I love the spoiler free real life footage when talking about the witness, where people who KNOW are seeing it instantly and everyone else is just seeing random outdoor shots

Outer wilds legitimately changed the whole way I view video games. Truly incredible experience

Knowledge-based progression

When I first discovered TUNIC, I didn't see many people talking about it, or at least not as many people as I think should've been talking about it. I think that, at first, most people will brush it off as just a cute, cozy zelda-like. I, too, brushed it off like this. But the game stuck with me, it gnawed at my mind, and eventually I caved and got it. To this day, nearly a year after I first beat it, it is my favorite game I've ever played. Every moment is shrouded in this immaculate air (air, heir) of mystery, and when you finally unlock that last bit of knowledge that unclouds the mystery, and it feels soooo.... intimate. I can't recommend TUNIC enough to anyone who hasn't played it. And if you do, please go in blind.

Still best game in this genre is Rain World. You have unlocked everything (except 1 thing) from the start. Can go anywhere. Only knowledge limits you.

I sometimes refer to this type of games as "rabbit hole games", because they have these moments of sublime epiphany that recontextualizes everything, kind of like falling into a rabbit hole. Baba is You is a great example for that - the puzzles are fantastic on its own, but the moment you realize how to reach that damn island on the overworld screen you also realize that the whole game is even deeper and more complex than you ever imagined.

Outer Wilds soundrack made me cry instantly. Good job on not spoiling expirience of mentioned titles.

The best videogame subgenre. It's hard to decide whether a game belongs, but imo any puzzle game that makes me go "Wait, I could've done that the ENTIRE TIME?" several times fits. I also think the existence of some puzzles should be hidden right under the player's nose. Here's a list of games I've played that did both: TUNIC Outer Wilds The Witness A Monster's Expedition Leap Year Can of Wormholes Linelith Elechead N Step Steve Parts 1 & 2 Toki Tori 2

I agree that Outer wild is basically the definitive "metroidbrainia". I almost prefer the term "wildslike" for this genre since many of the games are so far removed from traditional metroidvanias.

I will give it to the fez devs that it is extremely funny that they have been radio silent on the black monolith solution except for one instance like 7 years after the game released when they came out and said that the release date theory was wrong, the most popular and assumed by the fanbase to be the intended solution. Absolute legends lmao Although checking on old forums and seeing statements on people who claim to know the devs it seems pretty likely that the black monolith solution is actually hidden in the images of the soundtrack, as they said something along the lines of "you guys should wait until the soundtrack is out". Maybe the black monolith represents that black part in the spectrogram before they put an image? Who knows Also another thing of note is that in an interview with Phil 10 years after the game came out he said that bruteforcing the puzzle was a much cooler solution than the one he planned. So there's that. Maybe it has something to do with the heartbreak code, which was intended to be datamined, as some sort of symbolism with how game completionism culture and squeezing every drop of content out of games is killing them and the developers I'm so normal about this game trust me guys

Found you through the Lego Racers video & now I'm enjoying everything you have on offer ;)

Leap Year released like a week before this video and is a pinnacle distillation of a pure metroidbrainia. Zero unlockable items as progression is exclusively knowledge gated. Captures the entire spirit of the genre within an under 2 hour play time.

When I heard the Outer Wilds Soundtrack kick in, I knew this was gonna be a really good vid

Noita would fit this description in the roquelike category

I see Antichamber in thumbnail, I click. Simple as that.

Nice video. I've always just considered this genre the "Wildslike" akin to roguelike's etymology. Another term I like is to call them "epiphonic" games since knowledge of mechanics drives progression, and thus it's all geared around making players have groundbreaking epiphanies that change their view of the entire game.

So many good references! My personal favorites were Swampy Boots and "My goodness, what an idea. Why didn't I think of that? Hammocks!"

Animal well died for me the moment I learned that some puzzles couldn't be solved inside the game. Not having a way to know which was which I eventually basically followed a guide the rest of the way. I think I had 2 eggs left at that point. I'm really glad you raised that point. Now that I know to expect it going forward I think similar games might will leave a less bitter taste. I actually just 100% Tunic (with some hints from reddit, I'm only human) and was excited by the more obscure late game stuff.

Riven is also one of the defining games of this genre. I've beaten all the others you mentioned except for Outer Wilds, which I barely started earlier this year only to lose interest and get sidetracked by Animal Well. Now that I've found mostly everything in AW (I don't think I'll bother with some of those secret rabbits), I'll give Outer Wilds another try.

There's something so cool about having a notebook full of weird scribbles trying to figure out stuff in games like The Witness and FEZ

Fantastic job with this video. Easy sub. You will be at 10k quick with quality like this

All of my favourite games in one place! I'm now playing through Chants of Senaar looking for another dopamine-filled brain-a-thon. I was hoping I'd find something I haven't already played in this video, but the only one was Chip's Challenge, and I think I'm alright skipping that. Great video!

I've seen people calling those games "knowledge-based" games and I prefer that term. It's not a genre on its own, it has to be paired with other genres. Just like you would say "an action-adventure roguelike game", you could simply say "a knowledge-based 2D platformer". I would define Outer Wilds as a 3D exploration knowledge-based game for instance.

My all time favourite "metroidbrainia" must be the puzzle book "ABDEC". All except the basics of the rule set is not told AND solution validation is obviously not automatic. The only way to learn the rules is to check that thy rule set gives a unique solution to every puzzle. It also of course has non-linear progression and meta puzzles :). The point about non-automatic solution validation is really clever and is something that more games should use

I 100% agree about the community puzzles & ARG stuff. They can be fun, they have been done well in the past and I'm sure there will be more in the future. But it's starting to feel a little bit rote at this point, i guess? Like the final (the ACTUAL final) puzzle of Tunic is a community ARG and when i got to that point i was incredibly disappointed. It really felt like that developers wanted to "heighten" the puzzle solving stuff and the only way they could think to go bigger was to do this, even though none of the puzzles up to that point required that level of dedication or labor from the community. Also mad props to the dedication to spoiler-free. These are some of my favorite games of all time, and it always breaks my heart a little to see other youtubers just flagrantly expose all the fun stuff and ruin the games for their audiences.

I call them puzzlevanias

For anyone else interested in these Metroidbrania or Knowledge-Based Games, I recommend both: - Void Stranger: puzzle focused - Rain World: exploration kinda, it's hard as hell but worth it

Great video, big fan of this "genre" Where Void Stranger?

Another example of a, Mertoidbrainia I guess, that I will take any opportunity to bring up is 'Toki Tori 2+'. Is cool, play it. A more classic styled puzzle Metroidvania is 'Isles of Sea and Sky' which came out recently. I also agree with the sentiment towards puzzles outside of a game, it even opens up the possibility of a puzzle being impossible to solve the intended way like say a website goes down that has an important key to solve it. I think I managed to 'solve' the word block puzzle. I say 'solve' because well I'd figured that I had to line them up to make a word and somehow managed to luck into finding the right one. So, take that as you will. Great video btw.

Yeah, Chip's Challenge! 🤩💖 Great video by the way. Thank you for diving into this topic! 😊

Does anyone remember Toki Tori 2? That’s gotta be the epitome of MetroidBrainia. You’re limited to just 2 actions, stomping and whistling. It looks like a MetroidVania on first glance, but you never unlock any new abilities. Everything in the game is gated by your awareness of how to use the whistle and stomp to get past the obstacles.

A game I see no one mention in this genre is Heaven's Vault. It was amazing. You go diacovering a forgotten language to discover the past of the world. Id say its a story game with the metroidbrania aspect being in the language but its AMAZING everyone in this genre needs to try it. Also, there are so many ways to reach the many endings this has and things you can miss and still finish the game Not to mention it has replayability and I still think people Haven't solved everything about the game

Thank you so much for this,i have been searching for YEARS for games similar to outer wilds or the witness and because of this video i can find some examples even in the comments. Great work man,instantly suscribed

Loved the video and Metriodbraina is probably just about my favorite type of game, so I have to say I agree about the it sucks to end up late to a community puzzle but I will say that the Animal well community has done a pretty good job about letting you still solve the puzzles only giving you the info you absolutely need and not just saying here's the solution. the Mural puzzle in particular someone made a site that has all of the pieces but allows you to figure out how it actually goes together without spoiling it.

"I explore around and find things that unlock new areas" is the category of Adventure Games, of which Metroidvania is a subset. Zelda isn't a game that could have been called a Metroidvania if it weren't for an arbitrary rule about 2D platforming. Rather, Zeldas and Metroidvanias are different kinds of Adventure games (and, in fact, different kinds of Action Adventure games.) Like... I shouldn't get so worked up about this. Genres are marketing categories, and they are notoriously non-systematic. People shouldn't fight over buzzwords devised or pushed by salesmen. But freaking text adventures and point and click adventures have the explore/unlock loop. Adventure as a genre predates Metroid and Castlevania by a good large amount, and both Metroid, and Castlevania, and for that matter Zelda, are consciously trying to be Adventures. And every five minutes some KZfaqr notices, "hey, this broader swath of games has something in common with Metroidvanias," but doesn't notice that, yes, and that broader swath already has a perfectly good name that has nothing wrong with it, and Metroidvanias have always intended to be part of that broader swath, man, it bugs me.

One of my favorite game series that has these knowledge gates is the Myst series. All the puzzles in these games require knowledge that can be acquired by exploring the game world, observing it and through interaction with objects. There are no keys and no items you can pick up. If you understand the mechanics of the game's universe you can breeze through them. And there is so much environmental storytelling in the games apart from the puzzles.

The man talked about FEZ 2, am ded 😭

Thanks for explaining so well my gripes with a game requiring community work. I've said this several times, I fell for the Animal Well hype and regretted paying the release price for it as it seems to be based on getting to enjoy the full game from level 1 puzzles to the level 4 ones, which realistically very few people will, in one hand because as you said it's unreasonable to expect a community that has already collectively solved a puzzle to do it again, and in the other hand because most people are not that hardcore and will just get to the credits and at most will explore a bit of the level 2 puzzles before getting bored or distracted by the next new shiny thing or, like in my case, deciding it's too much work and too much repetition of subpar movement mechanics. I had this experience with Animal Well shortly after having played Tunic for the first time, and it felt like a bit of a deja vu. I had to retread a lot of Tunic because of the game giving so little guidance, but at least Tunic had the option to turn on infinite health and stamina, so I just went and 100% it in a quasi-comfortable way. Then with Animal Well when I saw how much of the game I'd have to retread, plus having to do deathless runs and speedrunning challenges and no way of making it all more comfortable, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, despite being so much of a completionist. Maybe in the future I'll go back to it, but right now I'm a bit annoyed at the game for expecting so much of the player and not giving any warning about having such high expectations. In fact, I believe these kind of games, what we can call metroidbrainias, should be more open and transparent about what kind of challenge they impose. While it's true, as you said, that metroidbrainias are best enjoyed going in blind, some can benefit a lot from at least letting you know if the tools required to solve the puzzle are contained within the game or require external tools, because I'm an adult and I don't have time to waste searching for clues that later I'll find out in an online guide that weren't there in the first place. I prefer games respect my immersion and don't break it by requiring me to use an unprovided barcode reader or to check the source code of a website or to make a spectrogram of an audio file, but if they really want to do that, at least be upfront about it and let me take that information into consideration before I decide to pay for a game. Hopefully more people will voice concerns and demands like mine and the industry will react appropriately. All in all, great video.

Chip's Challenge deep cut, subscribed

This is literally my favorite game genre and I've played hundreds of games. I've always just called them knowledge based games. There's a great video that superdude made on them

There’s this game I really like called Taiji. It’s basically The Witness, but with tile puzzles instead of line puzzles. Definitely recommend.

Hey, that's me at 0:03 :D I'm so pumped more people are talking about these sorts of games!

This was a great recommendation by the YT algorithm, thanks for the great video! This is indeed a pretty amazing kind of game and makes sense that there's not a lot of them out there since it's not the easiest type of experience to craft. Also not that easy to get people to play! how do you hook someone on something you can't talk anything about or else you'll ruin it for them? haha. The way you went over the listed games without giving out too much was well done in that sense.

Great video describing my favorite type of game in recent years. As much as it would be amazing to have a game like this that reaches that level of replayability, that larger than life "a-ha!" moment is what cements these games in my mind, and makes the whole experience worthwhile and worth the price of admission. Also I appreciate the discussion of the big community driven endgame meta puzzles that a lot of these games have and how frustrating it is that only a select few people will ever experience properly. Reaching the final secret in Tunic after so much work only to be met with an ARG that I'm too stupid to understand was a bit of a letdown, but I do understand the value and excitement it can hold for others.

I've read a lot of discussions about how to define this "genre", what games should or shouldn't be counted in it, or whether the genre exists in the first place, and to be honest, I haven't really made up my mind about it, and I wish to see more writing or videos about it. But my current takeaway is that, I feel like defining a group of games by whether their progression system is unlock-based or knowledge-based is a bit arbitrary for an entire genre. First off, as you've shown, many of the games we consider to be part of the genre don't fully rely on knowledge-based progression. But even for Outer Wilds, the game which many would consider to be the best example of the genre (or even the best game of all time), pure knowledge-based progression isn't even that important. in Alex Beachum's conference "Designing for Curiosity", out of 20 minutes, he spends a grand total of 20 seconds to mention this aspect of the game, and when asked about it in a question later, he says it's totally optional. You could also mention the fact that older games have had knowledge-based progression, either in part (super metroid) or in full (toki tori 2). Yet you don't really see those games mentioned when people talk about games similar to OW/TUNIC/FEZ etc. While on the other hand, games like Obra Dinn do get mentioned regularly, despite not adhering to the rules of the "genre", as you've shown. Rather than looking at mechanics, we should be looking at the *feelings* these games give us, as I believe that is the reason we group these games together when talking about them. They encourage us to let our minds wander, sometimes focusing on specific details, sometimes thinking about the game at large, confident in the fact that there is actually something we can figure out and that it will lead to a tangible reward. They surprise us with stuff that was right under our noses to make us wonder what else we missed, what else there is to see. They shower us with bits of information, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, hints and clues that we get curious about as we know they actually mean something. To me, Outer Wilds is the best one because it unapologetically and exclusively focuses on that: curiosity. As show by Alex Beachum, most if not all large-scale design decisions in the game focus on making the player curious and rewarding that curiosity. It makes that feeling the core element of the game and the only thing that drives it forward, to the point that it becomes a very unusual and weird game that some new players bounce off of when they don't get what they should be doing. But when you vibe with it... man.

Since Francis Bacon pioneered the phrase "Knowledge is Power", I suggest we call these games Bacon Games.

OMG. I absolutely love "Chip's challenge" I played over what felt like thousands of levels on my 386 PC back in the day. Recently I found a version that has extra levels but it didn't age that well. But I've played the hell out of that game. You better not badmouth Chip's challenge

Closest to a formal definition of a genre I've seen yet. Including counterexamples is key. We should start using it - I know I will anyway!

Just picked up both OuterWilds and Fez. Thanks for the video! ❤

Best genre indeed! I share your opinion on community puzzles, they are uninteresting after they've been solved. And they are a frustrating when you play fully blind (the way the genre is best experienced). They are okayish for a small easter egg, otherwise I'd rather have them not included in the main parts of the game (like Animal Well (great game) unfortunately did). Also, La-Mulana is a masterpiece. ❤

I love Antichamber and I am so happy to see it in this video

I was pulled the thumbnail and I’m barely a few minutes into your video….take my Like already!!

I still revisit Outer Wilds sometimes... Just for sightseeing, the music, and visiting the Sun station...

Loved the video! Outer Wilds is my favourite game of all time.. (and I'm normally not one for picking favourites) Obra Dinn was my biggest surprise regarding a game I played last year. Keep it up Tin Sensei! 🎉

A criminally under rated Video again. Keep up the good work!

Holy shit Chip's Challenge was one of my favorite games back in the day. Nice to see other people still remember it. Thank you for the video.

I would classify metroidvania as a action explorer, while these cases like animal well, i would call it as a puzzle explorer

Great video

This "genre" definitely has some of my favourite games, as well as many games I've been meaning and wanting to play and I think it's cool that more people are seemingly starting to talk about this stuff, outside of game dev circles. I don't like to think in terms of genres and categories too much, because I think it can be limiting, but it can at least be useful in discussing these things, building on our ideas of what games can be and potentially pushing the medium forward in a meaningful way. Personally much of my interest in game design started with Jonathan Blow, his game Braid and then later The Witness. I had been interested in it before then, but he really kind of changed my perspective and broadened my horizons and since then it's continued to be one of my biggest interests, just because it feels like there's so much potential for creativity and exploration. I feel like "video game" doesn't even really do justice to what the medium can do or be. I prefer thinking of it as interactive art/experiences. Anyway cool video. I'm sure we'll be seeing more and more games like this. Not just "metroidbranias" or "iceberg/rabbit hole games", but games that try to be meaningful, deep or interesting in some ways. Games that can actually benefit us or have a meaningful impact on people's lives or at the very least don't try to waste people's time or money. Games that respect people's intelligence and games that explore uncharted territory. Don't get me wrong though, I think there's room for all kinds of games, including triple A slop or whatever. It's not about being elitist, it's just about wanting to see variety, creativity and innovation. I like being able to mindlessly play some CoD, but I also like mindfully playing The Witness or getting immersed as fuck in Hollow Knight and it's beautiful world. So I'm looking forward to seeing where things go, because I feel like we've only scratched the surface of what people can come up with and create.

Tunic was REAL nice. The story and lore were snoozers coming from Hollow Knight, but solving the mountain door and deciphering the language was some of the most fun I've had in games in a while. And yes, I deciphered it myself. Took about 5 hours or so, lol. I will, however, forever hold up that the softest feather can suck my ass.

Chip's Challenge! That's what it was called!

Making a video like this without mentioning La-Mulana seems criminal

Amazingly curated video, hoping to see more of this type of content from you :)

This is my favourite type of game genre ❤ as you said, it allows for the best, most emotionally involved and most rewarding first gameplay by far. Thanks for the video!

This is an awesome video (I might be biased because this is probably my favorite genre, and you just told me it had a real name!!!) but I really like your content in general - You've just gained one more hardcore fan, keep pushing Tin Sensei!!

If people like these kinds of games and especially outer wilds I heavily reccomend Void Stranger, even if the genre of game doesn't initially seem up your alley its amazing.

I left the video (for now) at the spoiler warning, but I just wanted to let you know that I think this is really great stuff and I'm excited for more!

Antichamber is hella underrated, I know it's an old game and people either never heard of it or played it/heard about it ages ago, but that game is mind fuck^2

I could never put it into words... but yes... THIS is my genre. Great video!

One game I think fits this mold is hob, it’s such a good game please check it out, beautiful, serene, kinda 2D Zelda like, but the dungeons are part of the world, and you need to literally shift them into place, you pull chunks of the world back into place. So cool.

I just remember playing FEZ as a kid on the bus and always being confused on where to go, or what to do, or if I was in a place where I shouldn’t be because I couldn’t completely solve all the puzzles. If I gave a crack at it now I’m still not confident I’d be able to make sense of that game without some external explanations.

I somehow managed to fully complete everything in fez (besides the final obelisk) without looking anything up. One of the most gratifying things I've ever done. I did it with both outer wilds and tunic a few years later, and I'm hoping to do the same in animal well

Awesome video! I'm incredibly passionate about games like this, and I really appreciate hearing your piece about community collaboration, as I could not agree more! I think once a game that encourages people to really sit down and think about what's going on forces someone to use the internet, that it has failed (at least for what I want to get out of it) which soured both Fez and Animal Well for me quite a bit. Some of my favourites that you didnt mention are Environmental Station Alpha and La-Mulana 1/2, but I've played all of the other games you mentioned other than the Witness. I might finally have to dust that one off in my Steam Library and give it a go. Liked and subscribed, good luck with the channel :)

I came into this not knowing what that even was, then as soon as I heard the outerwilds music in the background I got it

It has one. In Japan. It's "Tansaku" or "Exploration platformer", but nobody uses it.

I was playing Riven this week and thought "this feels like a Metroidvania" Now I know why.

Dammit, now I have to go find a longplay of Chip's Challenge.

The setup for this video was so good that as soon as you said "Outer Wilds" I had to stop watching because I haven't played it yet. You'll get the remaining 4/5ths of my view later.

Oh boy, I just randomly found your channel by Lego Racers vid. Looks like I'm here for a treat. Instant sub!

Amazing video! I recently saw a tweet that made me think of this topic. This type of game is particularly magic.

These are "Knowledge Games". At least, that's the name I've most consistently seen and used. Outer Wilds, Animal Well, FEZ, TUNIC, Void Stranger, Manifold Garden, Toki Tori 2, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (somewhat), Baba is You, Rain World, etc. All games where the player is gated mainly by how familiar they are with what they need to do. Where the "sequence" only exists for someone playing the game for the first time, and the best secrets are under your nose the whole time.

Honestly the bunny mural, while built for community collaboration, it is possible for a single person to do it on their own. The just got to completely delete their save, start fresh with a new flower seed (this also changes their mural shard) and do a 38 egg speedrun until they can view that shard. Then they got to completely delete the complete save file, not the ingame one but thensave file that holds the save file, start a bew game with a new seed, and do another 38 egg speedrun praying for no duplicate piece. I predict that to do it on their own would require roughly 200+ speedruns. And somehow figuring out how to number and arrange the shards ... Which I still don't understand that part and I did the 38 egg speedrun to get a second shard to prove my theory... How the heck are you supposed ti know where to put it... Is it the glowing dotes denoting file and rank in a grid?

Not strictly this genre, but Baba is you (made by one of the creators of Noita) blew my mind how many times it can recontextualize itself and give you the there is no spoon -moment. It may look like sokoban, but the solutions rely mostly on understanding and not much on long, tedious sequences, so you probably solve many levels while not actually playing the game, but just thinking about it while doing something else.

Loved the video man

If I remember correctly, back in the day when FEZ was still new, Phil Fish once referred to the game as a Mystroidvania, so there's that as an option that never really got picked up. I think any extension of the term Metroidvania is a bit unnecessarily messy though. Unrelated semi-review, of all the big games in this realm, I didn't enjoy Animal Well as much as I should have, just because compared to most others, the game isn't willing to direct you towards puzzles to solve. My only options were to move on entirely or use a guide by the end, because I didn't know where to look. FEZ has map locations marked as incomplete, TUNIC has the fairy-finding code, even The Witness' pillars and which face the marking is on point you in the rough direction of what you're missing, that help you find where to go when you are out of leads, and let you figure out the rest. When I resorted to a guide for Animal Well, a lot of the secrets were well designed and cool but I didn't get to do them because I wasn't willing to scour every inch of the map a second or third or fourth time looking for secrets without any indication that I was even close. Any hot or cold would have been nice.

I will disagree on you on the bunny mural puzzle, mostly as it isn't required for the game at all, depending on how define fully completing something. People talk often about Animal Well as layers 1 to 4, with a lot of people stopping after layer 2. You got to the credits twice at this point and with that, you could say it's fully completed. There are extra things that you know of, but the experience so far is where most people will be comfortable at (and all can be done as a single player.) You might stumble and even solved some of layer 3 or even 4, but in the end those become community puzzles. For spoilers: They layers seems to be: 1-Defeating the first manticore 2-Collect all the eggs for the second manticore 3-All the secret bunnies 4-The secret with those bunnies and the unicode puzzle for the time-capsule. However, there is speculation that there exist a 5th layer as there are some hidden secrets and people wondering why some of these are things in the game.

12:40 the FEZ crossword clue has been solved _individually_ by at least 2 people because I watched Let's Plays. Keith Ballard used the help of encyclopedic knowledge but no video game wikis nor forums nor community, the Let's Play is still up. I sure as heck couldn't do it. But they are also extra collectibles, right? (both the crossword and the big monolith puzzles) They're not even required for the good ending! Tunic has a bunch of stuff like that as well - it just doesn't provide "completionism" so nobody bats an eye :P

This is one of those videos for me where I think "Wow this video is really well made! This guy must have a lot of subs." It turns out you don't, but you definetly deserve them!

I call these "knowledge-based games" - games which require the player to gain certain knowledge to complete; however, these are (mostly) unreplayable, since you go through them once and get all the knowledge needed to complete the game. Sure, there may be some other elements you need to find/unlock to get to the game's end, but the main element - the knowledge - has already been gained on the first playthrough. I think that to be a "metroidbrainia" you also need to be... a traditional metroidvania. Here: metroidbrainias are games which not only require the player to gain certain knowledge to progress, but also heavily require other types of collectibles - abilities, items, etc. - in order to complete. The one example I can think of is Animal Well, where, while you *do* need knowledge to progress, you also need items to use your knowledge on.

Awesome video mate keep it up❤❤

Great video! :)

Fantastic content!

you people have to check out Lingo, it's a great game i'd say closer to the witness in it's nature of a metroidbraina

FEZ monolith, a bad puzzle ? This is actually, in my opinion, the most beautiful thing in the game. After understanding and solving every challenge, every mystery, we are forced to face something we can't understand... The solution ? Find help from other people on internet, connect to the outer world, with people who just like you enjoyed this adventure. This made me share this passion with new friends met online and left me a mark I will never forget. On the other hand, i find ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL that Phil Fish could leave the game behind with one last personal secret in mind. That's between FEZ and him. Considering good or bad a game that can or cannot be solved "by itself" (meaning it has all the keys directly in it)... is non-sense. FEZ tells us more that any other game about what it is to give birth to an art piece and to let it "live" beyond the creator, through the public's eyes. To me, the monolith puzzle is simply a "good bye"... an invitation to let it go and turn our secret seeker sight onto the world around. Took me years to digest this (roughly explained here) but yeah, FEZ changed my life way beyond my gaming passion. It's a philosophical masterpiece made with much much love.

I love what you did with the thumbnail, that's what made me click.

I spend a lot of time in this "genre". TUNIC, The Witness, and ANIMAL WELL are probably all in my top 10 favorite games of all time. The amount of time I've spent in each of these titles is extensive, especially once you've factored in the randomizers for each of them (with ANIMAL WELL being one I'm actually a developer for). Anyways, I think you mentioned something that I think speaks to the truth here: it's not TRULY a genre, but rather a modifier added to games that already exist in another genre. It's a term that says little about the nature of the gameplay, and much more about how you experience it and the types of feelings you have when solving its challenges. For this reason, I HATE the term "Metroidbrainia". I think it leads to a lot of misplaced conceptions. It implies that it's a genre (when it's not) and that the core features are something present in either Metroid or Castlevania (which they're not). I've come to like "Epiphany-driven" as a descriptor for this type of game. The term is pulled from the Steam store page of Lingo, which is an indie game that's very true to the roots of these types of games. It's what Jon Blow would have made instead of The Witness if he was a single developer without access to a multi million dollar art budget, and had a pension for English word puzzles and noneucludian geometry instead of maze puzzles and religious philosophy. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece of the genre, as it definitely has its flaws, but I think it captures the spirit very well, and "Epiphany-driven" is how it describes itself. It captures the core essence of what makes these types of games distinct from any other. The games are built to make you have epiphanies. At the end of the day, linguistically, I like what it does, too. It's now a modifier for another genre. ANIMAL WELL is an epiphany-driven Metroidvania. TUNIC is an epiphany-driven soulslike (with Zelda mechanics). The Witness is an epiphany-driven maze puzzle game. It rolls off the tongue well.

Big thumb up to the last part. I also want to mention that people who appears on online discussion about these topics is already likely to be a member of some game community. There are players who are introvert or just less interested in socializing with gaming, and their opinions are less likely to be heard. You can finish many souls-likes alone even if their communities are huge and sometimes annoying, but it gets harder if you have less experience with similar games. My expectation on any game is, to lower the threshold of both the community attendance and previous gaming experience, and metroidbrainia is the genre getting closer to it. To be carved into history, a game must build its own history within. The external heirlooms of previous games and corresponding communities are shortcuts to commercial success. But where is yourself, developer? (my English is janky, sorry for that)

Knowledge-gating

“Nonlinear puzzle game”

i've heard it called "mystroid" before (you know, after Myst and Metroid). i would put la mulana (and la mulana 2) in that category. (also void stranger to some extent. it's less platformy, more puzzley.)