Regarding Elden Ring, I would argue it does the sense of exploration better than Hollow Knight, but only by a small degree. For every area, there’s no map at the start, and the entire map’s size is obscured since it only shows what you’ve traveled through. It gets bigger as you go, but it’s still obscured by a fog of war for areas that fit inside the map, but you don’t have a map fragment for. You can see on the map where you can obtain the fragment, but not how to get there. Most times you can just cut a straight line to it, but sometimes it’s a pain.

All that said, the thing it does better than Hollow Knight for exploration is a limitation of Hollow Knight’s map system. It’s split into different rooms, and each room has finite entrances and exits. Because you fill out the map through exploration, you’re going to know what you have and haven’t found.

Because Elden Ring gives you the entirety of the map, it’s both helpful and not. You can figure out (mostly) how to get from point A to point B, and you have markers for everywhere you’ve been. There’s two minor issues with that, though. It’s a 2D map for a 3D world, which means you end up with some locations not being properly shown, because they’re underneath cliffs. The second is that the map does almost nothing to show what places of interest there are. You have large buildings shown, but that excludes all the catacombs (dungeon areas) you can visit. There are areas on the map that are right there, but due to the topography you have no idea how to get there. Going by the map alone means you’re going to miss out on a solid amount of the content available.

It’s because the map is so limiting that it feels so good. You’re able to use it to figure where places are in directional relation, but you still have to look yourself to try and uncover areas. My first run, I prided myself on uncovering everything. I searched high and low, inspected the map to make sure I went to every corner, and really made sure I knew what was out there, and it felt amazing in terms of how much content there was and how much exploration you could do. I started a second run when the DLC came out, and found an area that, somehow, I had entirely missed. It took over a hundred and forty hours of searching, really searching, to get what I thought was complete, and it still wasn’t. It was a fantastic feeling on my second run.

Hollow Knight’s map is excellent. The gameplay is excellent, the exploration is rewarding and challenging. But the issue it has is that it only has those two dimensions to work with. Elden Ring really works to emphasize that third dimension when scouring for secrets.