Hollow Knight and Dead Cells are now two of the best games on Switch.
They’re part of a huge trend in games, alongside games like Bloodborne, Ori, Dark Souls, Rogue Legacy
The games look different.
They feel different.
But at their core, they share a collection of the same powerful ideas.
They’re Metroidvanias, a simple name for a complicated genre.
What started as a mash-up of Metroid and Castlevania has since evolved into something far more
varied and interesting.
These new games have stopped copying Metroid and Castlevania, and instead, uncovered the
key components that make those games tick, while also delving into their own ideas.
Here are the ingredients to a great modern Metroidvania.
The core of a Metroidvania is exploration.
A sense of discovery.
The best of these constantly reward curiosity by offering up new and interesting environments
that make you feel like you just stumbled upon them.
Hollow Knight’s world is a deep labyrinth in which you seamlessly transition from one
surprising environment to the next.
Some of these environments are hidden through subtle pathways, you could easily miss during
your first time through, a massive beehive or an intricate sewer system.
The world isn’t linear, so when you find a new location, it feels like your own personal
discovery.
And that’s satisfying.
When I first found that bee hive, for example, I felt like I’d entered uncharted territory,
like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.
This emphasis on discovery makes for a tricky balancing act, and can frustrate certain players who
feel lost or untethered.
Stumped on where to go next?
You’ll likely be circling around the same areas over and over again --
if you’re not already searching for a guide online.
To minimize this frustration, games like Hollow Knight add subtle cues in the environment,
like lighting and art, to direct you to where you need to be.
You’re being guided by an invisible hand.
The discovery still feels like your own, even if the game was nudging you all along.
Metroidvanias share one common trick to guide the player: the gradual building-up of skills.
Each new item or ability allows the player to overcome the environment’s obstacles,
opening new areas to explore.
They call it gear gating.
The best Metroidvanias allow you to do things with these abilities that feel like they might
break the game.
And sometimes they do.
Shadow Complex revelled in letting you break the game.
One of its most memorable items was the Foam Gun, which allowed you to build bridges wherever
you wanted, using hardened foam to cobble your own pathway.
You could use it anywhere.
The only limit was your ammunition and ingenuity.
Clever use of the foam gun has allowed speedrunners to complete the game in 5 minutes.
In a good Metroidvania, these abilities limit your progression.
In a great Metroidvania, the allow you to become a master of the world around you.
But until you feel god-like, Metroidvania’s make you feel weak by sending you all over
the map, often on foot.
So, in a great Metroidvania, the basic act of movement needs to be satisfying, because
you’re going to be doing a heck of a lot of it.
Ori is almost liquid in the way it moves around the world,
flowing from one slingshot jump to the next.
Each of Ori’s upgrades, from a cloth glider to a wall jump, allow you to enter
new spaces, but they can be used throughout the entire adventure for no other reason than
they feel good.
You don’t just feel power over this world, you feel like you exist within it.
Which brings us to the real star of every Metroidvania: the world around you.
In a great Metroidvania, each new area needs to elicit a sense of wonder and awe from players.
This is rarely pulled off.
Rogue Legacy, an otherwise excellent game, definitely suffered from environmental drudgery.
The recently-released Chasm focuses a lot on equipment and character advancement, but
it left the environments feeling super dull and familiar.
Let’s compare these two scenes, one from Chasm, and one from Hollow Knight.
Both are set in a mine but the difference is pretty striking.
From the background details to the lighting, Hollow Knight’s mine really stands out.
The best environments in Metroidvanias tell a story without saying a word.
This crashed ship in Super Metroid is never really explained but it’s one of the franchise’s
most impactful moments, with it’s creepy corridors running in stark contrast to the
alien world outside.
In many modern Metroidvania masterpieces, story-driven revelations are not delivered
in static cutscenes but rather in subtle clues.
Games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne (yes, they are Metroidvanias, don’t @ me) are much more
interested in telling the tale of the world rather than telling the individual story of one character.
Even though you may not have been able to decipher the intricate plotline in Dark Souls,
you probably were able to glean quite a bit if you just took the time to poke around in
some of the darkened corners.
Hollow Knight followed this same model, telling the tale of a fallen kingdom of bugs and how
it came to be in such a sorry state.
For example, priest-like locusts prove to be one of the hardest fights in the game,
but their stubbornness reveals that they were actually guarding a doorway from an unthinking
horde of beasts.
All of this is conveyed in the visuals and never explicitly stated in the game.
You just have to piece it together for yourself.
We’re living in a golden age of Metroidvanias, as developers who grew up loving the genre
are taking it upon themselves to expand upon the mechanics they loved.
The stiff controls and limited palates of older Metroidvanias are being replaced by
more fluid, modern-feeling games that still maintain the most important tenets of the
genre.
These games must pull off a wide range of skill sets to really be considered successful,
from player progression to artwork to storytelling.
And it seems like there are plenty of developers up for the task.
As someone who loves Metroidvanias,
that is awesome news.