Hollow Knight: All Spells, Ranked

There are some incredibly useful spells in Hollow Knight. Here's a look at all of them, ranked.

Best known for its hard difficulty and rich lore, Hollow Knight is one of the best indie games to have come out in recent times. The clean and crisp gameplay mechanics make it extremely fun to play and revisit even to this day.

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One aspect of the gameplay that makes it so fun is the different spells that you can use. These are slowly discovered as you explore Hallownest, providing a natural sense of progression as well as helping you unlock more areas.

Infamous in the community for its ability to give you a few frames of invincibility, the desolate dive is a useful tool in a savvy player's arsenal. The best use of the spell is for dodging seemingly undodgeable attacks, but that can be hard to accomplish without practice.

The other biggest use is to break floors that rattle around. There's a certain level of visceral satisfaction to breaking things (that you've known for a while are breakable) that is hard to replicate.

The first spell you get, and the most basic of them all, Vengeful Spirit, fires out your soul in front of you, effectively giving you a ranged attack. In the unforgiving world of Hollow Knight, such an ability is a godsend and can help you clear out mobs in a timely manner.

There are certain skips that can be performed using the Vengeful Spirit spell since using it pushes you back a little bit. Even if you don't want to do those, it is useful to keep that aspect of the ability in your mind when using it since it can affect the flow of the battle.

Because of the large spread and multiple instances, Howling Wraiths is a pretty useful spell. It fires a cone of expanding attacking spirit on top of the player, dealing a decent amount of damage. This is only useful against flying enemies since it doesn't hit anything on the ground.

This spell is found near the corpse of a snail shaman in Fog Canyon. It doesn't provide any frames of invincibility, but it can make you hover for a few seconds, similar to Vengeful Spirit, except it doesn't push you back.

The direct upgrade to the Vengeful Spirit spell, Shade Soul, turns the pure white spell into something from the abyss. It increases the damage of the spell and its speed, and the spell now goes through enemies, dealing damage to anything in its path.

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An interesting factoid regarding the Shade Soul spell is that the player picks it up from a snail shaman who's linked up to a machine, hinting at the spell being a modified version.

A fusion of white and black, the Abyss Shriek is the upgrade for Howling Wraiths. Similar to its predecessor, Abyss Shriek releases energy in an upward arc. However, instead of just three times, it now does four instances of damage, making it one of the highest damage attacks in the game.

All the spells interact with various charms like Shaman Stone to deal more damage or get a reduced cost. This makes having a spell-based build much more viable.

Descending Dark is the upgrade of the Desolate Dive spell. Instead of one burst after the initial dive, it now does burst damage twice. The first wave deals damage to either side of the knight, and the second burst does the same, though with a lower numerical value.

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Descending Dark also gives a whopping 0.4 seconds of invulnerability for the player. However, if you use it consecutively, the invulnerability does get canceled.

The single most versatile and useful spell in the game, Focus, is granted to the player at the very start. It gives the player the ability to use the soul they accumulate to heal themselves. This process requires a few seconds and 33 Soul in order to gain one heart. If the player gets interrupted during its casting, either by an enemy or due to lack of attention, the spell is canceled, and the used soul is lost.

In certain areas or against certain enemies, it makes sense to modify the Focus spell to some extent, using different charms to allow for different types of gameplay. For example, when going through the Path of Pain in the White Palace, you might want to equip Deep Focus, increasing the efficacy of the healing in exchange for more time. Having a Shaman Stone equipped doesn't increase the amount of health healed using Focus.

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