Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias

A planet-size eyeball blinks in celestial light before the hero in Ultros awakens on a spaceship amid alien shrubbery the color of an acid-dipped rainbow. Traipsing about winding, overgrown passageways, grand halls and resplendent stained-glass altars, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by this strange place.

Ultros belongs to the cryptically named genre of video games called Metroidvanias, which drop protagonists into unfamiliar locales and ask players to find their bearings. The genre revels in spatially disorienting the player. It is vital to feel lost, said Marten Bruggemann, Ultros’s design director.

“The best Metroidvanias are not afraid of that emotion,” he said.

Unlike their blockbuster counterparts, the Metroidvanias often created by boutique teams do not lean on whiz-bang graphics or unscrupulous economic tricks to keep players engaged. It is the pure design wit of their makers that has been breathing new life into an illustrious form for decades.

The two Metroidvania progenitors — 1986’s Metroid and 1987’s Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest — cultivated a sense of geographical bewilderment by letting players unfurl the secrets of their arcane worlds in any direction along the X and Y axes. Part of the charm is that the entirety of these expansive play spaces is not immediately accessible: Sections lie gated behind power-ups, like the so-called Morph Ball and High Jump Boots in Metroid, and players are forced to rely on a labyrinthine map.

Decades later, the genre continues to yield rich rewards. Ultros, Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown were included on many best of 2024 lists, and other notable releases within the past year include Nine Sols, Tales of Kenzera: Zau and Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist.

The genre has come to be known for its friction, with a propensity for baffling mazelike settings, acute sense of isolation and often punishing combat. Yet Jeremy Parish, a journalist who helped popularize the term Metroidvania and wrote an upcoming book on the genre, said that in some ways they are more accessible role-playing games that do not get bogged down in stats and menus. Characters grow while exploring a vast world, allowing Metroidvanias to deliver immersion, exploration and a sense of discovery.

Beyond Ultros’s stunning visuals, which evoke 1960s psychedelic fantasy art in sparkling high definition, the game’s major innovation is gardening. By collecting seeds and planting them, the player enables alien flora to grow as time advances. The vibrant plant life is not just decorative; it is an ingenious take on a defining feature of Metroidvanias, helping the player gain powers to reach previously inaccessible areas.

Bruggemann said that cultivating plant life was a way to make the player consider Ultros’s spaceship setting beyond the immediate threat lurking in each room. It also plays into another key aspect of Metroidvanias: the necessity, Bruggemann explained, of creating a “mental space of the world in order to navigate it.”

There is one puzzle in Animal Well, the beguiling platformer set in an underground maze with a menagerie of creepy creatures, that requires the player to rely on just such a mental map.

A few hours in, a gigantic ghost cat appears that can only be dispelled if the player places an object in what looks like a shrine. The trouble is that the shrine is halfway across the map. To have any hope of outrunning the spectral presence, the player must commit a serpentine route to memory.

Even this pulse-quickening chase sequence, which has an optimal solution, can be completed in many ways. Such nonlinearity is characteristic of Metroidvanias.

Animal Well’s solo designer, Billy Basso, said the game was made with precisely this convention in mind, as well as some of the genre’s most dedicated fans. While Metroidvanias tend to unfold along lines that are blocked until more abilities are gained, creative players will often seek to bypass them.

Basso’s game has soft blocks on progression but nothing that ingenious players cannot get around by combining the game’s tools, an array of household objects like a Frisbee and Slinky, with an imaginative approach to platforming. Basso said he hoped to cultivate “what if” moments — “what if I could skip this, or what if I could do it this way?”

Ultros was designed with a similar mind-set. There is a golden path most players will follow, though craftier gamers can complete the story in any order they wish. It is even possible to eschew one of the game’s major features, a time-loop mechanic. “You can actually go through the whole of Ultros in one turn,” Bruggemann said.

Metroid, which was released in 1986 for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the company’s Famicom console, was not the first game to embrace this exploratory style of 2-D action-platforming. But Parish said it was the game that codified the approach.

Parish sees Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, which was also released in 1986 for the Famicom, as forks in the road of the role-playing game genre.

The Legend of Zelda looks like an R.P.G.; it has swords and magic. Metroid? Not so much. It is a sci-fi game starring an androgynous bounty hunter in a spooky alien world. Beyond aesthetics, Parish emphasized that Metroid’s lack of menus allowed players to get the dopamine hit of character progression without the rigorous steps of managing R.P.G. systems.

Parish is often mistaken as the creator of the term Metroidvania. In reality, he helped popularize it while writing for the gaming website 1UP in the mid-2000s. The term had been slowly spreading across internet forums and chat rooms before its proliferation in video game magazines and websites.

The term Metroidvania initially referred to entries in Konami’s gothic 2-D action Castlevania series whose mazey maps closely evoked the Metroid games; it then grew to encompass indie games such as Eternal Daughter (2006). Kate Willaert, a gaming historian who publishes video essays on YouTube, pointed to Shadow Complex (2009) as an early example of a developer describing its own game as a Metroidvania.

Now there are 2,234 instances, and counting, of the term being used as a descriptive tag on Steam, the PC gaming marketplace. The form has even explored 3-D space with the likes of Metroid Prime (2002) and the brilliantly weird Control (2019).

With such an explosion in popularity, a certain staleness can be expected to set in. Basso laments the rush of indie games that followed the celebrated Hollow Knight (2017), each with a nearly identical set of moves: slide, double-jump and midair dash.

Even the Metroid franchise is not impervious to criticism.

Metroid Dread (2021) failed to deliver for both Basso and Bruggemann. Basso was not fond of the way the game arbitrarily blocked the player, either from returning to particular locations or forcing them to tackle high-level enemies in a particular order, and he took note that he did not want to do that in Animal Well. Bruggemann was disappointed that the game did not let him experience the foundational emotion of the genre: feeling lost.

Making a compelling Metroidvania is no easy task. The games demand the creation of many discrete areas that can theoretically be explored in any order using a set of in-game mechanics that must all complement one another and the environment. Animal Well and Ultros each required seven years to make, and Hollow Knight’s highly anticipated sequel, Silksong, has most likely been in development for even longer.

Basso believes that Animal Well’s protracted production helped an idiosyncratic style rise to the fore. The game started out generic, with obvious ideas like an enemy bat that flies around, but became more elaborate as the years went by. “I was thinking about the world and mythology and art direction a lot,” Basso said. “It was a very nonverbal, slow process of accretion.”

With its cast of odd, unnerving animals, madcap puzzles and childhood toys, the finished version of Animal Well maps the eerie feel of Basso’s subconscious onto the computer screen, as if players are entering his very own mind palace. It also has a nearly airtight quality, an internal logic and cohesiveness that rivals any 3-D blockbuster title.

This may explain why it is so easy for players to suspend their disbelief in Animal Well’s lo-fi den, to explore its concrete cavernous space and lose themselves to its twinkling darkness. This lonely labyrinth comes to feel like home.