Big Baddies Breakdown: Dung Defender (Hollow Knight)

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

There are a lot of games that feel like Hollow Knight. It’s an exploration action game, the kind of maze-like adventure that Metroid and Castlevania pioneered. Its sharp and precise combat against large knights evokes Dark Souls. The setting—a deathly kingdom of bugs that’s falling under the sway of a great poison—is ripped straight from those games. It’s dark; it’s spooky. There’s a constant aura of oppression and threat about, only fended off by precise platforming and tactile combat.

All of this sounds as though Hollow Knight is a painfully dark and spooky game, when that’s not at all the case. Hallownest is a dark world, punishment and danger lurk around every corner, and it’s filled with truly scary enemies, but that’s not all it is. There’s an incredible life as well. It’s dark, visually speaking, but there’s always a wealth of color and shade to guide your way. The music is brilliant and enthusiastic. And it’s all buoyed by this Tim Burton tone that finds sweetness within the dirt and darkness. Much like Dark Souls or Burton’s admittedly few better movies, there’s a score of wacky, lovable side characters who brighten the place up. And the brightest, most unexpected one of all happens to shine brightly in one of the worst, most deeply horrific places.

You’ll probably reach the Royal Waterways pretty late into a casual run, maybe over the halfway point. It’s right under the gorgeous, waterlogged City of Tears, where the nonlinearity really opens up. You can technically get there early—it has two entrances, the first of which needs a key you can find right as you leave the city—but that’s unlikely for a first-timer. Usually, you’ll have first scaled the glamorous Crystal Peak, found the plot and critical path in the Resting Grounds, and returned to the Howling Cliffs where the game started. It’s possible to hit Deepnest, which alongside the Waterways and Ancient Basin forms the nasty underbelly of Hallownest, first, too. No matter what, though, you’ve seen grand architecture, stunning beauty, and a sense of community by the time you take the plunge.

So, naturally, we need to follow that up with the grotesque. The Waterways are Hollow Knight’s take on the loathed sewer level, and they’re about as disgusting of a sewer level as you’re likely to find. The main enemies are these hideous flukeworms that chase you relentlessly, and their bodies split into equally hideous new monsters when you kill them. The breathing noise they wheeze makes your heart palpitate. Their “marm,” an optional boss, is obscene. The pipes are filled with acidic water. Parts of it are so dark that you need a lantern, one of the most expensive items in the game, just to explore safely. And like the other deep areas, it eschews the game’s haunting yet whimsical score for a spooky, discordant ambience.

The Royal Waterways. If you squint, you can just make out the other severed half of the Flukemon that’s chasing me. It’s in the upper-right quadrant.

The beginning of Hollow Knight had some of this, but it was easier to miss as you came across the gothic City of Tears, the soft foliage of Greenpath, and zany sidekicks like Cornifer the mapmaker. You come to a kingdom that’s dead, realize it’s merely dying, and fall in love with the joyous life that’s there. These lower sections get more and more removed from that; they are primordial, stink of death, seem barely alive, and what is alive is ugly and angry and mean. The Waterways is a horror level, no bones about it. It’s oppressive and awful.

And then, you meet him.

The Dung Defender is the other main boss of the Waterways. He’s a fairly standard one at that; he throws fecal balls at you, swims through the mass of waste that forms the arena’s floor, and gets a quick boost of power after losing half his health. The balls bounce around the stage, as does he at points, which sets up the game’s mix of precise platforming and Souls-like dueling. The changes in space are great for the Soul mechanic, where striking enemies fills a reserve of magic you can spend to either heal or fire a powerful blast. It’s a good fight. The difficulty is balanced, the length is good, and the pace is excellent. I’m not sure I’d rank it as Hollow Knight’s best fight, but it’s certainly up there.

Part of it is the pacing. The general pace of Hollow Knight is brisk—it’s an exploration action game, which demands constant movement—but measured. In fights, you’re constantly moving towards enemies to hit and away to heal, since healing demands a few seconds of holding still (from a resource that, again, only gets filled with every hit). It’s a constant jump between aggressive and defensive play. Boss fights often provide quick windows for you to pull off a heal before jumping back in, though some are better or worse about it. For his part, the Dung Defender provides moments that are very nice but subtle, typically when he’s throwing his literal crap around. You have to pay attention to him, and predict where the balls will move, but that’s not too overwhelming. Kinda like Cuphead in that way.

Stylistically, the fight also suits the setting perfectly. This is a kingdom of bugs, he’s a dung beetle, and dung beetles move balls of dung. It’s just that in this case, the balls aren’t rolled but launched in hard directional lines. Instead of just being limbs, his front legs slash and defend like backhand swords. While many of the denizens of Hallownest are relatively generic insects (usually some form of beetle), a few are more involved in how they depict specific genera. Dung Defender is on the opposite side of characters like Quirrel or Hornet, bugs who only hint at their actual species. He’s a caricature, because any boss based on a dung beetle is going to have to be, and because it leads to a fun fight.

#HollowKnight Boss GIF 1: Dung Defender! If you search the Waterways you can meet this charming hero! #wiiu #gamedev pic.twitter.com/KuJ9qhbZb0
— Team Cherry (@TeamCherryGames) June 4, 2016

And that gets into something that might be more important than the mechanics: the attitude—namely, that the Defender is an absolute delight. He throws out a hearty laugh with each hit. He sings as he attacks. He beats his chest to get a buff. His theme song is downright heroic. In a world where every enemy is a husk or a stalker, he’s exuberant. He even has the dignity to respect your skill and apologize for attacking you. When you reenter the boss room, he’ll be right there (which itself is a bit rare, as most bosses die or flee in defeat). He’s fun, and fun is something you desperately need in the awfulness of the Waterways. It’s like Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy or Siegmeyer from Dark Souls—characters of an archetype he bluntly follows—traipsed into a nightmare to pick you up.

He even passes this onto you. Your main prize for beating him is the Defender’s Crest, one of the many charms that you mix and match for various powers. It makes you smell as bad as him (something that does not go unnoticed by NPCs), but it’s not just a gag gift. The stink cloud actually harms any enemies who touch it, and it can interact with a variety of other charms. One of the more inscrutable features of Hollow Knight is that most charms’ effects change and improve when they’re paired with other charms, and the Crest can make other offensive bonuses significantly stronger. But it’s still big and goofy, like the guy who gives it to you.

There is a bit more to the Dung Defender than just being a classic big hearted paladin. He’s got his own sad backstory, revolving around his time as one of five Great Knights who protected Hallownest’s queen. Ogrim—that’s the name he’s cast aside in the wake of the kingdom’s devastation—is the last survivor (another one is still alive, but she’s retired in seclusion and he seems to have no idea). There may have been something between him and one of them, Isma, but the only details are echoes. It’s actually her resting place he’s guarding, and behind a hidden floor, his room is filled with statues he’s carved of her and his other fallen comrades.

Dung Defender asleep and “guarded” by the other Great Knights; he’ll retire here after your first chat with him.

This kind of thinly told drama is fairly standard for our era of gaming. It’s something that grew from first-person environmental storytelling and FormSoftware games. Hollow Knight is a bit less extreme in how it presents its plot; its cast is much more lucid. You can communicate with ghosts and read characters’ thoughts by striking them with the Dream Nail, an odd tool that lets you interact with their lingering dreams. Many of Ogrim’s compatriots may be gone, but you can still get a hint out of some of them. And it’s a bit easier to grok the details in general.

The other use of the Dream Nail is that taking it to a defeated boss lets you fight a harder, crazier “Dream” version of them. The counterpart in this case is the White Defender (who, to get this out of the way, I didn’t fight—I was only ever able to beat enough of the easier Dream Battles to get the good ending). Hollow Knight worked aggressively in both its main game and copious downloadable content to add to and build on its boss fights, often having super secret alternate versions that demand an insane level of skill. This Defender is buffer, tougher, and adds a wall of spikes to his repertoire. If you beat him five times, our Defender leaves Hallownest for good but crafts a dung statue of the player character. It’s cute.

The whole fight’s kind of encapsulated by one cool element. When you strike the Defender during his bouncing attack, it actually knocks him away, letting you get in an extra strike if you hit him upward. You can do the same to his dung balls, launching or even breaking them entirely. It’s a very “platformer” kind of mechanic; it fits the way Hollow Knight uses the Knight’s Nail (their sword) as a tool of traversal. You hit spikes to bounce off them lightly and move about, so having the Nail affect enemies as bodies and not just hurtboxes is a natural extension. Does it matter that much? Not in practice, but it’s kinetic, in keeping with the mechanics, and fun. Hard not to be delighted every time you pull it off.

Altogether, everything about the fight is a great mix of gameplay, personality, and storytelling, which is why it’s a bit insane that it’s largely optional. The Dung Defender gives you just his charm and access to Isma’s Grove, a sub-area in the Waterways whose item lets you safely swim in acid. That’s a huge relief for traversal, and it does open bonus goodies across the world, but it’s not necessary for hitting the credits. Many players will probably avoid his direction for a long time just because the area is so viscerally unpleasant—though that would make them well acquitted for the fight. They’ll probably have Descending Dive, for instance; the move’s required for the critical path, but it also messes with the Defender if used during his swimming animation.

But you can’t really think of it the way we think of other optional content or bosses, because it’s just too important. For one thing, while you can technically reach the Queen’s Gardens and the good ending with just the Shade Cloak, avoiding a particular acid pool without Isma’s Tear demands extremely precise timing beyond even a skilled player’s abilities. But the Dung Defender’s also an icon of the game; he was advertised during the Kickstarter campaign for the project (albeit with a backstory that was completely rewritten), and the White Defender’s remix of his theme was used in a trailer. He’s important.

A GIF Team Cherry published in a 2016 update on the game.

Hollow Knight juggles a lot of things. You’ve got that Metroid-style build of power and skill, Souls-style storytelling and mechanics, and a complex badge system. These things are not new for this industry; they certainly were not in 2017, when it was first released. 2D Souls-like Metroidvanias were fairly common back then. And Hollow Knight does everything impeccably, but that’s not necessarily enough in this marketplace. Not when seemingly every other indie action game was packed with tough as nails fights, copious exploration, and post-apocalyptic splendor. It needed something else.

Even alongside amazing mechanics, it’s the perfect, indelible tone that adds the final flavor. Characters speak an adorable fictional language. Monsters are cute even when they’re gross. Each new ability feels as whimsical as it does empowering. The painterly art style is special. The games that inspired Hollow Knight share this to some extent; Souls has its eccentric NPCs, Castlevania its peanut-noshing flights of fancy, and Metroid its brightly colored caves. But they don’t have this specific kind of beauty and atmosphere. It’s that tone the Dung Defender carries best, even more than the excellent mechanics of his fight. And he’s a good reminder about how important tone and flavor are… even if his “flavor” might seem painfully unappetizing.