This massive mod voice acts all of Hollow Knight, even the item descriptions

A group of over a hundred dedicated fans has completed a project to add voice acting to the entirety of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry's beloved (and still sequel-less) Metroidvania whose NPCs have, up to now, been generally pretty quiet.

Spotted by TheGamer, Hallownest Vocalized has been in the works for a while now—its reveal trailer went up in August 2021—but it finally crossed the finish line last weekend. With the aid of a frankly unwieldy number of voice actors from the Hollow Knight fan community, it replaces the various warbles and meeps that constitute the sum total of standard Hollow Knight's voicework with actual, fully-voiced dialogue. You can get a taste of it in the launch trailer above.

It doesn't stop at NPC dialogue, though. The mad lads actually went and voiced seemingly every scrap of text they could get their hands on. The trailer says the project has voiced 35 spirits, 45 lore tablets, 42 bosses, 48 NPCs, 89 corpses, 105 item descriptions, 168 journal entries, and 218 enemies. Leaving aside for one second quite what it means to voice act a corpse, that's a dizzying amount of work.

If the trailer is anything to go by, it's not bad work either. Some of the recordings clearly weren't done in a studio environment, but the actors are all going for it, and it seems both charming and fitting to me. I suppose my bar for quality might be lowered by my experience of the fan-voiced mods of the mid-to-late 2000s, though. Hallownest Vocalized sounds like it was mixed by Young Guru in comparison to The Nameless Mod and the various projects that added cut character Kaevee back into KOTOR 2.

You can find the instructions to install Hallownest Vocalized in the YouTube description of its launch trailer, above, but the process isn't that complex. You just have to download and run the Scarab Mod Launcher, fire it up, and locate the mod in its catalogue. Perhaps it'll be enough to keep you going until Silksong.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.