I have spent so many hours wandering Hallownest that I'm starting to hear the rain of the City of Tears in my sleep. By 2026, after nearly a decade of pogo-bouncing off spikes and waiting for any Silksong crumb, I thought the little mysteries were drying up. Then the Hollow Knight subreddit gave me a reason to boot up the game again. The community discovered that the telescope in the Watcher's Spire doesn't actually let the Knight look through it. Instead, the game silently swaps in a video file and plays it over the view. That tiny piece of scenery is really a disguised cinematic player, and it absolutely broke my perception of Hallownest.
Let me set the scene. Near the top of the Watcher's Spire, above the soaked windows and the patrolling sentries, there's a small telescope. Inspecting it normally gives you a sweeping view of the City of Tears. It seems like a quiet lore moment, a chance to soak in the atmosphere before you trudge onward. But according to a fan named Pingu212, that panorama is actually a hidden video. When you press the interact key, the game doesn't move some camera rig. It plays a clip. That means any brave modder can open the game's assets, find the original skyline video, and replace it with whatever cursed media they want.
Pingu212's first experiment was a masterpiece of questionable taste. They replaced the telescope video with a very 1980s television commercial for Freddie Freaker, a mascot that invited you to call a phone number for a joke. Through the magic of the reverse-engineered spyglass, the Knight could gaze across the historical waterways and receive a loud serving of retro advertising. You can even hear the game's raindrops pattering behind the commercial, which makes it feel like a bizarre late-night broadcast from deep within the kingdom. It is the kind of discovery that the phrase 'for science' was invented for.
Once the community learned that the game would accept a different video file, somebody posed the obvious question: what happens if you put an entire film in there? Pingu212 answered a little over 24 hours later by cramming all 90 minutes of Shrek into the telescope. Yes, the whole thing. Swap the original file with a roughly 1.2GB video and the Knight can stare into the distance while the full ogre romance unfolds over the rooftops. When the movie isn't being fast-forwarded, you can still hear those same City of Tears raindrops behind Donkey's dialogue, which is a surreal audio combination I will never recover from.
This hidden video trick doesn't stop at the telescope. The community dug around and found that several other disguised moments are just video files waiting to be swapped. Here are the main places where Hallownest secretly rolls tape:
| In-game moment | What is actually happening |
|---|---|
| Inspecting the Watcher's Spire telescope | A secret video clip plays instead of a live camera pan |
| Killing a Dreamer | The dramatic cutscene is a replaceable video file |
| Riding a stag beetle | The fast-travel sequence is a video clip |
| Watching the blacksmith upgrade animation | A hidden video plays behind the upgrade moment |
| Learning a nail art | The tutorial showcase is another swappable video |
That's a lot of opportunities for chaos. With the right replacements, you could make the Dreamer deaths play silent film reels, turn the stag beetle ride into a music video, or make every nail art lesson open with a different meme. The modding potential here is enormous, and I say that as someone who once spent an entire afternoon just making the Knight wear a silly hat.
What fascinates me most is how this changes the way I think about Hollow Knight's famous atmosphere. The City of Tears feels so alive because of its layered sound and mood, yet part of that immersive skyline view was always just a pre-recorded clip. It's a clever development shortcut that the team hid in plain sight. For years, we all accepted it as a real in-game vantage point. Now we know the truth: the Watcher's Spire isn't a scenic overlook, it's a tiny movie theater for bugs.
As we keep waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong, these discoveries remind me why the original remains so beloved. The community's curiosity hasn't slowed down. We're still poking at the game's innards, replacing carefully crafted visuals with ogres and 80s commercials, and somehow making Hallownest feel fresh again. If you need me, I'll be at the top of the Watcher's Spire, rewatching Shrek for the third time through a bug telescope, with raindrops as my surround sound.
Insights are sourced from Rock Paper Shotgun, where PC-focused reporting often highlights how developers lean on pre-rendered sequences and clever asset tricks to preserve mood while keeping performance predictable. That lens helps contextualize Hollow Knight’s “telescope view” as a deliberately staged cinematic layer—an atmospheric shortcut that also becomes a modding playground once fans realize it’s just a swappable video file, the same kind of behind-the-scenes technique that can turn quiet worldbuilding beats into remixable, meme-ready moments.
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