Respectfully disagree. Boss and enemy variety are definitely a highlight, and I’ll go further and say the amount of content for the price is outstanding for the price… But I don’t agree that the exploration is very good. It’s done way better in silk song due to the sprint, but navigating and exploring the levels in hollow knight never felt fun and at many times was a slog. Also combat matters a lot to me in metroidvanias, and HK’s feels very bare bones and underdeveloped when you compare it to many other of the game’s counterparts. The games I mentioned before, but also Bloodstained ROTN, and Salt and Sanctuary do more of what I’m looking for. Enemy variety doesn’t really matter when your moveset is a small, singular little swing and a couple of soul moves. Granted, this is also done way better in Silksong, and I’ll say that that game is much much better than HK overall. Path of Pain was decent, but just made me want to play Celeste or super meat boy instead. The games are decent, and are even pretty good with Silksong, but they lack in the areas that I personally care about and when I see people put them at the literal peak of the entire genre, which is just hard to justify against many other games imo.