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.
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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.