A month or so back as I was loading up my Nintendo Switch with games to play during a much needed vacation to visit my parents in Florida, I took a chance on a little indie title called Hollow Knight. It was lowest on my priority list between Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker, which I figured my daughter and I could play together, and Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze. I’d heard good things about this moody Metroidvania and I figured I might want something more bitesized to fool with on the plane. This all went down about a week or so before departure.
I haven’t stopped playing since.
Hollow Knight got its hooks in me early and often. What at first appeared to be a grim, flat, colorless, and unremarkable side scrolling action game, quickly revealed surprising depth. Most astonishing; the pathos of its storytelling which, like Dark Souls before it, is doled out in small bits of context free lore that builds its shape over time and the gameplay. This is partially determined by the player and partially determined by just how far into this nightmare you’re willing to delve to acquire the bits and pieces necessary to tackle its challenges and pierce its rotten core.
In the game you play as a resurrected “hero,” a tiny nub of a bug in a cape wearing a white mask, who wanders a desolate underground insect world using a stubby nail to dispatch grubby fiends like mad mosquitoes, explosive pill bugs, and slice happy mantises. Like all games of this nature, progress is locked behind the player’s access to abilities. Find a passage just out of reach and you can rest assured that you’ll have to revisit the area later once you’ve acquired whatever in-game artifact grants you the power to double jump. It’s standard for this subgenre and I know the ins and outs of this design like the back of my… nay, Satoru Okada’s hand. So why is it still so compelling even now after I’ve notched 30 or 40 such games on my gamer belt?
Why do we love Metroidvanias so much?
Before I get into that, I should probably explain what a Metroidvania is, and how this subgenre got its name for anyone that’s either new to gaming or has been willfully ignoring a whole subgenre for 30 years. Once upon a time there was a side-scrolling action game called Metroid about a bounty hunter named Samus Aran tasked with retrieving a bio weapon from space pirates and eliminating the threat. What made Metroid so good wasn’t the story or the characters per se, but the game’s unique design. Metroid dropped the player in an unfamiliar land, underpowered and unprepared, and asked the player to figure things out, doling out necessary upgrades at intervals designed to keep you second guessing every floor, wall or ceiling. That’s where the Metroid part of Metroidvania came from.
The “vania” part refers to Konami’s classic vampire hunter series, Castlevania, though it wasn’t until the release of Symphony of the Night in 1997 that the games would build on their action RPG elements to introduce more Metroid like gatekeeping. To this day that game is held up as the gold standard of modern Metroid style game design due to its gorgeous 2D gothic presentation, its twisting, teasing architecture and level design, and its more RPG-like combat which uses a hit point system.
Now that we’ve established where the term came from, we have to return to the big question. Why do we like to play these games?
THEY’RE GOOD GAMES
It sounds obvious, but bare with me for a moment. Metroidvanias just have good game design and that’s because you really can’t have a game that stops the player in their tracks without offering some guidance or some subtle nudge in a different direction when they become stuck. That means there’s an ongoing balancing act between progress and backtracking, in which the game needs to constantly withhold content but not so much so that the player loses interest.
Any criticism I’ve heard about Hollow Knight concerns the game’s opening act. Detractors claim that the first hour or two doesn’t do quite enough to compel the player onward. I don’t fully disagree but, for me, there was about a twenty minute window where my curiosity and my need to accomplish started to lose out to my impatience. However, Hollow Knight, like many games of this type is so expertly crafted and perfectly paced that once I got past the initial hump, there was always a new place to visit, a new power to try out, some grinding to do, or a mystery to solve.
THEY’RE POWER FANTASIES
Hollow Knight is a challenging game and, like many of its ilk, when you begin the story you have a dinky jump, a dinky slash attack, a weak dodge and not much else. By limiting the player’s repertoire to the barest gameplay essentials (much like how many a Zelda game begins your adventure with a goddamn wooden sword) as you gain new skills and powers, you grow in confidence. Besting foes with little but your determination and luck makes you feel like a conquering hero. Dispatching enemies in a single blow that once escorted you to the game over screen however, makes you feel like a god. Then, of course, you run into a boss that wrecks your divine ass and sets you about rethinking this whole “I AM A GOD” thing.
One aspect that I love about Hollow Knight is how customizable your power fantasy is. If you want to wreck the bug baddies with magic, you can use all your charm slots to augment your spells, if you want a fast attack you can set up that way, or you can go for heavy power moves or defensive buffs. It’s up to you to determine what kind of strategy best suits which area and which enemy type.
THEY ENCOURAGE EXPLORATION
It’s easy to get lost in Hollow Knight’s labyrinthine interconnected world, but that’s part of the fun. Once you’ve left the relative safety of the game’s first major area, Forgotten Crossroads, venturing into new, hostile territory like the lush overgrown Greenpath, or the fallen citadel, City of Tears, is done blind, without the help of a map. In each freshly opened zone the player must first seek out the map maker by following a trail of his discarded pages and listening for his mellifluous disembodied voice.
Like any good Metroidvania, the game doesn’t always make this easy. It will often tease the player with the destination but deny them the means to get there. This withholding technique works in two important ways. On the one hand it gives the player a new goal, find X. On the other, it encourages the player to explore the surrounding area with more vigor than they normally might and to brave dangerous, unfamiliar grounds even when outmatched. Or in cases like mine, spazz out on every single wall.
The map in Hollow Knight ends up being an essential part of the experience as the onus is placed upon the player to equip a specific charm and chart the twisting tunnels and corridors that run through out the game’s underground world. Only then can you get a full picture of the area. At one point, I came across a part of the ground that crumbled a bit when I stepped on it. The game lets you mark the map up with one of five icons that you can purchase from a shopkeep, so I put a big red marker on that spot on the map to remind me to revisit it later. From that moment on, I was on the lookout for any power that might allow me to break through that loose ground. Each time I bested one of the game’s bosses or found a new power up hidden away in a lost corner, I would come back to all my icons and test out my new tricks in hopes of opening new sections.
The real world is mostly discovered, catalogued and Starbucks’d, but Metroidvanias tap into that inherent human need we have to uncover untouched land and plant a flag in it.
THEY MAKE YOU FEEL MORE CLEVER THAN YOU ARE
Sure, there are some parts of these games that are absolutely inaccessible without X upgrade, but often there are ways to “cheat” and defy the programming gods by clever use of the limited powers you have. An early technique I used in Hollow Knight to access areas that were probably meant for later in my adventure was to sword bounce off enemies to reach far flung ledges or cross wide gaps. Each time I’d free an imprisoned caterpillar in some area I shouldn’t have been able to reach, you couldn’t wipe the look of self satisfaction off my smug mug.
The truth, of course, is that for the most part the developers have done this intentionally to reward the player for thinking outside the box. They dole out these little feel good treats at the beginning to stoke the flames of ingenuity and to give the player some early victories over the mounting odds stacked against them. A simpler way to put that is that these hidden puzzles make you feel smart in a game that will make you feel worthless in short order.
IN CONCLUSION, YOU ARE PRISONER TO THEM
There is happiness in slavery. Not the kind that strips away your civil rights and binds you in chains, but the kind that deprives you of the burden of free will. Metroidvanias provide the illusion of absolute freedom by presenting a vast open world locked only by the player’s inability to resolve its challenges. The further into Hollow Knight that I delved the more I felt penned in by own desire to progress, driven to its conclusion not by a simple gamer’s need to rank amongst the best or topple the challenge set forth by the programmers but by a desire to exit the maze. Like the mouse, tracking cheese, I would eventually have to reckon with the notion that there was only ever one way out.
Perhaps the most compelling reason that we truly love Metroivanias is because of how they make us feel as if we’re the captains of our own destiny, all the while closing the paths forward until we have no choice but to step through that final door. They’re cathartic in that way.
