(Header image is from misternoobie’s lets play youtube series of the hit videogame Elden Ring)

I love big solo boss battles. I just can’t help myself. There is just something so satisfying about putting a certified big ass mini on the map. Goose with three heads? Been there. Dragon with scales as black as night that breaths, not fire, but a thousand children’s dreams? Done that. Gargantuan troll that eventually fractures into shards of molten glass, spinning in geometric patterns that defy all understanding? You betcha.

More often than not though, those solo boss fights fall flat. I have never gotten close to the abject horror I felt on my first run of Elden Ring when a troll three times my size slammed down next to me, taking 90% of my health with it, and I realized I was going to have to fight it to make any progress. Frankly, I had resigned to believing that something like that just couldn’t work in tabletop.

Hollows defies that, and promises to make tactical solo boss battles work. It’s pitched as a souls-like table top game. It is supposed to give you that thrill of dodging around a monster that can kill you in a second if you aren’t paying attention. But does it deliver on that promise?

Yes. Absolutely. 100%. Play hollows. The important part of the review is over. Go home, make some friends, get this game to your table. It may be my new very favorite RPG. Let’s talk about why, starting with all the bits you may not expect, and then wrap it up with how the combat works so well when so many systems have failed before it.

Beyond the combat

I would play hollows without the big boss system. Creators Christopher Taylor and Grant Howitt took a game about beating up big bosses, added talking weapons (I assume the weapons are supposed to talk, they talked in the session I played), centered the whole thing around the sins of toxic masculinity, then injected it with a dark and seething rage with just a pinch of hope.

Quick run down of catharsis inducing themes we ran into in our single session: Political injustice, religious hubris, gender identity, and drug abuse. Depending on the context, these items can be really touchy, and potentially trauma inducing for players, but in every case I felt empowered to explore the topics in a meaning way. (Though that last one was more confusing than cathartic? One of the other players sat outside a grim forge within the hollow, smoking tobacco with a child laborer. I have no profound thoughts about the situation but it was very funny in the moment.)

I must make a quick aside now and thank our gracious GM @Gemelli who created the hollows we ran and the pre-generated characters we used. He was a fantastic guide through the system, and the hollow he created reflected a rage at the current US administration that many of us are feeling now.

And that is where Hollows diverges from Heart and Spire in theme. They all deal in similarly heavy topics, but you don’t win in Spire, and you don’t survive the Heart. The bleakness in those games is beautiful, and knowing you are going to dying, but forging on anyway is particularly powerful. Hollows is different though. Hollows portrays a land of shadows, of corruption and pollution, a world twisted by the misdeeds of others, but you are going out to fix that world, one hollow at a time.

And those themes aren’t accidental. Hollows becomes a game that you can store all your pent up anger and frustration and actually do something about it. Sure, in real life you may just be an accountant who spends their weekends at political rallies that never seem to make a difference, but here, in the hollows, you can close a bloody gash in society.

Okay we get it, talk about the combat

Hollows plays out on the most interesting grid I have seen to date. Plenty of systems use abstract distances, but this is the first I have seen where the grid is centered on the boss. It is immediately clear what the focus is on during combat, who is in charge of the landscape, and it is not the players.

(Hollows grid from the pay-what-you-want quickstart guide The Sins of Grisham Priory)

Hollows cracked the code on boss fights. I really felt afraid from the word “go”, and it got much scarier as soon as the Forgemaster hammered our garbage-eating, knife-wielding party dummy for half of his life in the first turn. It was tactical in all the right ways. Despite the grid always being the same, our place in it was constantly moving as the Forgemaster crashed through us or pushed us together, often landing my character just where I didn’t want to be right before my turn started.

Our abilities were okay on their own, but really shined when we worked together. It became clear very early on that we were doomed if we tried to each play our own game without paying attention to our teammates. Tactics were streaming through the sidebar while each person prepared for their turn or reacted to the nasty tricks Gemelli pulled on us, and he let out exasperated sighs as we used our tasty abilities to narrowly escape incoming damage or protect a friend from certain death.

No one was scrolling reddit waiting for their next turn to come up. The fight demanded our attention.

The difficulty curve was perfect. We started out the gate very down, with two of close to dying before the Forgemaster entered his second phase (and I love a second phase), then once we turned the tables in our favor, the fight ended quickly, no slog needed. It made the fight tense and the win rewarding.

The weapons are unique and interesting. They become archetypal, not just a spear, but THE spear. Character abilities let you break the basic game rules in satisfying ways that make you feel clever. The skills system supports a fairly wide range of play and scenarios outside of combat.

I am telling you, the game is good. Go buy it right now.

Acknowledgments

Hollows can be pre-ordered here.

Thank you again to the gracious GM of this Sunday Secret Sampler session, gemelli., and to the rest of the group: .lizzzzzz, tundrafundra, and raggadorr_. Thank you to Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor, and to the entire team at Rowan, Rook and Decard for making such incredible games that make me feel things that I can never quite get at through regular mundane living. And a special thank you to the designer of the Secret Sunday Sampler logo kraftpaperhat.

No AI was used to write this blog (and it never will be because I looked into the source code of DeepSeek and saw how I was going to die and now I can’t sleep).

P.S. We were only able to play a single session. There is a lot more spice and exciting crunch that we missed out on just doing a one-shot, especially the progression system and the hidey-hole you go when you die. It all sounds very interesting. If you can’t experience it for yourself right now, find gemelli. on your nearest Hollows adjacent discord and I am sure he will be happy to give you a good run down on all of that.

P.P.S. I played a character that used any pronouns and it was actually really freeing to switch through different pronouns through the session depending on how I was feeling. Is the call coming from inside the house on this one?