Exploring the Hollow Knight Beta Script

 https://youtu.be/mznSfGJIbcw

A beta of Hollow Knight just showed up online recently. Now I’m sure you’re wondering how this happened. Does somebody’s uncle work at Team Cherry? Did a hacker break into their servers? Well no, one of Team Cherry’s playtesters, a prolific and mysterious figure simply known as Graig, posted the beta on a few discord servers, with Team Cherry’s permission. So Team Cherry just decided to let anyone access this beta, which honestly is pretty cool. This beta in particular was provided to Kickstarter backers in 2015. And it was also available in a Humble Bundle sale that took place a few weeks before the game officially launched, basically acting as a sort of demo.

So this isn’t the biggest discovery in the world. No, there aren’t any unused bosses here. And no, your long lost father isn’t here either. But I think it would be fun to run through the beta and discuss what it’s like to play, and what little differences there are between this and the final game. The beta doesn’t have the Hallownest poem or the cutscene in the Black Egg. Instead we just get this simple introduction cutscene of the Knight arriving in Hallownest. This cutscene has always stood out to me due to how the Knight’s eyes are stylized. It would make sense that this cutscene was created very early in the game’s development. You can see how Ari Gibson’s art style for Hollow Knight has slightly changed over the years.

The first major difference you can see in the beta is that the Knight has four masks instead of five. Considering how difficult Hollow Knight can be for new players, adding more health was probably a good idea. We can see from some of the earliest footage that there were originally got to be three masks, which would have just been ridiculous. Another notable difference is that the Knight’s nail is much shorter, which makes it pretty difficult to fight enemies, but at the same time, the swing speed seems a bit faster. I can’t put my finger on it, but I think the controls at this point lack a tolerance or grace period, which can make timing your nail swings a bit awkward. Also it takes way more hits to get enough soul to focus in the beta.

But don’t worry. Team Cherry gave the Knight another ability to help make up for the extra difficulty. From the start of the game, the Knight has a back dash ability. I wouldn’t call it the most elegant move. It’s kind of awkward to use and I never felt like using it while playing. Even against False Knight it really didn’t feel very reliable. If you dash twice in succession, you can see that the knight does this weird spin maneuver like it’s a fucking anime character. At first I thought this was just a pointless visual effect, but if you back dash three times in a row successfully, the third dash actually goes back a bit further than the other two. I guess this could be useful for speedrunning, sort of like what they do in Symphony of the Night, but the timing is really tricky so honestly it’s just better to walk like a fucking normie.

King’s Pass is pretty much identical to what it is in the final game right down to the dialogue on the lore tablets. There is a spike pit in the first hallway, as opposed to just being a weird, empty pit. Also the Fury of the Fallen charm is not there. Instead it’s just a chest full of Geo. In fact, there are no charms at all in this build, or any sort of inventory menu either. There is a map for the Forgotten Crossroads however, except it’s just a static image with no interactable elements. There’s just some cool attention to detail that I really like here. However, the functionally of the map in the final game probably wouldn’t have been possible if Team Cherry made the other maps like this one.

Dirtmouth is pretty similar to what we see in the final game as well. Jiji’s cave is gone though. And there is a different sign in front of Cornifer’s shop. The biggest change here is related to Elderbug’s dialogue. Out of all the character dialogue in the beta, Elderbug’s is probably the most varied. A lot of it is slight rewordings of different things, like he says “heh heh” sometimes which is just kinda odd. But Elderbug also has additional dialogue in the beta that doesn’t appear in the final game.

He mentions that Dirtmouth was actually founded as a result of more and more bugs wanting to sneak back into Hallownest after it was sealed up. Now this doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Why would there be a stag station if the town was built after the kingdom was sealed up. Even the Last Stag talks about this. I guess Elderbug is getting senile in his old age.

Elderbug also has some additional dialogue about a girl who left Dirtmouth to explore Hallownest. Apparently she had lost both her mother and her brother to the ruins, so Elderbug asked her why she was going. She mentioned that she was dreaming of a stone egg, and that she could hear a familiar voice singing inside of it. This is obviously referring to the Black Egg where the Radiance was imprisoned. But what’s the deal with the singing?

In the Quirrel comic, he sort of dreams about the Black Egg, but it’s more about the Hollow Knight specifically. And there’s no singing. In the final game, singing is mentioned a lot in the Crystal Peak. And you could maybe argue that the Radiance has some kind of influence there. A prime example would be how Myla mentions the crystals singing and then she gets infected. But the Radiance’s infection is more about dreams and light than about singing. So I’m not surprised this dialogue wasn’t in the final game. In fact, this dialogue doesn’t even trigger in the beta. It appears in the game files of the beta, but I can’t get it to show up in the beta itself.

But that’s enough Elder Bug discussion for one lifetime. Let’s dive down into the Forgotten Crossroads. There are a few differences here at the Black Egg Temple. Notably, all three Dreamer masks are identical. Does this mean there are three Monomon’s trapped in there? Well no. This is because the Dreamers were originally designed to look identical. In fact, you can see a spot in the final game where the original mask designs are still used.

Quirrel is also here, and he sports almost identical dialogue as the final game. Although he has one additional line of dialogue here that ultimately gets used in Greenpath.

Heading back to the left and down, we can see that the layout of Forgotten Crossroads in the beta is pretty similar to the final game. We’ve got the Grufather, the Balder blocking the road to Greenpath, the Brooding Mawlek area: not much here is different, the biggest exception being the path to the Mawlek is slightly different. Cornifer is in the same spot, but he lacks the papers laying about everywhere, and his familiar hum. He also sounds a little less confident in the beta dialogue, and he doesn’t mention Iselda at all.

Going left from here we can see what acid used to look like in the beta. I have to say it looks kind of cool. Going back right, we can see that the Vengefly King encounter with Zote was originally located in the Crossroads. That would explain why Greenpath suddenly looks like the Crossroads again when we find Zote there. Team Cherry just grabbed all the stuff in this room and moved it over there thinking no one would notice. Zote’s dialogue is pretty much the same. Still blathering on about his backstory like a fucking anime character.

Going through the rest of the Crossroads is pretty much the same at this point. Gruz Mother is still there, although she has a ribcage for some reason. A similar ribcage can be found in Mato’s hut. Salubra’s hut is there but you can’t enter it. You can rescue Sly. Although he doesn’t offer you anything to purchase at his shop. Myla is the same, although there is no elevator shaft here like there is in the final game. And the crystals are a more dull grey color. There are some hoppers in the beta Crossroads. Looking at even older builds we can see that there was even a giant hopper fight in the location where you originally fight the False Knight. False Knight is here in this beta, although I think his attacks are a bit faster. The first encounter with the Snail Shaman is pretty similar, although the Ancestral Mound is called the Shrine of Souls. Also Vengeful Spirit costs half your soul meter as opposed to just a third, which is just awful. Did I mention the beta is a bit more difficult? Because it is.

Speaking of which, the shade in the beta looks quite a bit different than the final game. It is just a dark blue tone of the Knight, as opposed to some kind of void creature. And when you defeat it, instead of void being absorbed back into the Knight, it’s Geo. I think it’s better that the final game removes the geo effect, since it kinda just raises questions about where this Geo is stored exactly. I mean, we all know it’s in the Knight’s ass, but it’s best not to raise attention to it, you know?

You know what else is dumb? These weird husk statues. What even are these things? Ellina mentions them in the Wanderer’s Journal, but her dialogue can easily be summed up as “What the fuck am I a looking at?”. I feel like Team Cherry justed added them as decoration but in reality they don’t serve any purpose. Anyway, in the demo, we see a lot of this particular statue. I thought this guy was removed from the final game, but you can still see him in the background of a few rooms.

Another tiny change Team Cherry made was to the crawlid enemy. Its spikes are less defined in this version versus the final release. We can also see that there were actually 3 designs of this bug, each one getting progressively more horny. Team Cherry mentioned in a blog post that people would try to jump on the crawlid, thinking it could be killed like a Goomba. Watching people play their game helped them realize that the enemy needed to be more spiky in order to teach players not to jump on them.

With the Vengeful Spirit spell, you can make your way to Greenpath, however the game just turns you around and tells you the demo is over. But of course, that is not enough for me to be satisfied. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, dataminers have already started pulling this beta apart for additional nuggets of info. 

If you’ve watched my videos before, you know that I use mods to get footage of Hollow Knight that is either zoomed out or has the HUD removed or has the Knight removed. I can do this using a debug mod created by SeanPR, KDT and 56. And 56 even created a mod for this beta so we can access new areas. So I just wanted to give a huge thanks to them and everyone who has contributed to the Hollow Knight modding community.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much new stuff to find this way. The beta itself doesn’t contain any rooms from Greenpath, or the Wastes or anything like that. We can see this entrance to the Fog Canyon, as well as the first room of the Crystal Peak but not much else. Also, we can find Iselda. There’s no animation for her though. She just stands there like a fucking person who stands a lot.

It turns out the forward dash is also in the beta’s code, although it can’t be acquired naturally. There are some parts of the beta that require the dash and double jump, but can be completed just by fly pogoing. Utilizing this technique actually makes it possible to collect four mask shards and get the coveted fifth mask!

Moving on, there is one unused music file in the game’s code. It appears to be an old track from the Forgotten Crossroads.

In the beta, Larkin’s music has already been implemented. I don’t know who composed this old music for the Crossroads, but it sounds like stock music of some kind.

In an even earlier build of the game that William and Ari played during the Kickstarter, you can hear some different stock music. 

We’ve actually been able to identify this song. It’s called Our Story Begins by Kevin MacLeod. Now if you spend a good deal of time on YouTube, you have probably heard of Kevin MacLeod. He makes royalty free music. Like if you’ve watched any DIY or vlogger video ever, you’ve probably heard him. Some of my favorite tracks by him include Scheming Weasel, Sneaky Snitch, and of course, my personal favorite, Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.

I can hardly think of another person who has such a reach on this platform as Kevin MacLeod. Truly Kevin MacLeod is an unsung hero of YouTube, and as it turns out, an unsung hero of Hollow Knight. Thank you for everything Kevin. You truly are an inspiration to us all.

Some of the sound effects are different. The whispering of the lore tablets in the King’s Pass are a bit different. The Knight also makes this annoying glass breaking sound when it gets hit. There are also some additional Quirrel voice lines in the game files. Sly has a completely different voice actor and it almost makes the beta unplayable.

In terms of art, there are some really early drawings of the buildings found in the City of Tears. I love how randomly all these windows are placed. It’s quite the architectural statement. There also appears to be sprites for an unused sleeping animation for the Last Stag. Two users known as Mebi and Nes were able to translate these images into an actual animation. This is really cool to see, and I wonder how Team Cherry was planning on using these sprites. Maybe the stag would be asleep if you came back to the same station you left him at. It really is a shame this animation didn’t make it into the final game. Although this sprite was reused and modified to be a stag corpse in the Stag Nest. So that’s nice.

The map shown when talking to the Last Stag is different as well. This random section at the bottom left corner of the map is blacked out in the beta. Kinda random but okay. If we look at the ingame files, we can actually see all the different parts of the map are already in the game. A big thanks to Mola for stitching these together so we can see the full map, as well as creating a color coated version to make out each section of the map more clearly.

I never noticed before that some of the symbols on the map actually sort of resemble the areas themselves. Like Greenpath has with these pillars, that sort of look like these things. The City of Tears also has these tall buildings on display, and what might be the Hollow Knight fountain. The Fungal Wastes also have mushrooms depicted on the map. We can see that the final map is a bit wider. Also the Stag Nest and City Storeroom stations were added. While the Forest of Bones was replaced with Deepnest, it still keeps the same symbols. And the Palace Grounds station was changed to be less descript in the final version, whereas the beta version clearly invokes the Pale King. Perhaps because Team Cherry wanted the hidden station to be more secretive.

 And that’s pretty much everything unique about this demo. There might be a few other details we could discuss, but frankly I think I’ve covered most everything remotely interesting. Honestly, I’m just happy that Team Cherry was willing to release this demo to the public. It’s great to be able to preserve this chunk of Hollow Knight history. Now if only we could convince them to release the builds they made before they switched to Unity. You know the builds with the snail village and the giant spiders and the swimming. But that’s probably never going to happen. 

For now, I should just set my hopes way lower. Like maybe hoping that Team Cherry will actually release a high quality version of this image. It appears to be album art for the Pale Court piece that Christopher Larkin wrote. That song was ultimately released on the Gods and Nightmares album, so I guess the album this art was made for never released. We have high quality versions of this art already, but none where the Pale King’s crown is this visible. Honestly it drives me up a wall that we don’t have this image in high quality. I can barely sleep at night. I’ve even tried recreating the image myself. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t look right. Honestly, I think I’ll have to take a break from video production until I can figure this out.

Songs used:
Hollow Knight OST
Greenpath OST
Dirtmouth OST
Dung Defender OST
Decisive Battle OST
Resting Grounds OST
Ode to Joy
Beta Crossroads
Our Story Begins - Kevin MacLeod
Scheming Weasel - Kevin MacLeod
Sneaky Snitch - Kevin MacLeod
Monkeys Spinning Monkeys - Kevin MacLeod
Second Coming - Kevin MacLeod
City of Tears (Inside Loop)