You’ve probably spent hours wandering through the damp, melancholy corridors of Hallownest. You’ve beaten the False Knight, danced with Hornet, and maybe even felt a bit cocky after taking down a Dream Boss or two. Then you find it. Tucked away at the very top of the Kingdom’s Edge, past the Great Hopper and the primal aspids that everyone collective hates, lies the Colosseum of Fools. It’s loud. It’s bloody. And the Trial of the Fool is waiting there to absolutely wreck your afternoon.
Honestly, this isn't just another combat challenge. It is the definitive wall for Hollow Knight players. While the first two trials—the Trial of the Warrior and the Trial of the Conqueror—feel like manageable tests of skill, the third one is a sheer vertical cliff of difficulty. It’s a grueling, multi-wave endurance test that demands more than just fast fingers; it requires a specific kind of mental grit that most games don't even try to touch.
What makes the Trial of the Fool so brutal?
Complexity. That's the short answer. Most bosses in Hollow Knight have a pattern you can memorize. You learn the tell, you dodge, you hit. Rinse and repeat. The Trial of the Fool doesn't care about your patterns. It throws 17 waves of increasingly chaotic enemies at you, often changing the physical layout of the arena while you’re mid-air.
The floor disappears. Seriously.
About halfway through, the floor retracts into spikes, leaving you with nothing but a few small platforms. Then those disappear too, forcing you to wall-jump and dash while fighting winged sentries and those miserable Primal Aspids. If you haven't mastered the art of the "pogo" (down-striking with your nail to stay airborne), you are basically dead meat the second the floor goes away. There is no room for panic here. If you twitch the wrong way, you fall into the spikes, lose a mask, and get hit by a projectile on the way up. It’s a domino effect of failure.
The Charm setup most people get wrong
Everyone wants to go full glass cannon. They load up on Strength and Quick Slash and think they can just out-DPS the Colosseum. You can’t. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Because there are so few opportunities to heal, your charm build needs to be way more balanced than it would be for a standard boss fight like the Mantis Lords.
I’ve seen players swear by the Dream Wielder charm. It sounds niche, right? But in the Trial of the Fool, it’s a godsend. It lets you harvest Soul from the slower enemies—like the Shielded Fools—much faster. You leave one slow guy alive at the end of a wave, Dream Nail him a few times, and boom: full health and full Soul for the next nightmare wave.
Nailmaster’s Glory is another one that feels optional until it isn't. Being able to charge a Great Slash in a fraction of a second is the difference between killing a Primal Aspid instantly or letting it fire off a three-way shot that knocks you into a pit. You need that one-shot capability. If you’re spending three hits to kill a basic flying mob, you’re giving the game too many chances to hurt you.
Survival is about knowing when to stop
Most deaths in the Colosseum happen because of greed. You see an opening, you try to get two hits in, and you get punished. In the Trial of the Fool, a single mistake usually leads to three more. You get hit, you lose your rhythm, you try to heal when it isn't safe, and then a Squib flies into your face.
It’s a test of patience.
You have to learn the "safe" enemies. The heavy, slow-moving ground units are your best friends because they are easy to kite. If you can keep one alive while dodging its predictable lunges, you can buy yourself thirty seconds of breathing room. Use that time. Breathe. Let your hands stop shaking. This isn't just a game mechanic; it’s a psychological tactic.
The God Tamer problem
After surviving the "no floor" section—which is widely considered the hardest part of the entire game outside of the Pantheon of Hallownest—you finally reach the end. You’re tired. Your eyes are burning. And then the God Tamer shows up.
Technically, the God Tamer is a duo boss: a tamer and her massive beast.
Here is the secret: ignore the tamer. Seriously. Focus everything on the beast. If you kill the beast, the tamer just gives up and the fight ends immediately. It’s a bit of a trick by Team Cherry. They want you to feel overwhelmed by two targets, but you only actually need to kill the big one. Stay over it, pogo on its back, and watch out for the spit. If you try to split your focus, you’ll get cornered.
Why do we even do this to ourselves?
The reward for the Trial of the Fool is, frankly, kind of underwhelming on paper. You get some Geo and a trophy/achievement. You get the Mark of the Fool. But in the Hollow Knight community, that mark is a badge of honor. It’s the moment you stop being a casual player and start being a master of the game's systems.
It’s about the flow state.
When you finally beat it, you don't feel like you got lucky. You feel like you saw through the code. You knew exactly where that Volatile Zote was going to spawn. You predicted the trajectory of the Mantis Petra's blade. You were faster than the game. That's a high most modern games are too afraid to give players because they’re worried about "accessibility." Team Cherry didn't care about that. They wanted to make something that felt earned.
Actionable steps for your next run
If you're stuck, stop trying to brute force it. Your gear matters, but your strategy matters more.
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- Upgrade your Nail to the Pure Nail. Do not even attempt this with a channeled nail unless you are a speedrunner or a masochist. You need the raw damage to clear waves quickly.
- Use the Abyss Shriek. When those flying mages (Soul Twisters) spawn, a single Abyss Shriek can clear multiple targets if you position yourself right. It’s the highest DPS move in your arsenal. Use it.
- Practice the Pogo. Go to the Basin or the Edge and just practice staying in the air for minutes at a time by hitting enemies from above. If you can't stay airborne for the entire "no floor" sequence, you will never beat the trial.
- Equip Quick Focus. If you do find a half-second to heal, you need that heal to pop immediately. Without it, you’ll get interrupted 90% of the time.
- Watch the spawns. The enemies always spawn in the same spots for every wave. If you memorize where the most dangerous ones (Aspids and mages) appear, you can be standing right there with a Great Slash charged before they even materialize.
The Trial of the Fool is a brutal, unforgiving, and occasionally unfair piece of game design. It’s also one of the most rewarding challenges in the Metroidvania genre. Take a break if you need to. Your muscle memory actually improves while you sleep. Come back tomorrow, stay calm, and stop letting the Primal Aspids live for more than two seconds. You've got this.