Beginner guide
The first two hours are walking and listening punctuated by a fight you were not ready for.
Talk to everyone in the settlement before leaving, save on arrival, and if a quest marker never appears after the first mission, restart the game — that is the reported fix and the studio's own advice in the thread.
Your first two hours in The Hollow are mostly walking and listening, punctuated by a firefight you were not ready for. This page is the short version of what to do with that time, in the order the game hands it to you — including the part almost nobody warns you about, which is that the game can simply stop pointing at things.
Before the first mission
You start as Morok, coming into Zaslon to find out what your father's weapon was and who holds it now. Nothing in the opening hours requires you to fight well. It does require you to talk to everyone standing where people stand, because objectives in this game live in conversation. Walk the settlement first, then leave.
Save the moment you arrive anywhere new. Save Anytime is listed on the store page precisely because the game expects you to lean on it; there are no generous checkpoints.
The opening quest, and the missing marker
The first real chain reported by players runs through a scout stationed at the Petryvki hanging rock anomaly. He sends you after TNT to stop an incoming group, and tells you to report a mole to the officer back in the village. That is where the trouble starts: the marker does not appear, and walking the map in circles does nothing.
Here is what actually worked, from the discussion thread where it was reported:
- Restart the game. The player who hit this wrote back that after a restart the pointers came back and progress continued. The studio's own reply in the same thread was that reloading clears this class of bug.
- Go back to the officer's post anyway. If he is not standing where he was, check the buildings around it rather than the road — the report describes the post being empty and the objective still live.
- Do not assume you failed the quest. Nothing in the reported thread indicates the chain breaks; it stalls.
What to spend your first hours on
- Learn one location properly. The map is semi-open and the named places carry the objectives: Vanavara, Sverdlovo, Nahirna Zachepilivka, Vanavara-Zachepilivka. Knowing one village's buildings and exits pays off later when a task sends you back.
- Do not hoard metal. The anomaly zone rejects quantities of it, and the store page is explicit that the region was built on human labour for that reason. You are not going to assemble a stockpile.
- Read the weather. Fog and thunderstorms change what you can see; night changes who is walking around. Sitting at a fire until dawn is a legitimate, intended option.
- Check faces before you trust them. The night design asks whether the person approaching your fire is still a person. Approach them; do not let them close the distance for free.
- Fix the image before you fix your aim. If everything judders, drop the in-game refresh rate — the developer named that as the cause on a 2K 180 Hz report. If the picture is muddy, the Contrast slider (added 3 June 2026) does more than brightness tweaking.
Settings worth changing on day one
| Setting | Why |
|---|---|
| Contrast | The lighting is deliberately flat and grey; contrast finds shapes in fog |
| Refresh rate | The studio's own fix for stutter on high-refresh displays |
| Mouse sensitivity | In-game sliders since 9 June 2026 — no system-level workaround needed |
| FSR | Turn it on for integrated or entry GPUs; the minimum spec is Intel Iris XE |
The minimum specification really is an integrated GPU (Intel Iris XE or Radeon Vega 7), so this is a game you can run on a laptop — but you will want FSR and a lower resolution to hold a stable frame rate.
What not to worry about
There is no crafting tree, no currency, no shop, and no code redemption system in this game. If you see a "The Hollow codes" page anywhere, it is describing a different product. What you carry is five locally made types of weapon and whatever the story hands you; the weapons page covers how that arsenal is put together.
When you are ready to leave the starting area, read Zaslon and its factions so that the names in dialogue stop being noise, and keep quest progression open in a second tab for the next time an objective goes silent.
