Saturday Morning Gaming: Metroidvanias
There are a couple dozen tried-and-true formulas for getting the player to engage with the game that they’re playing. The novelty of Pong told the player “hey, this is you” and then gave you this: |
The novelty of that wore off pretty quickly. The Atari 2600 gave us Pitfall which had us be Pitfall Harry and we had to run around collecting treasure and that got us from 1982 until 1986 when, a month away from each other, Nintendo released Metroid in August 1986 and Castlevania in September 1986. Despite the former being sci-fi and the latter being fantasy, the main focus of the game was the same: Here’s a map. Explore it.
And one of the first things Metroid gave you was a locked door. Now, it wasn’t opened with a key. It was opened with a particular weapons upgrade. But the gist was the same. Here’s a map but it nudges you to explore this part first until you find the key to the second part (where you’ll find the key to the third part) and so on and so forth until the entire map is available to you. (It wasn’t until Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest that they introduced the key mechanism to the Castlevanias).
And as you get upgrades, areas on the map that used to be inaccessible now open themselves to you. Oh, the explosives can open up weak walls. Oh, the grapplegloves let you climb cliffs that were too high to jump to. Oh, the magic mirror opens the hidden doors that you thought were just mirrors for the first half of the game.
Along the way, of course, you get a bunch of flavor text. You’re trying to prevent the end of the world. You’re trying to kill the evil genetically engineered monster that has ruined the facility. Hey, you’re trying to kill Dracula himself.
But the emphasis is as much on the map as it is the story taking place on it. It’s about finding the new areas, opening them up, and learning that there were a handful of places in the early maps that you didn’t even know you couldn’t get to because you didn’t have the tools you needed to open the doors that you didn’t even know were doors yet.
My absolute favorite Metroidvania game is probably Arkham Asylum (or Arkham City (Or Arkham Knight)).
I mention all of this because I got into a similar discussion at work and I was told that I should really play “Hollow Knight”, a Metroidvania from 2017 that won a bunch of “Game of the Year” awards and I thought “I think I might have that already?” and, yep, it was a giveaway a couple years ago on the PS5.
And I’m not *TOO* far into it but it reminded me how much I love this particular genre. I’ll get more into Hollow Knight next week, once I figure out what the heck I’m supposed to do now that I have the Mantis Claw.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is promotional art for Metroid.)
I was a massive fan of Castlevania while the vast majority of my friends were into Metroid and Rygar (which, I suppose, was more akin to Ninja Gaiden than Metroid). Not really sure why that was…I suppose it was a combination of not wanting to compete with my friends in trying to beat Metroid and preferring the D&D-adjacency of Castlevania. And I never played Simon’s Quest…
I, also, believe I have Hollow Knight floating around in my Steam collection. Suppose I should check it out.Report
Hollow Knight does not hold your hand. I’m not calling it a “soulslike” or anything like that because, so far, I haven’t needed twitch skills as much as mere hand-eye coordination and puzzle-solving abilities.
But it dumps you into the world and tells you “go nuts” without explaining what nuts are.
I’m having a blast and have only had to google “what in the heck do I do now?!?” once (the answer involved using a down attack on the purple mushrooms).Report
Hollow Knight is great. It was one of the first non-console games I had played in a long time and one of the first I got from Steam, and the fact that it was cheap and not in shrinkwrap made me assume it was going to be a trivial thing, but it was quite deep. And definitely difficult, at least for an average gamer like me — I did defeat what I assume was the “final boss” but there were other battles available that I knew I had no chance at.
I struggle sometimes with these game genre definitions though — to me, a “metroidvania” suggests not just the features you mentioned but also a 2-D platformer, i.e. something like original or super Metroid (I never played the “vania” part of the term). I would never have considered any of the Arkham games to be metroidvanias, though they may have some metroidvania-like elements. But I understand my own definition is not the only valid one — I’ve sometimes found that out the hard way by buying a game listed in that category that totally did not feel like an MV to me.Report
The “Can a MV be 3D?” debate has resulted in many broken hearts and broken bones, but I think that it absolutely can be.
That was one of the big eye-openers for me in the first few hours of Arkham Asylum. The fact that they translated it to 3D is one of the (many) reasons I love the game.Report