Celeste is a precision platformer; Hollow Knight is a metroidvania. Celeste is a series of single-screen challenges with instant restarts and a story about anxiety. Hollow Knight is a huge interconnected world with real combat. Both are excellent and they scratch different itches entirely.
Both are 2D, both are hard, and both are unusually kind about it — Celeste with assist mode, Hollow Knight with generous benches.
Dash, climb, and about four hundred rooms that each teach you one thing. Deaths cost you a second. The B-sides and C-sides are among the hardest platforming ever designed, and none of it is compulsory.
More like this: games like Celeste.
Forty hours, a map you have to earn, and combat that keeps deepening. Much less about pure execution, much more about exploration.
More like this: games like Hollow Knight.
Celeste is a precision platformer; Hollow Knight is a metroidvania. Celeste is a series of single-screen challenges with instant restarts and a story about anxiety. Hollow Knight is a huge interconnected world with real combat. Both are excellent and they scratch different itches entirely.
Better is the wrong question for these two — they are close enough that the answer depends on what you want from the next twenty hours. Pick Celeste if you want to master a movement system. Pick Hollow Knight if you want a world to get lost in.
No. There are no scores anywhere on this page. This is a written opinion about what each game is for, so you can judge whether it matches what you are after.