Games like Hollow Knight: one kingdom you have to learn

Hollow Knight sells you the map. Not as a joke — Team Cherry's own Steam listing names it as a feature: buy compasses, quills, maps and pins from a wandering cartographer, and until you do, Hallownest is a place you hold in your head. That is why games like Hollow Knight are hard to replace with a level select, and why the game's own page still draws people nine years on. What people miss is one continuous kingdom that only became legible because they learned it. Seven games keep that intact in different ways; three are on Game Pass.

The lowest price we logged for each game between 26 September and 31 October 2026, read on 7 November 2026. Earlier readings are left out because the feeds then still carried Steam accounts, console keys and region-locked keys, so the low on a game page can be lower than the figure here. Game Pass status is as our own game data lists it. Live prices sit on each game page.

Game	On Game Pass?	Low	Date	Store
Hollow Knight: Silksong	Yes	$8.70	8 Oct 2026	Eneba
Nine Sols	Yes	$13.65	14 Oct 2026	Eneba
ENDER LILIES	No	$9.99	26 Sep 2026	Steam
Bloodstained	No	$1.27	6 Oct 2026	Gameseal
GRIME	No	$1.31	17 Oct 2026	Eneba
ANIMAL WELL	No	$16.47	30 Sep 2026	GAMIVO
Prince of Persia The Lost Crown	Yes	$4.54	30 Oct 2026	GAMIVO

Games like Hollow Knight that hand you one Hallownest

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Team Cherry put Hornet in a kingdom built upwards rather than downwards. Pharloom is a climb: mossy grottos at the bottom, a citadel at the top, and the same refusal to say where to go. Hallownest asked you to descend into Deepnest and the City of Tears; Silksong asks you to ascend, and that changes how you hold it in memory — you navigate by altitude rather than by corridor.

The real change is what Hornet carries. Its Steam entry promises over 200 enemies, more than 40 bosses and a craftable arsenal of weapons, traps and mechanisms — a different proposition from the Knight's nail and a handful of charms. You build loadouts rather than tune one build, and quests arrive from named NPCs instead of being inferred from scenery. Finish it and Steel Soul mode returns, permadeath intact.

Steam has it at 90% from 424,586 reviews, just below the original's 97%, and the dissent is mostly about difficulty. It is on Game Pass, so you may already own it; if not, Silksong's own page is worth checking on the day, because our record has its figure swinging by more than half inside six weeks.

Pharloom is read upwards. Everything you unlock is a way to get higher rather than deeper. (Official Steam screenshot)

Nine Sols

Red Candle Games calls its combat Sekiro-inspired and deflection-focused, which is the single most useful sentence anyone has written about this game. Yi does not dodge-roll out of trouble; he parries into it. Attacks come at you to be answered on the frame, and the reward is a charged counter that you spend on the thing that just hit you. Hollow Knight's combat rewards spacing. This rewards nerve.

Around that sits what you came for: interconnected regions of New Kunlun, NPCs who hand over upgrades and abilities, secrets wedged into the geometry, hand-drawn art and manga cutscenes between chapters. The setting is Taopunk — the studio's own word for cyberpunk crossed with Taoism — and it reads as a genuinely strange place rather than a reskin.

It sits at 94% from 45,906 Steam reviews. Our record for Nine Sols is unusually flat: across 27 dated readings in the window the whole band was about three dollars wide, and the game's own price habit says discounts here are modest and brief. Waiting is not a strategy. It is also on Game Pass, which is the cheapest way to find out whether parrying suits you.

Red Candle Games' own release trailer, which shows the deflection timing better than any description of it.

Charms, relics and a build you assemble yourself

ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights

Lily cannot fight. Every attack she has is a dead knight she freed and recruited, and the Steam feature list is blunt about the consequence: mix and match abilities, equip hidden relics, suit your playstyle. That is the charm system turned into a cast. Land's End is smaller than Hallownest and much slower, and the score from the group Mili does half the work; ENDER LILIES sits at 94% from 46,030 Steam reviews and is the pick for mood over challenge.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Koji Igarashi built the template Hollow Knight inherited, then came back and built it again. Bloodstained is one castle, mapped room by room, with shards torn off demons as your ability pool and a weapon list its own store page describes as "literally a metric ton". It is 2.5D rather than hand-animated, and that shows in the character models, which have never been the appeal.

What it offers that nothing else here does is volume: thirteen free content updates, three playable characters, Boss Rush and Speed Run modes. Steam puts it at 93% from 41,778 reviews. The Bloodstained listing is the cheapest row in the table by a wide margin, and across 22 dated readings it sat there steadily rather than dipping to it once.

One castle, learned room by room — the structure Hollow Knight borrowed and stretched across a kingdom. (Official Steam screenshot)

Deepnest, for when the map should frighten you

GRIME

Absorbing your enemies is the whole system here. You parry with a black hole for a head, swallow what you broke, and spend the remains on skills; weapons are living creatures that mutate mid-swing. The world is anatomical rather than gothic, which makes GRIME the closest thing here to walking into Deepnest for the first time. Steam has it at 85% from 6,804 reviews, and three expansions have arrived since launch.

ANIMAL WELL

You are disempowered. Billy Basso's own Steam listing says so outright, and it is the design: no nail, no upgrade tree, just items that each have several uses and a pixelated well whose rules you work out by testing them. Candles are lit for safety and the map fills in gradually as you go, so progress is literally drawn by exploration rather than handed over.

It is nonlinear in the strong sense — collect in whatever order you like — and the stated focus is tension rather than action. Finishing it is not finishing it: the page promises hidden puzzles people will be solving for years. Steam has it at 96% from 24,685 reviews. Our record for ANIMAL WELL is the widest here, spanning about eight dollars across 30 readings, so this is the one row where the day you buy changes what you pay.

Nothing here tells you what is dangerous. Working that out is the game. (Official Steam screenshot)

Benches further apart, or a gentler fall

Prince of Persia The Lost Crown

Ubisoft Montpellier made the accommodating one. Mount Qaf is a single mountain explored as one map, Sargon's time powers do the job charms do elsewhere, and its Steam entry advertises optional accessibility features and an Eye of the Wanderer tool for remembering where you were. That last part is the opposite of buying quills from Cornifer, and for many people it is why they finished this and not Hallownest.

It is the weakest reviewed of the seven at 84%, from 7,324 Steam reviews, and the criticism is usually that it is tidy where Hollow Knight is strange. The Lost Crown is on Game Pass too, and our record has it ranging across almost twice its own floor inside 34 readings.

Mount Qaf's biomes are distinct enough to navigate by sight, which is the point of them. (Official Steam screenshot)

Two names you will see elsewhere

Both of the lists above lead with Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and it is on Game Pass, but our dated record holds too few readings for it inside the window to put a figure beside it, so it gets no row. Metroid Dread is the other constant recommendation, and it is not on PC at all.

Team Cherry's own Silksong release trailer. Hornet moves faster than the Knight, and it shows immediately.

Dirtmouth, and the one to leave it for

Play Silksong. It is built by the same two people and keeps the one quality the rest only approximate — a kingdom that is a single place rather than a set of rooms — and it is on Game Pass, so for many readers the decision is already made. If you have climbed Pharloom already, Nine Sols is next, because its deflection combat gives you something new to be bad at rather than a second helping of what you are good at.

For the cheap end of the table, what a keyshop actually is is worth five minutes, and what a historical low really means explains why the figures above are dated rather than live. Three of the seven come with a subscription, which our Game Pass picks covers more widely; parrying fans should carry on into the soulslike round-up, and games for a low-end PC applies to every row above.

We wrote this from store pages, published reviews and our own price record, not from playing each game for this piece. Some store links on our game pages are affiliate links, so playze may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.