![]() ![]() "I’m using to track story missions and challenges I’ve completed (or want to complete eventually), but it’s also a place where I’m writing down essential things to remember - little pieces of the story that I might otherwise forget, like security codes or floor plans. Or even Polygon's writer and pen-lover Nicole Carpenter's bullet journal about Hitman 3, which she says helps her engage with the game in a whole new way: Image: Nicole Carpenter/Polygon I'm envious of people who can both create notes and turn them into beautiful journals on the fly, like Dark Souls player Cora did, chronicling the results on Reddit: Image: u/coraezyart It's an art object in itself, really, and I've always loved seeing the finished document after an entire game's worth of record-keeping, filled with notes, scribblings, doodles, and secrets like a diary. Each map is a web of soft, thin lines, annotated with thoughts and symbols, accompanied by the small shreds of story that we're trying to piece together. The added bonus is that my partner, who's the one actually drawing the maps, has done a really nice job. There's a lot of backtracking in a metroidvania like Hollow Knight, and sometimes it's just really nice to be able to not only place a generic "go here" pin, which the game offers you, but to make a physical note that you would guess this area needs a dash/swim/shoot ability. So we've been map-making off-screen, creating to-scale replicas of Hollow Knight's corridors, towers, and all of its little metroidvania bits (you know, when you walk past a very obvious You Need An Ability To Get Through Here area) for our own use. That's not a flaw - it's a game about mysteries, exploration, and discovery, and it doesn't want to reveal all of its secrets. The in-game map is good, especially with the added complication of having to first find the map-maker in each new area, then make the map, but it doesn't tell you everything you need to know. Hollow Knight, at least for me and my partner (we're playing it simultaneously - him on the TV, me on the PC), has been an excellent note-taking game. I often play games with a notebook, but that's only because I'm often reviewing them, and I need to note down things like "this is very boring" or "every time X happens, the Switch fan starts making a very loud complaining noise", so I can put them in my review.īut rarely do I get to use a notebook for frantic scribblings, trying to piece together mysteries, work out narratives, and make maps - and even though that sounds tedious and potentially stressful, it feels massively nostalgic, harkening back to an age where games told you NOTHING, manuals sometimes told you some things, and ASCII-illustrated game guides were printed off from the internet in huge sheafs of your parents' expensive printer paper. Please don't look too closely, it is full of mistakes This is my notebook page for Return of the Obra Dinn. It's totally reasonable to expect a game to give you all the information you need within itself, with the exception of games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and Stardew Valley, for which a notebook is where you write all the things you can't possibly remember, like gifts, catalogue items, shop times, and where and when to catch fish. There are very few games these days that require a notebook to understand, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. ![]() ![]() ![]() but instead, as you can tell from the title, I want to talk about how Hollow Knight contributes to a legacy that has existed since the very first days of gaming: The need to take notes. And there's so much to talk about from that entire day's worth of playing! The melancholy, the audio work, the music, the cuteness. In fact, I've apparently played it for 28.5 hours, which is a lot of bug-time. Well, the mistake has been rectified, at least. ![]()
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