I don't want to be too harsh since it's clear that this is the product of some passionate fans, but I feel like this game could use a little more fleshing out, especially on the GM side of things.

I run an RPG club at my school, and several members have been clamoring to play this game all year. While I have played some of Hollow Knight, I don't have that much familiarity with the larger lore and specific about the different kinds of creatures in the world of Hollow Knight. In my mind, a TTRPG tends to work. We ended up having an overall good time with the game, but it gives me a couple of suggestions for things that could be added in possible future editions to better facilitate play.

Step-by-step character creation instructions: I like how modular and personalized the characters can feel mechanically, but that complexity can make character creation difficult. One of the difficulties that I had with my players was knowing what needed to be included in a starting character. Step-by-step instructions for making a character would have helped speed the process along, especially since I was helping a large number of players make their characters for the first time. Having some example starting characters would also be nice so players who don't have strong preferences for their characters can jump into a campaign much more easily.

A Move/Combat Reference Sheet: This is something you see in a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPGS, but something I like about those games is that they usually include a little reference document listing the basic moves all the characters can do in and outside of combat. As a GM, I often had difficulty figuring out which skills should correspond to which actions. Whether it was the players looking around a room, socializing with the NPCs, or trying to remember certain things, if it wasn't a combat roll, the rules don't give as much explanation for when to account for proficiencies, stats like spook and cute, and which stats would better correspond to certain skills. As a result, it feels like there are a lot of aspects to this system that I ignored because I wasn't sure how to implement it.

A Fleshed Out NPC and Creature Compendium: As a GM with little knowledge of Hollow Knight, one of the most difficult things was trying to effectively design and run encounters. Just looking through Skald's Journal and the Duelists Notebook, I had a hard time gauging which creatures would present a healthy challenge to a group of 4+ players. In addition to these docs being incomplete, the fact that the traits are listed without an explanation for each creature meant that I had to rapidly switch docs to remember what effect each trait had. It would take up a lot of space, but copying over that text for each creature would be a big time same for the GM and help make combat better match the speedy frantic pace of the video game.

Also, the fact that this information is relegated to a separate document is concerning on a long-term level, since a GM who wouldn't be able to access the docs for whatever reason would be forced to do all of this extra basic work in creating a bunch of monsters. I would highly encourage the team to add the finished monsters on these documents into the PDF so future players can still use them even if the Google Docs go dead.

Example Adventure: This once again speaks to the lack of resources for GMs. The fact there are 114 pages primarily player character customization focused while only having about a single page for GM resources shows that this game was mostly designed with little consideration for how a campaign ought to be structured in the long term and what to try to include in the adventure. Perhaps this stuff was included in the Oakshade setting document that was linked on the GM resource page, but those links were dead by the time I found it (Another reason to preserve this information in this guide). As a result, I had difficulty trying to figure out what kind of goal my players could work towards. For my player group, I ended up taking an OSR adventure titled "The Incandescent Grottoes" and switching out the creatures with characters found in the Skald's Journal and the Duelist's Notebook. It more or less worked out, but I think an example dungeon would help to get a GM acquainted with the system and make it easier for groups to run it.

I want to come at this from a constructive standpoint because I know a lot of players who would be interested in more Hollow Knight adventures. However, the lack of resources and clarity on certain aspects of the game makes it hard for me to be enthusiastic about running a game like this in the future. That said, I do think there are a lot of good ideas in this system that people can have a lot of fun with, and I hope the team can iterate upon these ideas enough to make this game reach its full potential.

Thank you for reading, Best Wishes.