I’ve come to an understanding of why I tend to dislike most metroidvanias and open world games.
At first, I thought I had just learned everything the genres have to offer. In metroidvanias, you get keys which unlock doors. They’re special keys, but you can only take that so far, right?
But that’s not really what made me feel bored with the metroidvania. Look at the good metroidvanias:
And these are some which I have generally been bored by:
What I realized is that the key difference between the two groups was not in the quality of their structure or mechanics, but in how I felt about the exploration in those games.
Animal Well is often praised for its atmosphere, and I agree with the praise. But there is only one atmosphere: creepy, unnerving, overgrown and pristine. When you go to the other side of the world in Animal Well, you encounter rooms which are roughly similar to the rooms you came from.
Meanwhile, in Hollow Knight, you go from a quiet town to a verdant forest, teeming with life, to a buzzing hive, to a cesspool of malice, to a grand, abandoned citadel, to a lonely chasm on the outskirts of civilization. Every time you get a new ability, not only can you open new paths forward, but those paths take you somewhere completely different than anywhere you have been before.
I think the effect is similar in Super Metroid, even though it is more primitive in its execution. Your mind fills in the gaps there, where a green hue and some sinking mud becomes a lush and untouched cavern, and a “submerged pirate spaceship” comes alive in the imagination in the same way about halfway through the game.
This is the case with all the metroidvanias I dislike. Ori and the Blind Forest feels great to play, and is beautiful, but you never really get excited to see the next area because, well, everything is beautiful. Everything is the same! Imagine an Ori game where you start in an utterly dark cavern, finding little pockets of light. You find strange ruins, or holds of civilization, until finally coming to the surface, where there is, at last, immaculate beauty! Wouldn’t that be exciting?
The key to exploration is variety and novelty. Opening doors with cool keys doesn’t matter if you’re already sure what’s behind it!
I wanted to also note that this is why I like certain open world games and not others! Breath of the Wild has some cool places, but a lot of what you’re doing feels like the same stuff. My favorite parts of that game are when you arrive in a really special place, like the four tribes’ towns, or encounter something really specific and interesting, like the random NPCs.
My friend James likes to refer to Zelda games as “Weirdo meeting games”, because that’s what you do - you blow open a wall somewhere and meet some weirdo! And you can judge how much I love a Zelda game primarily by how interesting, grounded, and novel the weirdos are! For reference, the list goes, in order:
Anyways, I just had this realization, and I thought I’d share. I’d like to dig more into what makes the places and encounters in good games so great, and why games have a seemingly hard time pulling off exploration which is novel and exciting.
The real insight here? Don’t follow your first instinct all the time! I thought I was just sick of the metroidvania formula, but it turned out to be far more nuanced than that.