Freedom through Choice: A Summarization of the Deterministic Cycles Presented in the World of Hollow Knight

Freedom through Choice: A Summarization of the Deterministic Cycles Presented in the World of Hollow Knight

“Obey no law but your own.” – Zote the Mighty

With the long-awaited news that Silksong is finally coming, I’ve found myself returning once again to Hollow Knight. It is a game I’ve revisited many times, and for good reason. The gorgeous art, immersive soundtrack, and razor-sharp mechanics make it a masterpiece of modern game design. Yet what keeps pulling me back isn’t only the polish; it is the story.

Beneath the surface of Hallownest lies a philosophical question that feels as alive today as it did when the game first released: what does it mean to live with purpose in a world shaped by forces far greater than yourself? Should one fulfill the role they were made for, or should one chase personal desire? And is there even a difference, if everything is already predetermined?

Hollow Knight, at its philosophical core, is a meditation on determinism. Hallownest is a world ruled by Higher Beings, gods whose power defines not only the environment but the destinies of those who dwell within it. Within this system, the Knight is forced to wrestle with the same question every creature in Hallownest faces, the same one that we as the players have too: am I merely fulfilling a script, or can I carve out meaning of my own?

Hallownest, A Deterministic World, Kingdom of Bugs 

Hallownest is not a free world. It is a kingdom defined by scripts written long before the Knight ever lifts its nail and slays its first Husk. The civilization we explore as players is already a ruin because its people lived under the weight of inevitability, under gods who offered power but not freedom. Collapsed tunnels of moss and fungus, bugs drunk off the leaked devotion of a chained deity, echoing expanses with lesser Higher beings staking their claims, the Knight’s purpose is to navigate them all.

Two Higher Beings dominate its history: the Radiance and the Pale King. On the surface, they represent opposites. Yet look closer, and you find they are two sides of the same coin: different forms of determinism, each binding the lives of Hallownest’s inhabitants to a destiny beyond their own making.

Here, Hallownest echoes debates as old as philosophy’s foundations. The Radiance recalls the fatalism of the Stoics and is even more in line with Richard Taylor. Having the belief that every event was already fated and thus choice was meaningless, and agency is a lie. The Pale King, in contrast, recalls Enlightenment rationalists like Spinoza, who argued that freedom consists not in resisting necessity, but in understanding and accepting it. Yet to the average citizen of Hallownest, the distinction is academic. Whether their destiny comes from Radiance’s infection or the Pale King’s enlightenment, the result is the same: a life that cannot truly be their own.

Thus, Hallownest is less a kingdom than a cage. Its inhabitants are trapped in the pull between two gods, each offering power at the cost of agency. And within this closed system, the figure of the Hollow Knight emerges; not as salvation, but as another cog in the machinery of inevitability.

The Radiance, Embrace of Divinity, Fulfilled Dreams

The Radiance is the embodiment of fatalism. She is a god of light, of dreams, of inevitability. Her infection is not simply a disease; it's a prophecy. Those who fall to her influence are consumed in mind and body, stripped of individuality, bent toward her radiant will. To be touched by her light is to become a creature without possibility. What you will do, you must do, because the Radiance has already written the end of your story.

But the reward for that is inclusion. When the Dream Nail, a weapon for the Knight, is used, it allows for the feelings and thoughts of those struck to be known to the player. Those consumed by the Radiance don’t have a lack of thought, but a feeling of bliss and acceptance. When we come across the Shopkeeper, Sly in the opening section of the game we find him with his eyes glazing over with the orange glow of the Radaince’s touch, he is lost in a warm delirium that we are able to pull him out of and have him return back to the surface with, in that moment though he remarks about the peace and warmth that enveloped him before our saving him. 

The Pale King, Cage of Logic, Illusion of Freedom

The Pale King offered something different, or so he believed. He arrived as a god of thought and logic, bringing the “gift” of higher thought to the bugs who bowed before him. With this came civilization: cities, temples, laws, and the idea of purpose; the illusion of choice. The Pale King’s philosophy resembles causal determinism; the belief that freedom is possible only within the structures laid down by prior causes. Each bug’s choice appears to be its own, but it is still the inevitable outcome of the King’s enlightenment and the causes he set in motion, as all actions of the Bugs are continued and extrapolated through. 

In the game, the set roles of the different Bugs we come to interact with seem to be of their own choosing: Conifer, Zote, Hornet, Quirrel. All of them expressing their will and seeming to make their own decisions, in the beginning, those choices are often attributed to themselves, with the credit for the ability to have them centered on the Pale King’s ‘Gift’. Over time and through repeated interactions to see them making the decisions this seems to reinforce that view. Behind those interactions, though, we learn that the choices they make are not truly their own, but a series of options made for them to select based upon the whims of either the Pale King or one of his own agents, the Dreamers.

The Hollow Knight, A Vessel for Another’s Design

The Pale King sought a way to resist the Radiance, and in his reasoning, he turned to the Void. In the Abyss beneath Hallownest, countless Vessels were formed, hollow beings born without mind or will, designed to contain the Radiance’s infection. Among them was the Hollow Knight, chosen by the King as the “perfect” Vessel.

This act reveals the King’s own belief about freedom: that the only way to fight fatalism is with emptiness. The Hollow Knight would succeed where all others failed precisely because it contained nothing. No thought, no desire, no weakness. In a sense, the Pale King believed salvation could only come from the destruction of an individual's life. This pulls from a similar idea as Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story of a perfect paradise that requires the knowing torture of an innocent child. The paradise of others rests on the endless torment of an innocent. 

Yet here the King falls into contradiction. He claims to offer higher thought to Hallownest, yet his ultimate hope rests on erasing thought entirely. He claims to provide freedom, yet his chosen savior is a prisoner of absolute obedience. The Hollow Knight does not conquer fate; it becomes the vessel of another’s design. Any claims of the Pale King must be viewed and judged through the lens of causal determinism in the place of true existential freedom; with the knowledge that all freedoms are causal, the bound logic of a continued closed deterministic freedom.

This is the paradox of determinism at its extreme. The Pale King, like many rulers and thinkers before him, believed that control could liberate. Yet control, even in the name of protection, is still control, still limitation, still determinism. The Hollow Knight’s sacrifice buys Hallownest only the illusion of freedom, for beneath the surface, the Radiance remains alive, whispering in dreams. A single interaction that the Pale King had with the Hollow Knight allowed for a hole in the perfect prison that the Pale King had designed. A single interaction caused the Hollow Knight to no longer be…hollow.

The Knight, the Nail to Balance Fate and Possibility

This is where the player enters. The Knight, our avatar, is another Vessel cast aside in the Abyss. By all logic, it should have remained a forgotten fragment. Yet the Knight’s journey suggests something different: that emptiness need not mean inevitability, and that even within a deterministic system, there is room for possibility.

Unlike the Hollow Knight, the player’s Knight forms bonds. It meets companions: Hornet, Quirrel, Cloth, even Zote in his comical resilience. It chooses whether to help, whether to fight, whether to walk away. The Knight does not exist only as a container of the Radiance; it exists as a participant in Hallownest’s community. And in those small acts, it carves meaning from a world designed to deny it.

Philosophically, this recalls existentialism. Thinkers like Sartre and Camus argued that while the universe may be absurd or predetermined in structure, individuals still have the capacity to create meaning through action. For Sartre, existence precedes essence: we are not defined by what we were made for, but by what we do. For Camus, the act of defiance itself creates value, even in the face of inevitable death.

The Knight embodies this tension. It cannot escape determinism entirely. It is still bound to confront the Radiance, still drawn toward the same final confrontation that consumed its sibling. Yet through the Dream Nail and the gathering of Essence, the Knight reveals another path: not one of emptiness, but one of connection. By entering dreams, by collecting fragments of memory, the Knight discovers what the Pale King could not. Freedom is not the absence of the self, but the presence of love, memory, and community.

The Void, Real Choice, Actual Cost 

The final confrontation with the Radiance is not merely a battle of mechanics; it is a symbolic act of liberation. Whether through self-sacrifice in becoming the new vessel, or through striking her down with the help of the Void, the outcome is the same: the Radiance’s light is extinguished.

Her death matters not only because it ends the infection, but because it ends the logic of fatalism itself. The Radiance represents inevitability; the belief that every action, every desire, every breath is already written. To destroy her is to shatter the story that nothing can change.

Even if the Knight perishes in the process, what remains is possibility. Hallownest is no longer bound to the Radiance’s dream, nor to the Pale King’s rational cage. It is wounded, yes, but it is open. A world without gods dictating every outcome is a world where bugs may stumble, may fail, may suffer, but also may choose.

This is the quiet triumph of Hollow Knight. It does not promise a happy ending. It does not promise that the Knight survives, or that Hallownest rebuilds. What it promises is the space for meaning, carved out through struggle, love, and sacrifice.