Hollow Knight - Speedrunner vs. 4 Hunters, but there's a Traitor

Today, we're playing Hollow Knight: Speedrunner vs. Hunters, but a traitor whose goal is to help ME win has joined the hunter team! The traitor may spread misinformation and sow distrust in the hunter team, and may also enter my voice call at any time and feed me information... but, they have to be careful the hunters don't catch on that they aren't listening. If they do, the hunters can vote and kill the traitor. Can I defeat The Hollow Knight while four hunters try to stop me, and a traitor tries to help? Let's find out.

▶ HUNTER CREDITS
@kindergartist (she/her)

▶ SKINS CREDITS
Student by KAdala
Among Us by 草莓Amon
Among Us (recolors) by Ismoil

▶ FULL RULES
• Win Condition: The Speedrunner wins by defeating The Hollow Knight. Hunters win if the Speedrunner dies.
• Hunter Scaling: Hunters start with 4 HP. Hunters gain movement abilities when the Speedrunner does. Hunters gain a Nail Upgrade for the first two movement abilities the Speedrunner collects. Hunters gain a Mask after three movement abilities.
• Speedrunner Pickup Limits: One Mask, one Vessel, one Nail Upgrade, two Charm Notches. One level 2 spell, one nail art.
• Banned Charms: Flukenest, Dashmaster, Spore Shroom, Grubberfly's Elegy, Fragile Heart, Lifeblood Heart/Core, Joni's Blessing
• Lifeline: Hunters are granted ONE lifeline after the Speedrunner collects their second movement ability. A Hunter may open their map to find the Speedrunner. Only one Hunter may open the map per lifeline and should not hold it open for more than fifteen seconds.
• Starting Rules: Hunters and the Traitor start at the bottom of King's Pass two minutes after the Speedrunner. One player starts every minute.
• Gate Etiquette: Only walk through boss gates when they are closed in error.
• The Speedrunner cannot hear the Hunter voice call.

▶ SOCIAL DEDUCTION GAME RULES
• One Hunter is randomly selected to be the Traitor. Only the Speedrunner and the Traitor know the Traitor's role. The Traitor wins if the Speedrunner wins. The Traitor may change HKMP teams at will to communicate with either the Speedrunner or the Hunter team. Traitor can change Skin IDs at will.
• All non-Speedrunner players may choose to vote and execute a non-Speedrunner player at any point. Votes are initiated by declaring a "Formal Vote" upon a target player, at which point a pause must be declared in chat. All non-Speedrunner, living players must vote Yes or No to execute the player. If a majority vote to execute, the executed player becomes a Ghost.
• Ghosts are invisible, invincible, and cannot attack. Once every three minutes, the Ghost may communicate with ("seance") their team for fifteen seconds.

▶ MODS CREDITS

▶ FOLLOW ME

▶ MUSIC
Hollow Knight - Truth, Beauty, and Hatred [0:00]
Kirby Super Star - Green Greens [1:16]
Kirby Super Star - Cocoa Cave [1:36]
Ace Attorney Investigations Miles Edgeworth 2 - Pursuit ~ Wanting to Find the Truth [3:45]
Shovel Knight - An Underlying Problem [5:14]
Metroid Dread - Artaria Level 2 [8:54]
Octopath Traveler - Boss Battle 1 [10:21]
Undertale - Another Medium [14:45]
Virtue's Last Reward - Recreation [17:03]
Pizza Tower - Mondays [21:49]
Donkey Kong Country - Northern Hemisphere [24:24]
Zelda Breath of the Wild - Molduga Battle [26:50]
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Crossing Swords [29:19]
Donkey Kong Country 2 - Flight of the Zinger [32:52]
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Big Shell [35:44]
Xenoblade Chronicles - Central Factory [37:38]
Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright - Testimony ~ Allegro 2001 [43:23]
Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright Justice for All - Pursuit ~ Cornered [49:13]
Donkey Kong Country - Mine Cart Madness [51:08]
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Countdown to Disaster [54:12]
9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors - Binary Game [56:26]
Octopath Traveler 2 - Boss Fight! (Critical Clash) [58:18]
Katana Zero - Chinatown [1:03:34]
Cadence of Hyrule - Cave (Combat) [1:09:31]
Lobotomy Corporation - First Warning [1:11:34]
Super Mario Sunshine - Delfino Plaza [1:14:52]
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Running Through the New World [1:17:46]

▶ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
1:12 Vesselhunt
1:19:42 Pantheon of God Gamers

#hollowknight #speedrunnervshunter #socialdeduction

[firebrn]

Hi everyone! Alongside this video, I'd like to announce my fundraiser for PCRF, an amazing charitable organization dedicated to providing relief to Palestinian children, especially those affected by the war in Gaza. Any and all donations are highly appreciated and mean a lot. YouTube covers all transaction fees, so 100% of your donation will be forwarded directly to PCRF. These donations may also be tax deductible, depending on where you live. If you can't support the fundraiser, that's totally fine. Thank you for reading regardless.

Please also consider checking out and following the hunters, as without them, these videos wouldn't be possible!

• @kindergartist (she/her)

*Update:* Copyright claims on this video made by "NexTone Inc. - Music Content" on Yasunori Nishiki's work (Octopath Traveler) have resulted in muted segments and glitched audio.

*Post-Game Discussion (Spoilers)*

So this game, I decided to experiment with Hunters getting +1 Mask after third movement rather than second. +1 Mask after second movement is a pretty hefty powerspike that's not really associated with any speedrunner power increase. +1 Mask after third movement, on the other hand, made the hunters a little too weak in the mid-game before getting CHeart. Next time, I'm wanting to try a system where Hunters gain mask shards incrementally for each pickup limit satisfied and movement item collected, rather than getting a full mask all at once. This should make the system a little harder to metagame by, for example, delaying the second movement pickup as long as possible. It should also mean that hunter power levels will more closely scale with the speedrunner's power level throughout the game. Hunters will eventually reach 6 masks, meaning we can lift the nerfs on some charms, as well as un-nerf Nail Arts so they're viable again for something other than lever skips.

This game specifically had some issues with the social deduction mechanics: voting to kill is somewhat beneficial if you get the right target, but getting the wrong target is extremely bad for the hunters. This means the best strategy is to not vote unless you're completely, 100% certain. Next time, voting needs to be somehow less punishing. Furthermore, the Traitor should be able to help the Speedrunner by fighting other Hunters, allowing for "accidental" attacking. I had planned for friendly fire to allow for this, but we needed to use HKMP Teams for voice chat. Teams, however, prevent friendly fire. Oops. That should've been obvious, but I didn't think of it. If we do this again, I'll make some changes here.

TransitionAlerts are set to 4s I think, currently. Hunters definitely seemed to have a little trouble seeing them, but I think once people get used to looking for the glow, they'll notice it more often. For clarification, we added this to prevent "transition moments" where there was a near-miss in a transition through pure luck. Transition moments are fun for viewers, but not great for the game, since it means hunters optimally should avoid using transitions as much as possible. We want hunters to roam, not camp, hence why the mod was made.

TheHuntIsOn's new Event Notifications turned out pretty good. I'm very happy with it. It's an evolution of the audio hint system. It being automated is nice because then other players can play speedrunner, and it means we don't get the random mistakes where I forget to play a sound effect. The ambiguity of the chat alerts encourages a lot of hunter discussion. We will probably expand on this in the future and slowly improve it. This system reduces the emphasis on lifelines, which is healthy for the game.

Lifelines are a bit problematic because they add a lot of chaos. Mindgames and planning can all be thrown out the window if the hunters lifeline at the right time. Or, more often than not, the lifeline means nothing at all. It's too luck based and unpredictable. Also, the speedrunner usually has no idea that a lifeline happened and they're about to get ganked. It's still fun to have limited lifelines because hunters have to deliberated when it should optimally be used. Constant lifelines on a cooldown aren't as good for the game, so I'm happy we've found a system that can partially replace them.

We've started recording hunter microphones individually. This allows for more finely-tuned audio balancing, allows for selectively muting people or moving their audio around slightly to avoid multiple people talking over each other, and allows for some post-processing of people's voices. Overall, it adds a significant amount of time to the editing process, but the end result is definitely worth it. Making these edits is becoming a lot of work, but I want to put out the best quality content I can. Very happy with the result here.

Anyhow, that jelly RNG was pretty bad. The jelly was so far down I couldn't dash under it without waiting, but also so far right that if I upslashed it, its projectile would get stuck on the platform and then would follow me into the tunnel to the left. Speedrunner brain took over and refused to let me wait, so obviously I slapped it away. Oops. Funniest ending to an SVH video though, I suppose. Felt like I played the rest of the game quite well though. I had a few kind of scary moments, but otherwise felt untouchable for a lot of it. Nice for a change after getting owned in a lot of the other games I've played recently, lol. Henry feeding me information on which spots were open definitely helped.


Next game we might be experimenting with a pretty huge change, which I'm excited to try out! This game still has soooo much untapped potential.

[levifoster]

Hollow Knight social experiment; tell everyone there is a traitor among them when there actually isn't, then let paranoia do the rest

[Bearforlife]

I think its funny henry got sussed so hard for missing mic checks even though he talked for all of them, signalled by the discord indicator. He just wasnt loud enough

[ceruloryx]

the amount of time henry straight up says "im the traitor" and its taken as a joke is hilarious

[Modander]

33:14 Oat says "the traitor is doing a great job" and henry litteraly says "Thank you"
Crazy confidence for sure :D

[SpoopyAce]

It's genuinely so extremely frustrating the *sheer amount* of times Henry very audibly called out mic checks and was just not heard lmfao

[henryst-]

this format was unbelievably stressful and incredibly fun. would totally do again 😈. I feel like I played pretty well for most of it given it was a new format, but the spire callout was EXTREMELY regrettable. also the monomon strat was GENIUS. ggs everybody!

[Bhinnichia]

I swear henry was nowhere near as sus as people were making him out to be. He was there and doing what he said usually and not making any major noticeable mistakes, but for whatever reason kinder seemed to have a permanent sus on him since the beginning and kept slowly making the others agree. Overall it was still super fun and would love to see more like this!

[Gaming_With_Sarcasm]

Proximity chat makes this so
much more funny, the hunter cam following their location in the room was a nice touch too

[oatmille]

this game took years from my life LOL the stress! i should have listened to kinder smh. another fun time, thanks for having me!

[pierre-mariecaulliez]

"yeah, they're gonna block C-dash
- Mike check ?
-HELLO !"
That's peak traitor play here ! And that's AFTER getting called ou in the first 5 minutes ;7

[natanealyipchengjunhci]

ok but can we talk about how stupidly good cron not only insane awareness, but is always almost able to pinpoint fire's exact location, so much that people find him sus. like actually crazy

[DerrickParr]

Henry is my new favorite person from this series whenever they were sussing him I was just thinking all the times is screamed in the Henry Stickmin games

[anwd]

It says Kronk when a lever is hit, 10/10 feature, keep it. (Shame about the lack of “pull the lever” or “WRONG dialogue though)

[acoolnameemm]

1. I love the 0 nail damage blooper. Just feels so casual that stuff like that presumably happens somewhat often and you guys just pause the game (as seen in other videos). I really like the casual vibe these videos have.
2. I really like the proximity VC indicators. Makes it really easy to understand when others can actually be heard in-game.
3. Henry openly going "Thank you so much" to the others saying the traitor is doing good is so funny.
4. That "they are going to CDash" followed immediately by "Mic check" and Henry being there in time was such perfect timing.
5. That jellyfish was the secret Hunter.

[shreshthanigans]

48:50 typing out 'haha' and deleting it is the most relatable thing I've ever seen. GGs on an entertaining run (as usual)! Brought many smiles to my face.

[LieseFury]

oat being the only hunter to ever initiate mic checks is so sus, and nobody else even thought about it

[lizziefirkey]

Now I really want you to do another one of these where *everyone* is a traitor but they all think they're the only one. I think it would be *so* funny.

[PhantasticalPhiasco]

Thanks for inviting me! It was chaotic and intense and a lot of fun! Would love to do this again sometime. Henry played really well. He may have stabbed us in the back but I would still trust with him with my life.

[BlueSR]

excellent video for an excellent cause!