Tag: metroidvania

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Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

More Info from TurtleBlaze

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC

Metroidvanias are usually an easy to pick breather for me in between longer RPG runs, and we were definitely in one of those. After Metaphor and Mario & Luigi back to back I needed a break. This one kind of fell into my lap via my backlog randomizer, but it chose well. This is a compact experience with solid combat and great movement that really hit what I needed out of it.

The thing that really stood out at the start was how fast the game was. This has such a smooth movement set that really just worked and continues to get better as the game continues. Core movement is fast on its own, which prevents the game from dragging. You then get the kunai that act like a typical grappling hook. This adds a bunch of possibilities for vertical movement up walls as well as even faster horizontal movement. You then get double jumps to cover gaps and eventually an SMG that you can shoot down to hover to cover even LARGER gaps. Finally, you get a dash to extend your movement even further.

All of the movement feels like it’s in service to reduce friction in moving through the environment. The unfortunate thing is that despite it improving the main story line, I don’t think it really does much to improve retraversal. Ultimately this feels like more of a problem of the core path than the movement mechanics but there just isn’t that much reason to retraverse most areas. You’ll go into an area, maybe hit a few areas a second time on the wya out, then really not see it again. In a couple of cases you retraverse through old areas late in the game, but for the most part the central hub of the game is so conveniently located that you just go through it instead of old areas. If I wanted to do a 100% run I’d have visited more, but just to complete the game there wasn’t much reason.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how much combat changed over time, but also how naturally the change felt. The first half of the game is entirely melee driven, and it starts that way early. You get a katana and learn to use it both at close range and for deflecting projectiles coming at far range. The use of it opens up more as you get traversal mechanics – for example using the kunai to grapple and reposition. This on its own feels incredibly tight and fun. It’s obviously pretty simple and wouldn’t have had legs to support an entire game, but it’s incredibly effective as the opening half. It’s when ranged starts to come in that things really change.

The first ranged thing you get is a throwing star. Its main use in combat is less for damage and more for its stun capability. Being able to stun larger enemies brings them from things that need at least a bit of thinking to something that you can run over, and as a power curve thing it felt well timed to right around when fighting the larger enemies is becoming a bother. Once the speed of stunning starts to become bothersome, you get the SMG. Besides its traversal hover utility, this is pure damage. This allowed me to start taking out enemies as I moved. In large packs I would still need to slow down a bit, but ultimately I was getting rid of targets quicker. The rocket launcher finished converting the game into something entirely different. Now rather than slowing down I was simply lobbing rockets and watching everything explode. The power curve changes allowed the game to slowly morph into a ranged-centric game in a way that felt entirely natural.

The thing that impressed me about this was that while it made getting through trash quicker, the bosses were clearly designed with this change in mind. Each boss felt like a test of the new things you gained. Early bosses were largely stationary, allowing you to dodge attacks and get in close range for melee damage. As you gained ranged weapons, bosses started requiring those because they were fast or had a lot of movement or just stayed out of range. By the final boss, I was basically using all traversal while lobbing rockets to get splash damage and focusing purely on dodging. It was such a smooth transition that I didn’t think about it, but in hindsight it was handled much better than a lot of games handle the change.

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a game of the year candidate from the year it came out, but it didn’t necessarily need to be. In simply being good at what it did, it provided exactly what I wanted out of it – a breather from RPGs. In being short it also was something easy to run through without growing tired of it. Basically, it made itself easy to play, easy to finish, and easy to recommend.

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Game Ramblings #183 – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC, Luna

I wanted to say that this game was a huge surprise but given the fact that this was made by the studio behind the fantastic Rayman games of the last decade, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. This is a game that just nails so much of what make Metroidvanias something that I go after. It combines a great sense of that side of the platformer genre and mixes in some really gratifying melee combat to make an experience absolutely worth playing.

For me it was the little things that it did right that make this such a memorable thing as a Metroidvania.

On the traversal front it doesn’t simply have retraversal like most games in the genre. What it often instead does is have a little puzzle/platforming loop that ends with a door opening a shortcut for later use. It’s a level beyond the usual changes brought about by gaining new powers that I really found interesting. It made core paths and side paths really obvious and allowed me to focus on filling out the map in areas along the core path, with the knowledge that I very likely had completed an entire section of the map when it ended in a loop. These areas were also very well marked on the map, where the end of these loops were generally marked by a one-way door. It gets rid of the sort of missile door typical of Metroid games and makes it obvious that you will just unlock this area when you’re done and be good to go.

Speaking of the map, the game is both a little less automatic but also incredibly more flexible than recent Metroid titles that I’ve played. This game doesn’t really automatically place much in the way of iconography when traversing new areas. Yes, it will unveil the areas you walk through but beyond one-way doors you’re kind of on your own for placing icons. What it does have is a particularly good tool for doing so. Beyond manual placement of various icon types – which is greatly appreciated – it has a very specific thing you unlock early that lets you add screenshots to the map. These are hugely important to retraversal. See some weird looking area you can’t get into? Add a screenshot. Chest out of reach with your current set of tools? Add a screenshot. Suspicious door? Add a screenshot. What you end up doing is scattering the map with these things and as you come back later for various reasons, you can get a very obvious visual representation of your own past with the areas and be reminded of the specific thing you wanted to check later. It’s such a nice built-in note taking aspect that feels very natural in the genre.

The other thing I found really good was how well the traversal moves actually integrated into combat, keeping flow between the two really natural. For example, one of the early moves you get is a horizontal teleport. This has obvious uses to clear large gaps in traversal. However, they also start having you face enemies and bosses that encourage using the teleport as a dodge mechanic to get behind and break protections. A later upgrade is effectively a grapple hook, which is useful for grabbing onto spots in the world but is also useful for pulling enemies to you/pulling yourself to enemies at range. This is pretty universal for all mechanics. If it can be used for combat it likely has a traversal use and in practice it means you are constantly reinforcing mechanics at all times, allowing for the player to naturally fall in and out of combat in an engaging way.

However, the thing about combat that surprised me is that the game got significantly easier as the game went on. To some obvious extent this is the natural state of the power curve. You get more powers and more tools in your tool box, and things will get easier. However, to me it felt like the mechanics of enemies didn’t get more complex at the same rate as I was upgrading. Sure, I was gaining things like heals on parry that helped me out, but the bosses weren’t throwing out crazy amounts of new stuff causing me damage. Yes, I was gaining more effective dodging mechanics, but the bosses weren’t necessarily causing me to dodge more often. What it meant was that as the game was getting marginally harder I was getting significantly more powerful, and the most difficult bosses were really the ones near the start of the game when I didn’t have the tools to compete as well against the mechanics. By the end of the game I was having little difficulty, even accounting for the fact that I was getting naturally better as time went on.

I do want to also shout out the flexibility of options here, which admittedly does lead to the game potentially being easier. Early on I noticed that I was missing a lot of what I thought were parries that I was timing correctly. It didn’t really feel like I was missing them, so much as the game was eating my parry inputs – kind of a weird battle against inherent input and screen latency. I dug into the difficulty options and noticed that I could adjust the parry window independent of all other difficulty options. A little bit of extra flexibility here completely solved the problem for me. I didn’t necessarily want an “easier” experience, but one that matched my expectation of timing with what was happening on screen and I was able to fix the specific thing that was causing me issues. That level of granularity is something I really love to see in place because it lets the user tailor the experience to the specifics of both their play style and their play setup without needing to just globally make the game easy.

I’m pretty happy that this is the game that brought the Prince of Persia series back, rather than the seemingly doomed Sands of Time remake. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the 3D entries in the series, but this feels so much more like the natural extension of the original games. It expands upon the open platforming of the original and goes with a very good modern combat layer on top of it to end up in a place where the series now feels pulled into the modern day, without really sacrificing the original vision.

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Game Ramblings #170 – Islets

More Info from Armor Games Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

There’s a lot of solid Metroidvanias out there, but there’s very few that I think get into the same neighborhood as a 2D Metroid title. The difference between ones that are simply alright and ones that really make that reach are never in the core mechanics, but in the little details. Islets is one that gets the little things right, and because of that it’s a fantastic title.

The core of a Metroidvania isn’t really that difficult to envision. You’ve basically got a game that encourages you to re-explore areas as you gain new abilities, have some fun combat segments, and really push some fun boss fights. Where games in the genre typically stumble for me is that they’ll focus on one of those sections and ignore the rest. Maybe their boss fights are fun, but it’s a slog traversing the environment. Maybe there’s too many enemies in the overworld, so it feels like you’re constantly slowed down. Islets is a game that manages to strike a balance that worked for me in how it handles all its details. There’s a few key points I wanted to focus on and they all tie into how well the game really gets some small things right that end up benefiting the whole.

The first one is that upgrades almost universally enhance traversal as a priority rather than combat. That may sound like the game is focusing on traversal over combat, but it’s not. A double jump opens up a bunch of opportunities for traversal, allowing you to clear larger gaps or taller walls. It also allows you to simply avoid easier enemies. However, what it also does is opens up a new dodge opportunity that is heavily used for boss fights. The same could be said for things like wall run or a ground pound. It obviously opens up opportunities that make traversal faster and more fun while opening up new paths. However, it also opens up new avoidance and offensive capabilities, which enhance the combat. Rather than focusing purely on weapon upgrades, they’re adding capabilities for your total toolset, which enhances the entire game, making the entire experience better for it.

That’s not to say that all upgrades are purely tied to traversal. In fact, there’s a lot of upgrades that are purely combat focused but are more power curve enhancements instead of toolset enhancements. They may be increased HP, more arrows to fire, passive reflect damage when the player takes damage, etc. What they all generally have in common though is that they are enhancing rather than changing your move set. This leads to a situation where reinforcement of new mechanics happens all the time through traversal-focused ones, rather than getting a combat upgrade that you don’t use for a while and forget about. It’s a nice way to maintain a power curve without it being overcomplicated.

They also aren’t shy about giving you temporary mechanics purely themed around the environment. One rainy section of the game gives you an umbrella that opens up gliding mechanic, paving the way for a temporary set of puzzles only in that section. One area has a bunch of moving platforms that have you dodging through spiky obstacles that only exist in that one area, which gives the traversal in the section a deliberately slower and more strategic pace. A section around the midpoint of the game has teleportation volumes, seemingly just for the sake of making a cool section of the game. These types of small-section one off mechanics really break up the monotony of traversal by making the player change how they’re going about things just enough without breaking the core of what’s there.

It also helps that there are entire sections of the game that take place in a twin-stick style shoot em up. These come up as you travel between the game’s core island sections and effectively end up acting as a nice breather. Mechanically each one has a bit of typical 2D projectile avoidance and usually some core mechanic you have to deal with (ex: a boss focused on boomerangs, or a boss focused on grappling themselves across the arena). They aren’t necessarily difficult and they aren’t overly common, but they’re there just enough to be a change of pace battle before you get going back into platforming.

Difficulty is another one of those areas where I think they really played a nice balance. This game wasn’t one where I was immune from death, and I think for the most part I died to most of the bosses at least a couple times while I was learning mechanics. However, there were a couple things that really worked out well for me in that regard.

One of the keys was that death never felt like progress loss. It was simply a return back to the last save point. This is completely opposite of a game like Hollow Knight, where I felt like death runs were such a negative deterrence that I never wanted to take risks. Here, I didn’t mind it. Save points felt like they were spread out enough to encourage the challenge, but not too far as to be a slog. It was helped by the fact that any sub-boss fights never came back once completed, so if you got through a couple of them then died, you didn’t have to redo them. The frequency of combat along traversal was also low enough that it didn’t feel like I was constantly in combat, but instead being in combat in a way that made sense based on the particular room I happened to be in.

It was also incredibly helpful that every major boss fight had a save point immediately before the boss. This let the boss be challenging on its own, rather than being a challenge because of what you had to do to approach it. Each boss definitely had its set of mechanics that had to be learned, so being in a place where I could learn the mechanics and immediately be back in a fight if I died was an incredibly good way to quickly positively reinforce the learning, rather than having to spend a bunch of time between attempts doing a run back after death.

Ultimately this is just a very well made Metroidvania. It seems to understand what the genre should be for a lot of people. It plays a good balance between encouraging exploration and traversal, while still having a core combat base. It has enough difficulty to be challenging, but isn’t overbearing in negatively impacting the player. And frankly, it’s just fun to look at. This is an entry in the genre that is simply worth playing.