Why I Don’t Like Metroidvanias
The Metroidvania genre, an overly specific portmanteau that hybridizes a few formulaic tropes of game design, is almost a trite way to describe games. And for a time, it felt like the genre reached full saturation in the industry. Maze-like exploration in an often 2D environment, gradual ability unlocking that results in extensive backtracking, and other such tropes of the genre have put me off from ever truly enjoying my time while playing these Metroidvanias. Though I’ve given games like Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight their due, attempting to traipse my way through their labyrinthine worlds twice respectively, I’ve achingly put down the controller each time before the credits rolled, causing me to wonder what it is about this genre that fails to click with my brain.
Many of the beloved Metroidvania games that I feel familiar with are designed in an entangled way that effectively turns me away from the experience. I am a player who enjoys exploration to a limited capacity, something that’s necessary to the formula of how Metroidvania games are designed: around curiosity, patience, trial-and-error, and puzzle-platforming. Above all, Metroidvanias always strike me as feeling directionless — which, I admit, sounds immediately reductive. In so many instances, Metroidvania games hide their maps, obfuscate their objectives, and feel disorienting as a result. I don’t need a constant waypoint at my feet, but the stubborn reticence that so many Metroidvanias display through their emphasis on non-linear environmental investigation is never something that has increased my appreciation of a game’s world.
As I’ve mentioned before in previous Epilogue articles, puzzles are often a major turn-off for me when I’m otherwise enjoying a game. Additionally, the difficulty inherent in platforming scenarios that not only require some degree of puzzle-based reasoning, but also precise, high-stakes manipulation of a character through harsh terrain, is a majorly stifling factor to my enjoyment of an experience. While some of my favorite games of all time like Gris and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild involve aspects that comprise this Metroidvania genre — namely puzzle platforming and open-ended, non-linear exploration respectively — the composite product that is produced through the Metroidvania formula is always compounded in a way that makes me feel unenthusiastic to continue playing.
Metroidvanias also seem to often gate major points of progress before tests of sorts, namely boss encounters which sometimes take the form of puzzles in their own right. I confess, I eagerly avoid severe difficulty in the majority of games I play. But some of my favorite gaming experiences are derived from inventive, visually and mechanically memorable challenges, so I struggle to conclude that it’s the bosses themselves that deter me from Metroidvanias. The difficulty, sure, is certainly a key factor that impedes my ability to immerse myself in this genre, but it’s also the way Metroidvania bosses tend to make an otherwise non-linear (map-based exploration) game feel suddenly confined to an often claustrophobic space. Whereas the Metroidvania genre often throws the player into a directionless abyss, the bosses in this genre often close off all other possibilities of progression or exploration. If you’re lucky, you can turn back and build your skills; sometimes, however, you get trapped.
There are so many games that I’ve purchased and played that, on paper, I felt like I should love. Metroidvanias happen to populate the largest percentage of false positives that fall into this category. Somewhere between Ori and the Blind Forest, Hollow Knight, and many others, I have felt out of touch with the reasons why people become so passionate about the challenges and design tropes characteristic of this Metroidvania genre.
Why I Don’t Enjoy Ori and the Blind Forest
Ori and the Blind Forest is the first explicitly Metroidvania style game that I remember playing, though I was surely exposed to iterations on the genre when I was younger. I picked up Ori because of some important surface-level qualities: the painterly art style that tastefully blends 2D and 3D details, the hauntingly gorgeous soundtrack that carries each emotional moment, and the promise of an impactfully written story that confronts themes of life and loss. Make no mistake, Ori absolutely nails those aesthetic and narrative notes throughout the entire game; there was never a moment where I felt them falter or diminish the experience through inconsistency. Rather, when I think back on Ori, the uneasiness that bubbles in my body is somewhat checked and balanced by these high notes.
But then there’s the experience of actually playing Ori, which I cannot say was ever consistently enjoyable to me. The abilities you unlock throughout the game bring some small degree of satisfaction, and the promise of exploring a new area in a fresh way is obviously there, but Ori is a game that feels strangely punishing. Simply put, I never had fun playing Ori, even though I found its aforementioned strengths to be worth experiencing. Somewhere between retracing my steps, running into a stray spark, platforming in the dark, and losing arbitrary amounts of progress to cheap-feeling deaths, I twice decided that Ori was not a game I was interested in finishing.
It’s a shame that Ori put me off this explicitly, because I think some of its elements of game design are thoughtful and provide payoff. The tense, lengthy ascensions up impossible landscapes as a rapidly rising tide below your character come to mind. Sure, I died upwards of a hundred times just trying to escape one of these sequences, but the feeling of success caused me to jump out of my chair in celebration — and that’s what I remember. I was cherishing the relief of knowing I wouldn’t have to go back and make yet another attempt, but when I think of Ori, I think of these moments of triumph. Sadly, however, they are few and far between. Most of the moment-to-moment activities in Ori involve mundane enemy encounters, trying out new abilities through an upgradeable skill tree, and so on. Nothing that, to me, seems memorable or engaging.
Ultimately, the reason I quit playing Ori and the Blind Forest during that second attempted playthrough is because I started to feel an exhaustion around the game. I had spent over 20 hours listening to the same soundtrack, and what first felt ethereal started making me feel frustration — even producing symptoms of depression that I’m normally able to suppress. During that time, I had retraced my steps through the narrative and complex environment. I had died innumerable times. It was a slog to simply reach where I had abandoned my first playthrough. Ironically, that tedium and exhaustion built up like lactic acid and I couldn’t bear it anymore. It became better for my mental health to put the controller down.
On a number of occasions, I have considered the idea of trying out Ori and the Blind Forest’s sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Our own Ben Vollmer glowingly reviewed the game, concluding that there’s “no doubt that Will of the Wisps has the ability to stand the test of time.” Though stunted by initial performance issues, the game has ostensibly been patched up into a package that retains high value. So when I see Will of the Wisps dipping below $10, I am routinely tempted. But each time, I have held off, because even though it’s a new game that wouldn’t replicate those identical feelings that I hold towards Blind Forest, some irrational part of my brain is worried that it will. That nagging feeling made me realize that, in the same way that I fail to enjoy fighting games, for instance, I feel an explicit aversion to the Metroidvania genre.
Why I Don’t Enjoy Hollow Knight
My experience with Ori and the Blind Forest is not altogether dissimilar from my two unsuccessful attempts at working my way through Hollow Knight. Readers of Epilogue will be well familiarized with my article that reflects on my aborted first playthrough at the game. Citing the increasing frustration I felt with the save system in Hollow Knight, relegating stopping points to far-away, often inaccessible benches, I was disappointed with myself for giving up on the game.
Similar to Ori and the Blind Forest, I wanted to love Hollow Knight. I was pulled in by the immaculate and expressive art direction, the dynamic and somber soundtrack, and the cryptic lore that gradually pieced together the story of Hallownest. But nearly from the word, “go,” I found myself beating a nail into a wall — sometimes literally — trying to progress. Whether it was the half-marathons retreading ground to capture my ghostly shade or dying for the thousandth time to scenarios that didn’t feel fair, Hollow Knight was the first game that I ever abandoned when I actively streamed video games on Twitch. And that ate me up inside.
Ironically, the internet seems to love my article on Hollow Knight, as it routinely brings in new readers who express camaraderie with my own frustrations. And for a time, many of my closest gaming friends actively practiced speedruns of the game, grinding their impressive times to respectable digits, competing in tournaments and randomizer races. The degree of expertise surrounding Hollow Knight in the Epilogue community is frankly astounding, and so I eventually convinced myself to love the game vicariously. If I watched someone else play and enjoy it, I still was experiencing the art, the music, the storytelling, and that felt gratifying in a way that playing Hollow Knight often didn’t.
Eventually, I took some time away from Twitch. When I tepidly dipped my toe back into the proverbial pool, I decided to revisit a few select games: The Last Guardian, the game that sparked and inspired my passion for games as an adult, as well as Hollow Knight, a spectre on my horizon that I hoped to finally vanquish. Little did I know, I would abandon each game, as well as the act of streaming, once again.
Armed with knowledge from the Hollow Knight community that allowed me to solve the central problem, which I cited in my article as the reason I stopped playing the game, I began my second playthrough of Hollow Knight intending to play with mods. By enabling a specific mod, the bench warp, I effectively eliminated my irritation at dying and having to backtrack for several screens. Suddenly, my character could plop a bench down wherever they were standing, and I had an instant checkpoint whenever I recognized that I might need one: before a boss, at a tense platforming challenge, etc. I cannot overstate how much of a relief this bench mod was during my second playthrough.
Even with this mod to compensate for my gripes about Hollow Knight, I had just as much of a challenge this time as I did back in my first playthrough. The enemies in Hollow Knight are tough, upgrades are rare, and navigating the world before obtaining a new map from the game’s cartographer, Cornifer, is as mystifying as it always has been. And naturally, this bench mod led to some strange situations where I trapped myself in a death loop, spawning on top of an enemy’s spawn point, or off the edge of a platform that was precariously located above spikes. These silly moments included, I would use this mod all over again.
When I first wrote my Hollow Knight article, I did not realize that solving the bench problem might not be enough. Like Ori, the exhaustion on my second playthrough set in much quicker, like a strained muscle recovering from an intense workout. Like Ori, I tired of the music, the locations I had visited the first time, and the repetitive spike-to-the-face deaths every few minutes. I cannot distinguish whether the sheer challenge involved is the reason that I dropped the controller yet again while playing Hollow Knight or if the fatigue of replaying a game is the source. Regardless, my second playthrough of Hollow Knight made me start pondering the question of whether Metroidvanias are even something I’m capable of enjoying altogether.
A Dread-inspiring Genre
In the same way that I’ve completely dropped first-person shooters from my gaming library, I’ve stayed away from Metroidvanias since those second attempts at Ori and Hollow Knight. You could throw, as Ben Vollmer does, Dark Souls into this same camp as games I’ve repeatedly tried but abandoned. Or you could throw Control into the mix — a game that I adore aesthetically and mechanically, but makes some strange design decisions that ultimately fit within the general description of a Metroidvania. And go figure, the recent explosion in gaming discourse around the imminently popular Metroid Dread hit me with a dilemma. I had to ask myself if I was willing to purchase a fully priced retail copy of this game, one of the most critically well-received games of 2021, that I knew I wouldn’t like.
With absolutely no disrespect aimed at Dark Souls, Control, or Metroid Dread, much less at Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight, the things these games seem to have in common are aspects of design that put me off from enjoying them. In the future, I think “Metroidvania” is a genre tag I’ll start marking as ignored on gaming storefronts, though I’m glad the Metroidvania genre exists, and I’m glad the medium of games is being put to such dynamic artistic use. For me, the sheer prospect of once again forcing myself into yet another Metroidvania simply causes me too much dread to seek them out.
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