Hollow Knight Sound Effects: Foley Teacher Recreation with Reformer Pro

| by JJ Lyon

There’s a reason Hollow Knight sounds the way it does, and it’s not a Hollywood foley stage. It’s one guy, in a home studio, with a shirt, some paper, and a leather couch.

The Foley Teacher’s unpacks exactly how Christopher Larkin pulled it off — and how you can apply the same DIY thinking to your own game sound effects, with the help of a tool like Reformer Pro.

If you’ve been searching for how to create game sound effects at home on a budget, this one’s for you.

The Hollow Knight setup was already a “budget” job

Hollow Knight was made by Team Cherry, a three-person indie studio based in Adelaide, Australia, with development partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over A$57,000 by the end of 2014. Three people. Kickstarter money. A metroidvania about bugs.

The audio? Almost entirely the work of one person — Christopher Larkin — handling both music and sound design. As Larkin himself put it, “there was no huge budget, so we had to work with what we got.”

The Foley Teacher, who has worked on AAA titles like Avatar and Assassin’s Creed, is upfront about why this matters. On a AAA game you have an audio director, an audio team, an in-house foley artist, and the budget to cover huge amounts of locomotion, surface types, armour, utilities — the works. On Hollow Knight, Larkin had himself, his home studio, and whatever was in the room.

“There was no huge budget, so we had to work with what we got.” — Christopher Larkin, sole sound designer and composer on Hollow Knight

Watch the video

The DIY techniques Larkin actually used

The shirt

Larkin used the cloth movement of his own shirt — recorded live, on his body — for jump and land sounds across many NPCs and the main character. The Foley Teacher demonstrates a version of it on camera. It’s one of those techniques that sounds absurd until you hear it sit perfectly in the mix.

Paper for wing flaps

Insect enemy wings? Paper, recorded in front of the mic, then shaped and altered. Cheap, immediate, and once you process it, unmistakably insect.

The leather couch

Used for creaks, resonance, and impacts. As The Foley Teacher puts it: “Be creative. Use your space. Record as much as you can.”

The point Larkin keeps making, and The Foley Teacher amplifies, is about the human touch. Pulling sounds from a library gets you to point A. Recording your own performance — even with a shirt and a piece of paper — is what gets you past it. Sample libraries are everyone’s sample libraries. Your shirt is only yours.

“Pulling from libraries brings you to point A. But if you want to reach another level, you need the unique recordings that go beyond field recording.”

Where Reformer Pro fits in

The Foley Teacher introduces Reformer Pro at the point in the video where library samples and raw recordings stop being enough — when you need a stylised texture that doesn’t exist anywhere, and you don’t have a full-fledged foley stage to record it.

His exact framing: “We can record the paper and then alter the sound with a tool I also like to use and which is really helpful if you don’t have a full-fledged Foley stage. It’s from Krotos and it’s called Reformer Pro.”

The clearest demonstration comes during the Hollow Knight whoosh. He’d already recorded an in-sync foley pass that gave him the initial impact — the punch that drives the movement forward. But he wanted something more: a bubbly textural tail to sit underneath it. So:

  1. He recorded a few loops of bubble-like textures.
  2. He imported them into Reformer Pro as the sound source.
  3. He used his voice as the live input to trigger and shape those textures in real time.
  4. He layered the result back against the original impact and added a touch of Renaissance Vox and Manny Marroquin reverb to taste.

The output is a stylised whoosh with character — soft, organic, specific to the project, and impossible to find in a stock library. As he says: “I like this way of thinking out of the box and using tools like Reformer Pro.”

That’s the workflow in a nutshell. Record your own raw textures. Load them into Reformer Pro. Perform them with your voice. Mix back against your in-sync foley. Done.

“Reformer Pro is really helpful if you don’t have a full-fledged Foley stage.” — The Foley Teacher

Why this matters if you’re making game sound effects on a budget

The connection here is direct. If you’re an indie sound designer recreating the feel of a game like Hollow Knight — small impacts, organic textures, dozens of stylised cues, no realism crutch to fall back on — you’re staring at three options:

  1. Hire a foley stage. Great results, expensive, often not available on indie timelines.
  2. Buy your way out with sample libraries. Fast, but everything ends up sounding like the same five libraries every other indie is using.
  3. Record your own foley at home and use Reformer Pro to stylise, texture, and layer it.

Option three is what’s actually happening in this video. Your shirt, your paper, your garden foliage handle the performance. Reformer Pro handles the texture and variation when you need to push past realism into something stylised — exactly the territory Hollow Knight lives in.

The time-saving angle is real too. Instead of editing, chopping, and automating sample layers to shape a texture, you perform it with your voice in one pass. It’s the difference between assembling a sound and playing it.

Worth being straight about this: Reformer Pro isn’t a magic wand, and The Foley Teacher doesn’t pitch it as one. You still need decent source material going in, and you still need ears. What it does is close the gap between “I have an idea for a sound” and “I have that sound in my session” — fast.

It’s the difference between assembling a sound and playing it.

A loose workflow to try yourself

If you want to apply what’s in the video to your own project:

  • Watch the scene with the sound off. Decide what the action feels like — sharp, soft, wet, granular, bubbly.
  • Find something in your house with roughly that character. Clothing for cloth movement. Paper for wings. Couch leather for creaks. Garden foliage for footsteps on plants. The Foley Teacher’s “secret weapon” is literally a piece of artificial plant he found on a street in Düsseldorf.
  • Record raw textures with whatever decent mic you have.
  • Load the textures into Reformer Pro.
  • Perform them with your voice. Match the rhythm, energy, and dynamics of the on-screen action.
  • Layer the Reformer Pro result back against any in-sync foley you recorded for impact.
  • Sweeten with EQ and reverb to taste.

Variation matters. As The Foley Teacher notes: “The sounds have to sound similar, but they have to have variation.” Reformer Pro helps with that too — every voice performance is slightly different, so you get organic variation for free across multiple takes.

The point

Hollow Knight is proof that distinctive, atmospheric game audio can come out of a single home studio. The Foley Teacher’s video is proof that the same DIY philosophy is still the smartest way to work if you’re an indie sound designer in 2026.

You don’t need a foley stage. You need ears, a few household objects, and a tool that lets you turn raw recordings into stylised textures by performing them with your voice. That tool is Reformer Pro.

Pair the two and you’ve got the same setup that built Hollownest — just with a faster route to the finish.