It is not uncommon for video games and other media to feature secondary characters or even protagonists who don't fully recall their past lives. This trope can help the audience feel closer to those characters while also not feeling completely alone in having to uncover all the secrets and mysteries of a world that's not familiar to them. This narrative structure often helps build up stories from the ground up, with compelling characters who grow and learn new things about themselves and what their story really is about, and such is the case for both Biomutant and Hollow Knight.
These games both feature a main protagonist who doesn't remember what happened to them during their early years, either because of the weight of the associated trauma or because they were away from home for too long. In Hollow Knight, the protagonist is a Vessel, a bug born with Void within themselves because of the Pale King's plans to stop the Infection from spreading across the kingdom of Hollownest. Biomutant's protagonist is a character of the players' design, but has a fixed backstory that sees them as the child of a Wung-Fu master who died at the hands of the alpha predator, Lupa-Lupin.
Biomutant and Hollow Knight Tell Similar, Yet Different Stories
The fact that Hollow Knight and Biomutant share this detail is no coincidence because both are story-driven games, and having a protagonist who feels like a stranger in their own world is not too different from the way players can feel. Exploration is a key element in both games, and their worlds are strange and unfamiliar - especially so in the case of Hollow Knight, where Hollownest is a unique setting that bears little to no resemblance to the world players are accustomed to. Biomutant's world is also very different from Earth, yet it carries the markings of pollution and other disasters that are humanity's fault.
In Hollow Knight, many of the Vessels were left for dead in the Abyss by the Pale King and the White Lady as they searched for a pure Vessel that could contain the Radiance and seal her away. The chosen one turned out to be the Hollow Knight, who was misjudged as pure and proved to be incapable of having the Radiance cast away. Thus, the Infection began all over again at the beginning of the game. The Knight, the game's protagonist, is a sibling to the Hollow Knight who tried to escape the Abyss right when the latter was handpicked by the Pale King to be the perfect Vessel, but their first attempt to flee failed. On another attempt, the Knight and other bugs found their way out of the Abyss, and the game's protagonist spent time away from Hollownest, growing stronger but also forgetting their own past.
In Biomutant, the game's protagonist lived in a quiet village where the art of Wung-Fu was born as a sort of physical finesse that was more about improving oneself rather than something focused on combat. However, the village had to do something to protect its residents from the predators, and this set in motion a chain of events that culminated in Lupa-Lupin being on a rampage and killing the protagonist's parents. This made the main character stray from their origins and travel somewhere else, far from those painful memories, only to come back later not remembering what had happened.
This narrative structure works very well in many pieces of media, ranging from books to movies, video games, and anime. Biomutant and Hollow Knight are just prime examples of this trope, and while they are very different games from one another it is something that ties them together.
Biomutant is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.