Hello and welcome back to my blog!
In quest of unlocking the rarest achievement in Hollow Knight, I had to start a Steel Soul run where death is permanent and you cannot die until you beat Hollow Knight, and that is so after getting 100% game completion.
At any point after unlocking the gate to the Temple of the Black egg, you can go and fight Hollow Knight, which will give you the second rarest achievement in the game. I already did this few days ago and you can read about it in this post.
I had only 89% game completion in that post, so I still need 11% more, and these are not so easy. I had to fight some tough bosses. One of the toughest ones that I feel can easily end this run is the Traitor Lord. He is big and quick, dealing 2 mask shard damage on every attack. This can quickly turn into a death if I am not careful.
Thankfully, I had some practice fighting this boss from the last few runs that I did. I also practised him in my other save file in the Pantheons just to get used to his attacks and patterns. Cloth came and helped me in this fight, too.
But it didn't go so well for her. She died in the process of killing the Traitor Lord. Her sacrifice won't go in vain.
Each main boss in the game gives a percentage completion bonus. Another thing that counts towards the game completion percentage is the charms. Each unique charm gives one per cent as well.
And many of them are not guarded by boss fights but just platforming challenges. I went to get the Sharp Shadow charm from Deepnest. I missed it because this is locked by the void gate.
I had to jog my memory and remember which boss I skipped and in which location. One of the bosses I skipped in Deepnest was Galien, a dream warrior boss. I need to get their dream essence to unlock a section of the map, too. So, this was pretty important.
He is not too tough. Once you have the Howling Wraith spell, you can just spam those spells without worrying about your health too much. Healing is not a good option here; rather, just going for the most damage output and defeating it before it is too late, and you are low on health and panicking.
I went and defeated more Dream Warrior bosses just to get that sweet essence.
I went to the Hive area and defeated the Hive Knight. Not sure if this fight counts towards the completion percentage.
One of my favourite places in the entire Hallownest is the Hive. I love the aesthetics in this place. So beautiful and very thoughtful.
Once I had enough Dream Essence and got the upgraded dream nail, the Awoken dream nail. I could go inside the White Palace.
The muted colours of this palace remind us of great tragedy. Weirdly, it is filled with all kinds of traps and challenges. A lot of buzz saws, spikes, thorns, etc. There are no enemies here, but the area is your biggest enemy.
This section is one of the toughest places in the game. There is a hidden subsection inside the White Palace which is called The Path of Pain, and it is exactly what it sounds like. I have tried it a couple of times and failed both times. I did like 90 per cent of it, but the one last thing, I just can't do it.
There are some important lore elements here. This was the palace of our Pale King, and there is a room which is like a laboratory of the King, where he must have figured out how to use this Void substance to contain the infection in his kingdom. This game is so lore-rich that every part of the kingdom has things to say about it. Many of these tablets give vague or cryptic information, too, and unless you have enough of them, you can't figure out the whole story.
Finally, after what feels like an hour of torture, we reach the Throne room. You will find the Pale King there. Using Dream Nail will reveal my favourite dialogue in the game, “No cost too great...“
No wonder the King died dead long time ago along with his kingdom. There is no timeline of events in the game, but we know things didn't work out for our king, who is a higher being that, at one point, helped establish this kingdom and make it prosper. But now it lies in ruins, and it is our mission to fix what the Pale King failed to do.
We collected the second half of the Kingsoul from here, which gave us another charm and a completion point.
The secret door in the Ancient Basin can be unlocked if you have enough mask shards, and it contains a new charm.
While I was in the Ancient Basin, I went and got the void heart. I don't think it increases my completion percentage, but this gives us a glimpse into the past, where the Hollow Knight was chosen by the Pale King.
The next thing I did was to collect the Love Key from the Queen's garden to get into the Tower of Love and defeat the Collector. This gave me the Collector's map, so now I can see where the rest of the grubs are located.
I defeated Markowth, which is a tough fight and can get out of hand. But my build was not too bad, and I killed him in under a minute.
I had to collect more grubs, not all give me the completion percentage, but the grub father gives some useful rewards that can help me a lot. These grubs took me a long time to save. One of them was in Deepnest, while some were in Crystal Peaks and one even in the Royal Waterways. I had missed many, but now it was time to get all of them and collect sweet, sweet goodies from Grub Father.
He gave me like four thousand geos lol.
I had missed the Engraged Guarding fight too, he not only gives me the percentage completion but also gives me a mask shard. I was growing in confidence, defeating all these bosses easily. I think this game is more about not panicking and having some confidence in yourself and your build. Not going too defensive in your approach. Just focusing on the healing builds will make you not focus hard enough to dodge because you think you can heal. But if you don't have that backup option, you are going to be more focused and likely not take damage.
I was now on 100% completion, and now, I just have to go back and defeat the Hollow Knight to get that super rare achievement. Hollow Knight's boss is not even that hard, and this is going to be an amazing feat for me. I still can't believe I am this close to getting this achievement.
Until next time...
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All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
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Screenshots are from the game Hollow Knight.
