the game's. The day a tester died eight times to the same night-stalker and then said "okay, I see its tell now, that one's on me," we knew we'd finally learned the Hollow Knight lesson. Hard is a gift. Unfair is an insult. The line between them is readability, and Team Cherry drew it better than almost anyone. Wishlist HAWKER if hard-but-fair combat in the dark sounds like your thing.
Surviving the Silksong wait
A word on the elephant. Silksong has been "coming" for so long that the wait has become a community in-joke, and the genuine question many Hollow Knight fans have isn't "what's like Hollow Knight" but "what do I play until Hornet finally arrives." The honest answer is that the wait has been a gift to the genre — the years since Hollow Knight have produced the strongest run of metroidvanias in the form's history, precisely because so many studios stepped into the space Hollow Knight proved was commercially huge. Nine Sols, Ender Lilies, Animal Well, Blasphemous 2: none of these might exist, or might be smaller, without Hollow Knight demonstrating the appetite. So play the wait. The genre has never been healthier, and when Silksong does land, you'll come to it having tasted everything its success made possible.
FAQ
What game is most like Hollow Knight?
Silksong, its direct sequel, whenever it releases. Among available games, Nine Sols for combat, Ender Lilies for atmosphere, and Animal Well for the sense of a secret-filled world.
What should I play after Hollow Knight if I loved the combat?
Nine Sols is the top pick for precise, demanding combat. Blasphemous 2 and, in roguelite form, Dead Cells are also excellent.
Is there a game like Hollow Knight but easier?
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is more forgiving and guided while keeping the beauty and platforming. It's the gentlest strong recommendation here.
Is HAWKER like Hollow Knight?
It's not a metroidvania, but it shares Hollow Knight's commitment to a dark, atmospheric world and hard-but-readable combat. HAWKER is a folk-horror shopkeeper roguelite with a day-night combat twist.
Is Silksong out yet?
Check its Steam page for the current status. Whenever it arrives, it's the definitive thing to play after Hollow Knight.
The bottom line
There's no single replacement for Hollow Knight, because Hollow Knight is several great games wearing one mask. Figure out which part you miss — the combat, the sadness, the secrets — and the right next game is on this list. The metroidvania genre is in its golden age, largely because Hollow Knight proved how big the appetite was.
And if the part you loved was a dark world and combat that's hard but always fair, that's the spirit we've built HAWKER in.
Next read: Games like Hollow Knight but roguelite, or Best grimdark games on Steam 2026.