Hollow Knight's creators didn't want to be constrained by the 'metroidvania' label, but they accidentally set a standard that every game since—even Silksong—has to reckon with

In a 2017 interview about the making of Hollow Knight's map, designer William Pellen told me that Team Cherry "shied away completely" from describing the game as a metroidvania. Artist Ari Gibson added that they didn't want to "let a genre dictate" the decisions they made about Hollow Knight's design while they were making it...
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