Alex Spencer

After a dozen defeats, I tried the 'switch off the sound and fire up a podcast' tip that people often throw out for Souls games. And oh my god it really helps. Without the music and screeches piling on the tension, I managed it first time.

Oh christ those corpse creepers in Deepnest. Every bug you kill, there's a chance its shell will grow legs and come skittering after you. Properly unsettling.

Hollow Knight is one of my favourite games of recent years, but I'd accepted the rest of it as essentially dead to me, beyond my abilities and tolerance for repetition. But playing alongside a friend has given me the motivation to push through. I'm going to see the end!

Finally unlocked an ability that allows me to pass barriers I first encountered about three hours into the game. Which for me, was nearly a year ago.

The whole time since I picked Hollow Knight backed up, I've been clinging to the same pile of Geo – the currency you lose on dying but can recoup by finding your fallen self. Bolstered by my winnings in the arena, it was close to seven thousand Geo.

This is an obscene amount of Geo – a sign of the kind of hording normally reserved for dragons and the very rich. In the past ten hours, I've found nothing to spend it on. And still yet I clung onto it.

And then, carelessly rushing to my own corpse through an area I was, it turns out, baselessly confident about... I lost it. Seven thousand down to zero.

I mourned, briefly – wailed, rent my garments, all that – but now I feel oddly free. There's probably a lesson in there, somewhere.

I'm putting off the final bosses of Hollow Knight in favour of semi-aimlessly pottering around Hallownest. Partly because, yes, I'm terrified of them – but mostly because I'm not ready to face being done.

Tomorrow, though, me and the Switch have got a twelve-hour flight, and I intend to alight from that plane a changed man.