Patient Gamers

I think that we mostly agree. My contention is that pretty much the entire game should still be engaging to play; having a long total play time shouldn't excuse that, and a shorter play time simply doesn't allow for it. Plenty of games have shown that it's possible to gradually layer mechanics one or two at a time, creating experiences around those smaller subsets of abilities that are still entertaining. I work in education and this idea is vital to what I do. Asking students to sit down and listen quietly as I feed them a mountain of boring details while promising, "Soon you'll know enough to do something interesting, just a little longer," is a sure-fire recipe for losing my audience.

And as I think you may have intimated, creating environments that require the use of only one ability at a time reduces those abilities to a boring list. When you've finally taught the player each ability in isolation, and suddenly start mixing everything up once they get to the "good part" of the game, they'll virtually have to "relearn" everything anyway.

We don't need to give the player everything at once to make our games interesting, but we do need to make sure that what we're giving them piecemeal is interesting in the moment.

I can't respond directly because I haven't played either Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight specifically, although I've played and enjoyed many other metroidvania games, including the majority of the Metroid series (I even enjoyed Metroid Other M... mostly). But I'll say that there's no rule that prevents metroidvanias from being entertaining until you unlock some specific part of the ability set. The search to unlock new abilities should be fun itself.

I agree with you. I also sympathize with the above comment's sentiment. The issue is that a lot of games released on PC / other consoles take much longer to release on the Switch, if they come over at all. (ie Red Dead Redemption 2 may just now be coming to the Switch)

So a PlayStation owner for example will have a much larger library of quality games to choose from.

This is why I have found myself personally touching my Switch a couple times a year versus every day like I used to.

that patrol special zones of the map. They're invulnerable to everything except for a specific, single use power-up in their zone. Until you find the power-up in that EMMI's zone, you have to sneak around or evade the EMMI

Haha same, I came back to them at the end and stared at room for like 5 mins thinking “they can’t actually expect me to chain five of these together across six different rooms in under 4 seconds I’ve got to be approaching this wrong, lemme check the internet…”

"these guys are nuts."

That’s amazing. I had no idea it was implemented into this game already. I will totally check it out. I love the link to the past randomizer.