Metroidvania
Acquiring such improvements can also aid the player in defeating more difficult enemies and locating shortcuts and secret areas, and often includes retracing one's steps across the map.
Symphony of the Night's assistant director, Koji Igarashi, is credited with establishing key principles of Metroidvanias through his work on other Castlevania games.
[11][12] With Symphony of the Night, Igarashi introduced new concepts into the Castlevania series from Zelda such as a large open world to explore and the need to acquire key items to enter certain areas, elements already present in non-linear platformers like Super Metroid.
[10][5] However, Symphony of the Night distinguished itself from prior non-linear platformers via the incorporation of console role-playing game elements with the means for the player to improve their character's attributes through an experience system.
[3] With the releases of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the formula these games presented would form the foundations of what are considered Metroidvanias today.
(2013), Moon Studios' Ori and the Blind Forest (2015), and Team Cherry's Hollow Knight (2017) are examples of modern indie Metroidvanias that have reached critical acclaim.
[21] Igarashi noted that with Symphony of the Night the goal was to have exploration closer to the top-down Zelda approach, but with the side-scrolling nature, it was compared more to Metroid, and believes this is how the portmanteau came about.
[24] In September 2015, the term "Metroidbrainia" was first coined to describe a sub-genre of games characterized by progression systems which are gated entirely, or at least primarily, by player knowledge.
Outer Wilds (2019) is often cited as the model of the genre, with other notable examples including Fez (2012), Gone Home (2014), Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), Heaven's Vault (2019), Tunic (2022), Chants of Sennaar (2023), and Animal Well (2024).
Not all areas of this map are available at the start, often requiring the player to obtain an item (such as a weapon or key) or a new character ability to remove some obstacle blocking the path forward.
Weaker monsters will inhabit other parts of the level, re-spawning when the player revisits those rooms, and often can be defeated to gain health, ammunition, or experience points.
[18] The 2017 title Prey was developed as a first-person-perspective immersive sim but using Metroidvania level design concepts to require the player to traverse the setting multiple times as they gain additional tools and abilities.
[10] Russ Frushtick from Polygon observed that many modern Metroidvanias not only have these qualities, but also find a means to tell a narrative through the world's environments without necessarily relying on cutscenes or dialog.
They argued that such games, while having 2D platforming gameplay and power-up based progression systems, lacked good level design, which at their time had not been well-refined in the industry, and provided little or no information relayed to the player to help them to know where to go next, exemplified by the cryptic clues from Simon's Quest.
The genre encourages tight connection between level design and game story, and can give developers opportunities to create an immersive world for the player.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps executive producer Daniel Smith said: "I don't think people generally consider how difficult it is to make a Metroidvania game.
[36] Comic Book Resources compared the use of Metroidvania to "Doom clone" in the 1990s, a term which was eventually replaced by "first person shooter" as the medium developed.
