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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]

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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.

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[–] [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.