The people in charge get things wrong all the time. Decca Records famously rejected The Beatles in 1963 because “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business”. Chappell Roan got dropped from her label and then became hugely popular with her next album. Sony sold KPop Demon Hunters to Netflix for $20 million after spending $100 million to make it — and then it became the most succthessful film in Netflix history. But a Reddit thread on Hollow Knight is a reminder that us regular people get things wrong, too.
Dismiss Hollow Knight At Your Peril
Shared to r/AgedLikeMilk by user Foreign_Yogurt_821, the thread in r/Gaming shows a ton of Reddit users dismissing the first trailer for the original Hollow Knight way back in November of 2015. In response to the original poster saying the game looks “beyond amazing”, one grumpy Redditor writes, “You mean beyond forgettable.” “one more indie 2D scroller. cause we don’t have enough of those,”another user writes. A third says, “meh cartoony 2d platformer, back to the dumpster where you belong.”
What strikes me about these responses is the sheer lack of understanding displayed by the commenters dismissing Hollow Knight. Team Cherry’s game isn’t a “2D scroller” or a “2d platformer”. It has platforming elements, but it’s an action-adventure game in the lineage of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night with Dark Souls elements. You might not be able to pick up on the Souls elements from the trailer alone, but you absolutely can tell it’s not a run-and-jump platformer in the vein of Mario. There are shots of the player map and fast travel map in the trailer, and both show a sprawling world.
To be fair, some of this may be salt in response to the original poster, who claims they’re friends with the Hollow Knight devs. People may be annoyed that they’re hyping up their friends’ game or suspect that they’re lying about their connection to the game. But the commenters don’t say that. They say the game looks bad and that indie platformers are bad.
The Past Is A Different World
In 2025, this reads like a lost language. But it speaks to how different the gaming landscape is now than it was ten years ago. Indies were increasingly popular, but there was still a large percentage of gamers who were only interested in playing big triple-A action games. That resulted in hostility toward games that didn’t look like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. Gone Home, which today would come and go without much notice from COD fans, was met with outright and long lasting contempt because developer Fullbright dared to make a first-person game where you didn’t shoot anything.
It being a queer story probably didn’t help matters.
I still encountered this sentiment in the late 2010s, directed toward anything that wasn’t attempting to be a photorealistic shooter or action game. A friend of mine asked, “Why are the graphics so bad?” while watching his brother play Overwatch. Similarly, I remember an acquaintance dismissing Cuphead appearing in an Xbox showcase because it “looked indie”. As triple-A development cycles have stretched longer and longer, players have delved deeper into the indie scene for their gaming fixes. At this point, just about everyone who is seriously into gaming as a hobby has played a weirdo indie game like Disco Elysium or Balatro.
Gen Z And Gen Alpha Have Changed The Conversation
But in 2015, there was one specific way games were supposed to be and games like Hollow Knight diverting from that with “cartoony” graphics and “2d scroll[ing]” led to their outright dismissal from that segment of gamers. Games like Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, and Hades have been gigantic hits and changed that sentiment. And, since ten years have passed, many of the players inclined to make those comments about indies have aged out of the hobby and been replaced by Gen Z and Gen Alpha players who grew up with games like Minecraft and Roblox.
Lots of things are worse than a decade ago, but here’s one thing that’s better: anyone who tried to dismiss a game like Hollow Knight would be laughed out of the thread. They would delete their comment. Hell, maybe their whole account. We have reshaped gaming to the extent that Hollow Knight: Silksong is the most-anticipated game launching this year. That’s a cultural win.
But, don’t get cocky. In 2035, we’ll probably be looking back at similar threads where 2025 players dismissed all the cozy farming sims…