Metroidvania General - An overcrowded genre with recycled themes and muddled mechanics.

[BiggestKai]

What's the deal with Aeterna Lucis? They delayed the game as to not coincide with the same release month as Silksong and it's been delayed ever since with no release date.
I need my long ass CBT platforming sections, damn it.

Shopkeeping Stealthvania, Goblin Vyke release:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MMkCH_FDFfk

This is a fun but a very rough game. It's more extraction stealth than actual stealth metroidvania but it's still a very enjoyable play.
Some bitching on the steam forums that it may or may not have used AI for the portraits. I found this post to be a particularly funny one.

 

[Sparky Lurker]

Shadow Sacrament demo:

https://dangen-entertainment.itch.io/shadow-sacrament-the-roots-of-evil-demo

 

[sodaboard]

are there any 3D metroidvanias similar to prime, where the focus is less on shooting and more on exploration, puzzle solving and getting upgrades to access new areas? i've been told the batman arkham series is like this but i haven't heard of any others.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

Foreign Sun release:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EPdAPAyiFOM

That trailer looks fucking sick. I wish the art style had a bit more fidelity but this cyber-samurai-western faction war shit looks kino.

are there any 3D metroidvanias similar to prime, where the focus is less on shooting and more on exploration, puzzle solving and getting upgrades to access new areas? i've been told the batman arkham series is like this but i haven't heard of any others.

Hard to get examples that hit every point but I can maybe recommend some shit. Low amounts of combat is probably the hard one.

• Give Powerslave/Exhumed a try if you haven't. It's very combat-heavy, but it does the Metroidy sense of character power progression very well. I also find the late-game platforming to be difficult but satisfying. Replayed the PS1 version and the nightdive remake recently and both are fine, I reckon the remake is better tho.
• I recently played the Shadow Man remaster after bouncing off the N64 version a few times - I had no fucking idea the game is actually a Super MarioVania. The aesthetic and the story are pretty interesting but the pacing is fucking abysmal so I haven't made much progress. Idk if it's in the N64 original, but the remaster has a toggle to play in first person which seems to only be broken for wall climbing and stuff, like morphball in the Primes.
• Not really a metroidvania, but Dread Delusion's pretty good if you want a game where exploration is fucking amazing. Cool mysteries, some choicing to be made, and it's the best attempt so far I've seen at pulling off the Morrowind "exploring a totally bizarre other reality" vibe. Combat's a fucking joke though, don't expect any challenge whatsoever.
• System Shock's a reasonably nonlinear metroidvania. One of the GOAT games for good reasons. If you haven't played it before you really really fucking should. Go with the remaster over the OG, in like 98/100 cases it's the superior version. Don't confuse it with the sequel though, I like SS2 a lot but it's outright a janky first person RPG, not a metroidvania.
• Vomitoreum is in GZDOOM, but it has a lot less combat and it's a lot simpler than you'd think for a game in that engine. Only big flaws are that it's very short and bosses are damage sponges.
• Arkane's Prey kinda toes the line of Metroidvania? It's even more non-linear than System Shock, and the best parts of it really only come out with repeat playthroughs when you find out just how much sequence breaking they accounted for and rolled with.
• Voltage High Society is a metroidvania brawler. I haven't had heaps of experience with this one. Updates have been extremely slow so I haven't played too much of it, but admittedly it seems like a ton has been added since I last touched it, which had a lot more than the time before that.

Also, very much a divergence from normal metroidvania-ness, but I wanna shill Hell Is Us again because I've been playing it again recently.
Not first person, lots of combat, but with very customizable difficulty options and INSANELY exploration-heavy game loop. Its "metroidvania" aspects aren't finding new powers to unlock new doors, they are finding information that furthers your conspiracy investigation and increases your understanding. There's no Map Menu, no objective markers, no dead space navpath holograms: you need to make a mental map as you thoroughly explore a zone, rotate the area geography in your mind to think about where you might have missed, pore over documents to understand the things around you, and really listen to what people say in order to follow leads and infer the solutions to puzzles. Actual fucking logic puzzles too, that require paying attention to your environment and maybe re-reading your notes and doing some conceptual and abstract thinking to solve them. It's one of those foofy european art council taxpayer-funded games, so it does get a bit art-faggy at times and it's graphically very demanding on hardware, but I'd argue it's one of the few times one of those games is actually worth playing. It's crazy fucking dark too, doesn't shy away at all from how fucked up war is, which I'm guessing is why it didn't get heaps of fanfare and hype.

 

[Back me up!]

I'm a bit late, but yeah. For Metroid skip the OG and play Zero Mission. 2 Is good, but the AM2R fan remake is just the best in atmosphere, sandbox, and difficulty; you can skip the official OG and its remake. Super Metroid is legendary and you've probably heard it a million times; people hold it in high praise for a reason. The only official 2D game that hits like it for me is Dread, the sequel to Fusion. Fusion itself gets a bad rap, but it's a good enough game. If you're going to get into the Primes, Prime 1 is incredible, and its Switch remake is most everything you could want out of it.

If you care about playing them in order, it's Zero Mission, Metroid 2, Super, Fusion, and Dread. The Primes take place in between 1 and 2 iirc but it doesn't really matter.

For Castlevania, the classicvania's are more arcade-y romps; less backtracking and building your character up and raw platforming. If you're wanting to go through some old school difficulty together then they're solid, and if it hits the way you like then you'll love when you get to Dracula X/Rondo of Blood. You'll get into what you're probably expecting out of 'Metroidvania' with Symphony of the Night, which like Super Metroid is lauded as a classic for good reason. Much of the Castlevania's beyond that point are going to play like your contemporary Metroidvanias that you picture.

tl;dr both series have great gamplay and fantastic music, and it's hard to really go wrong.

Metroid Fusion is a very good game but has two major designs concepts things people don't consider:

1. It is a mobile game first, so locking you into a section helps deal with the start and stop nature of system.
2. Relating to 1 -

Spoiler

It was suppose to be extra freeing feeling to break the orders/ levels and feely explore the station in the second half of the game.

Sadly most people just remember the first feeling of being locked into a zone at a time at the start of the game.