Games

34528 readers

724 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

Submissions have to be related to games
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No excessive self-promotion
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

121

Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Interesting that in the title, stated in absolute terms in the text, and from the designers they interviewed, they cite getting lost as crucial for the genre. Personally, I disagree. Getting lost has tended to be why I didn't care for certain games in this genre, like Axiom Verge, and it soured my otherwise higher opinion of games like Hollow Knight and Symphony of the Night. Still, I think this is a good exploration of the genre and what makes it tick.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I think I'd put it this way - I like adventuring, exploring, and finding my way through an immersive world. I don't like when I can't seem to stumble into the exact right clue or secret passage or interactable and waste up to possibly hours scouring the same locations over and over.

That said, metroidvanias are my favorite videogame genre. I just had to accept that it's okay to look up a guide or wiki before I get fully tilted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

Yeah I don’t like banging my head into a wall either. What I mean by enjoying getting lost is being in a dangerous area where I don’t know how to get back to safety. It’s a mini adventure within an adventure to figure out how to escape without dying.

One game I play, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, has a built in mechanism to create situations like that: shafts you can fall down that put you into an unexplored level that’s deeper and more difficult than the one you were on. It’s pretty effective at creating these mini adventures though fans of the game complain about them all the time.