Thank you! Like I said, Hollow Knight is possibly one of my favorite games, so if there's a way I can possibly make it more accessible for more people to experience without also spoiling that experience, I'm going to take it. I could gush on and on about how great everything about it is (art, music, story, mechanics, design, etc.) but it's one of those things where it's best experienced for yourself.

Hollow Knight is a solid contender for my favorite game, so good choice! I'm going to try to keep things spoiler-free as much as I can since a huge part of the experience is exploring and slowly unraveling things. Here's a list of (hopefully spoiler-free) tips that I think might help.

Not much will make sense at first.

Hollow Knight follows the Dark Souls school of lore: You don't get an exposition dump in the beginning giving you the whole background behind what's going on. It's perfectly fine to be confused about what you are doing and why. In fact, I'd say that's an intentional choice that winds up making a ton of sense after a certain point in the game.

Careful looking up info

Because of this fact and how long it's been out (as well as how popular it is), it's unfortunately very easy to spoil things. Be careful with that, and make sure to tag on "spoiler free" to any searches you do on the game.

It's difficult, but fair

You're likely going to die a lot, that's true. That being said, there aren't really any situations that I can think of where I had no way to avoid dying. The nice thing is, the game sort of sets itself up in a way that you (hopefully) learn different techniques over time, and the fact that it's a metroidvania means you get upgrades drip-fed to you, so you don't have a million things to try to learn at once. I'm not great at games nowadays, but I did still manage to beat the game. I never completed the boss rush stuff, but that's more because I've never been a huge fan of boss rushes in general.

It's methodical

You don't have a time limit during fights. Feel free to take your time learning an enemy's attacks; there are generally tells you can keep an eye out for so you can prepare to react appropriately. Don't be afraid to keep your distance as much as you can while in a fight.

Don't forget your Soul

Soul is the game's "magic" system, and it's a pretty big help in keeping you from dying. You recharge it a bit each time you hit an enemy, so as long as you're able to run in, hit an enemy, and get away without getting hit, you can recharge enough for another use. There are also generally minor enemies in each area that are relatively easy to deal with - these are basically prime candidates for recharging Soul if you're low.

Be sure to explore

There are going to be quite a few dead ends during your journey. These are usually places you just don't have the tools to deal with yet, so if it seems like you can't progress, try somewhere else and come back later! Another thing to keep in mind is you'll sometimes hear or see weird stuff on your journeys - it can be worth putting in some extra effort to see what the source is. Something that I would say is important for this is the map and quill you can buy in the shop in the first town. It updates when you sit down at a bench, so don't worry if it doesn't seem to "work" right away.

If you're having money troubles...

Grab the "Gathering Swarm" charm from the store in the first town, go sit on a bench, and equip it. It won't make your money problems disappear, but it'll help.

Enemy spawn mechanics

Enemies only respawn when you sit on a bench. Yes, that goes for the entire map. Yes, I have cleared a significant number of enemies across multiple zones without sitting on a bench and verified this (it was to help me finish a specific side quest). No, bosses will not respawn.

Hopefully this gives you a decent set of tips to get you started! I hope you enjoy your journey as much as I did when I played the first time!

I think the federated approach Lemmy is taking can both help with that and exacerbate it. While it's easy to push fringe views, it's also easy to quarantine/block off servers that are going in that direction. I'm not sure what tools are available for doing that in Lemmy, but I don't imagine it would be hard to block users from a Voat-like server if push comes to shove. It winds up coming down to the culture and values of the server you're on, and if those go in a direction you don't like you can also go elsewhere. Sort of like how there were bots that would pre-emptively block people that post in specific subreddit, but more granular control so you don't wind up with situations like where someone would post in /r/conservative to argue against misinformation, then find themselves blocked from leftist subreddits. Here, if you're a member of a leftist Lemmy server, that's part of your identity so it'd be easier to see situations like that and prevent collateral damage from blocking members of the alt-right server from brigading. The only issue there is that it also becomes easier to set up echo chambers, so there's a fine line to walk. I'm rambling a bit, but hopefully I'm making sense.

This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo's woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.

I really resonate with the first portion of your comment. That is to say, my journey to bisexuality was basically the same: I never had a "eureka" moment, more of a "oh, I finally managed to loosen the shackles of the homophobia I was raised with thanks to exposure, and now there seem to be feelings that I should figure out." I guess if I had to pick one specific moment as a pivot point, it was when I told a guy that offered me his number that I was already in a happy relationship rather than I wasn't gay. Even before that point though, I already had stuff rattling around in my subconscious (working at a gas station across the street from a gay bar will lead to a lot of subconscious questioning of prior assumptions).

Nowadays, I'm perfectly secure saying that I'm some flavor of bisexual. I hesitate to try pinning it down more since it's such an amorphous thing for me (kind of like your relationship with gender), and because of the previously-mentioned relationship (19 years at this point and going strong), I don't really feel any need or desire to do any "hands-on" exploration. I would say that's the benefit of not having a single "this is it" moment for when I "realized my true self" though: Having a flexible view on my romantic/sexual/gender identity means I can just live being the person I am. It can make things difficult if people insist on labels for things when I don't quite know how to label myself, but I just use whatever is closest for me and it works out alright.

That's exactly what I mean (/r/196 is the one I meant, with /r/19684 being the non-horny version). I'm bi, so I have no issues with the queer community at all - the issue is strictly how hard it was to not get constantly bombarded with horny garbage. Same reason it's so hard for me to find anime and manga that I can enjoy. Fanservice in those is absolutely out of control.

This is my concern. That being said, I don't think that's quite as likely to happen because the reason for Voat's creation was fundamentally different. The Lemmy exodus is because of API changes and the treatment of Apollo's creator, while Voat was created as a result of a crackdown on hate subreddit (/r/fatpeoplehate was the big one, but this was years ago so I might be misremembering things).

That being said, I do specifically remember that the driving force behind the Voat push was "free speech." I'm pretty sure we know who screams the loudest about free speech at the expense of all else, and it looks like Beehaw at least was created with the core idea of being against that crowd. So, while I can't speak for Lemmy as a whole, I'm trying to at least be optimistic about Beehaw, since the reason for the exodus is completely different from the Voat exodus,meaning the migrants will have a different composition.

This is actually a really good point that I hadn't considered! My career dream as a kid was zoologist (which never quite panned out for me). My only concern with kids that want to be influencers is if they're looking for love and attention they aren't getting at home, and that's entirely out of concern for their mental and emotional health. I don't really think it's bad for kids to want to be influencers though, as long as they understand what they're getting into if they start putting serious effort into creating a career out of it.

Honestly, I agree entirely. I was a lurker for the most part, and it was so tiring wading through the random horny posting throughout Reddit. There was a subreddit I followed that was specifically the same as another well-known subreddit, but had an additional rule that no mentions of sex were allowed. Even the various subs satirizing other popular subs (like ShitpostXIV, which focused on Final Fantasy XIV) eventually became half cropped porn. It gets tiring, and I was actually relieved to see the lack of NSFW topics here.