While the promised free Gods & Glory expansion for Team Cherry’s glorious Hollow Night continues to be within the works, porting the sport to the Nintendo Switch has led to the creation of some tangential new content material & options that all of us get to take pleasure in within the interim.
While not utterly finalized, they’ve rolled this little bundle of boss fights and gubbins out as a beta on Steam, and name it the Lifeblood replace. While maybe not price a full playthrough to expertise, it’s extra of an already-good factor.
The star of the present for the Lifeblood replace is an all-new boss battle. The Hive Knight (pictured above) leaps into battle with a charmingly buzzy ‘Huzzzzzah!‘. He’s not the hardest of enemies, however nonetheless has some fascinating tips up his sleeve, and has his personal theme tune.
They’ve additionally gone and tuned up the Traitor Lord boss battle. Formerly a bit of underwhelming resulting from an absence of assault selection, the mantis ought to now do a couple of higher job of holding gamers on their toes, additional encouraging completion of a very useful character’s side-quest.
One main new characteristic has been launched early: Custom map markers ought to provide help to navigate the sprawling underworld a bit of extra simply. Really, this ought to be a regular characteristic in each Metroidvania in the event that they’re not going to routinely mark each sort of locked door or closed path for you, but it surely’s good it’s lastly right here.
Beyond that, there’s some (unspecified in the patch notes) steadiness tweaks, some extra sounds and voice samples and a few bug fixes. The Lifeblood replace is at the moment Steam-exclusive and may be accessed by right-clicking on Hollow Knight in your downloaded video games library, choosing Properties/Betas and selecting the Public Beta department of the sport there.
This new replace ought to quickly come to all variations, together with the Gods & Glory enlargement (the final of the promised Kickstarter stretch targets), however for now it’s Steam-only.
There’s additionally rumblings that some paid DLC is deliberate for later within the 12 months, maybe giving us the prospect to play as Hornet. Can a metroidvania presumably develop too giant? Team Cherry appear devoted to discovering out.
Hollow Knight is out there through GOG, Steam and Humble for round £11/$15.
