Post

a while back someone posted a video of awards for Metroidvania games and I was like hey, I should watch this and get ideas for my next search-action games to play for my list (list here: medium.com/@RowanKaiser...)

but they opened it up by saying that their all-time favorite was Hollow Knight and that's just so far from the way I think about what I like in this these that I just stopped watching. like almost every much-loved search-action game I bounce off of is a Soulsyvania. Just doesn't seem to work for me

which makes me think that there's really three different interacting subcategories, the Soulsyvania, the METROIDvania, and the MetroidVANIA and I'm very much a partisan of the latter

but that's also got me trying to figure out what the difference between the Metroid-centered search-action game and the Castlevania-centered one is. Is it just melee versus missile combat? Platforming intricacy? Narrative focus?

Castlevania-style games have a sense of fun and playfulness that Metroid-style games don't have. Like there's challenges in SOTN but a lot is just having the ability to mess around and do dumb useless things. Also if you haven't please check out Team Ladybug games. They capture that idea so well