Any good metroidvania recommendations?

[Valestein]

"Exil"(which clearly apes hollow knight's art style) and "Curse of the Sea rats" are the standouts of this batch.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

"Exil"(which clearly apes hollow knight's art style) and "Curse of the Sea rats" are the standouts of this batch.

• Lo-Fi Samurai - not bad, but I really don't understand going for that graphics style. Also rhytm based gameplay is nice in Beat Saber but I wouldn't play anything like that on a PC.
• Chafi and the Space Hunter - instead of a Samus Aran vibe, I'm getting a hooker-cosplaying-a-badass vibe. No powers beyond a simple dash shown, and the animations look stiff and unnatural. No silky smooth controls and nice feel of character movement makes a metroidvania dead to me.
• Barbarian Saga - looks ok, but mostly combat focused. Personally, I prefer more puzzle platforming and less combat (i.e. Ori > Hollow Knight), but this might be decent still
• Cycle - another pixelated shit
• Count Pumpcula - maybe to whacky theme a bit? Also I really don't like when devs go for pixel graphics for everything except the menus, which are rendered in a very modern and sharp way. Have some consistency ffs.
• Dewdrop Dynasty - fuck you devs for making your sprites as shitty as on a ZX Spectrum. I'm betting a potato every single dev of this game was born after SVGA was a thing.
• Astronite - overly pixelated and black and white! Could you get more hipster? Are you planning to run this on TI-84 or something? (oh yeah, TI-84 has 8 color display duh, so they must be aiming lower)
• Curse of the Sea Rats - gameplay looks decent but furries... I did play through Monster Boy, so it's not like it's intolerable, but it will need to be very good
• Selini - stylish, but hipsterish and overuses bloom. Also, no powers shown. Makes me think this is more of an Inside-like than a proper metroidvania.
• Exil - this actually looks really good. Some nice traversal shown, some bosses, etc. Indeed has a strong HK vibe, but this is not a bad thing.

 

[Grauken]

Cycle / Count Pumpcula / Dewdrop Dynasty and Astronite look the most interesting to me. The rest is meh

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Cycle / Count Pumpcula / Dewdrop Dynasty and Astronite look the most interesting to me. The rest is meh

Seems our taste differ substantially! Please do post your impressions of the gameplay in this thread, I'm willing to overlook shitty hipster artstyle if game is good.


Another game I've recently found:


The demo plays quite nice, if bit too combaty. Shame that the them is so terribly cringy and there's no option to disable controller vibration on every single shot.

 

[Bigg Boss]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

 

[Grauken]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

That's like saying you only play Ultima games and don't care for other RPGs

 

[toughasnails]

Lol I forgot that your post was the reason I even looked Islets up. Looks good. Did you play their other game, SHEEPO?

As an aside, do you know which Metroidvania's that work well with KB/M? My fucking gamepad broke and it'll be a week or so until I can get a new one =\

Never played Sheepo, though I probably will in the future

I've been playing Sheepo recently. It's basically a precision platformer lite metroidvania. No combat, the abilities you acquire allow you to transform into different types of animals you encounter for a limited time, transforming into a bird allows you to fly, as a worm you can burrow through earth. Boss fights so far were either you escaping from the boss or avoiding their attacks/projectiles and staying alive long enough. It's very light on collectibles. It's fun though, the movement is p polished (seems to be inspired by Ori a bit), the visuals are p pleasant, the music p chill. The game have this sort of laid back, afternoon feel to it.

 

[Grauken]

Recently played

Axiom Verge 2

I bounced off this initially expecting an Axiom Verge sequel, this is tangentially related and a very different game story- and gameplay-wise. Heavy focus on exploration and hacking of enemies, incl. hacking of bosses that trivializes them. It works here, though as boss fights aren't exactly that important in the game. Lots of great moments and overall great game

B.I.O.T.A.

Various arcade moments welded to a somewhat open-world-ish 2d platformer, you progress by increasing your wallet size and buying key items, doesn't really feel like a metroidvania, has selectable chars with different gun types, some finicky platforming, save-everywhere that makes difficulty for the most part trivial and retro-pixel graphics that border on sometimes hard to parse, it has some charm and fun but really is just mostly mediocre

Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread

Great visuals, great voice acting, and lots of charm, some terrible gameplay choices with terrible controls that make this really hard to recommend, it feels fun for the first few hours then becomes a chore and never really stops being one until the end, hard pass

 

[Valestein]

This looks interesting, has two PCs and (local) co-op.



"Anima Flux"

 

[The Decline]

"Exil"(which clearly apes hollow knight's art style) and "Curse of the Sea rats" are the standouts of this batch.

Those all look like ass.

 

[Jrpgfan]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

Only the best in the genre(Hollow Knight).

 

[Bigg Boss]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

Only the best in the genre(Hollow Knight).

I played ShovelKnight but HollowKnight is better huh? Ok thanks.

 

[Jrpgfan]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

Only the best in the genre(Hollow Knight).

I played ShovelKnight but HollowKnight is better huh? Ok thanks.

It's a completely different game and it's in a whole other level.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I played ShovelKnight but HollowKnight is better huh? Ok thanks.

Shovel Knight was inspired by a few NES/Famicom games, specifically The Legend of Zelda 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, and the MegaMan series generally. Both Shovel Knight and Hollow Knight could be described as action-platformers, but the former isn't a Metroidvania, since it has discrete levels and does not contain the type of exploration found in Hollow Knight and other games in this genre.

 

[toughasnails]

I played a couple of hours of this and so far it seems to be p decent?

Kinda poor first impression with the art in cutscenes and character portraits but the actual pixel art is p good. And the game itself is surprisingly solid, really enjoyable exploration with a good variety of items/power-ups to find, unabashedly Metroid-esque feel to combat and movement. So far it seems like each of planets you visit has a completely unique selection of enemies too.
Looks like the game had p rough launch which is to blame for some of the negativity around it, but so far I have encountered no issues so it seems like the game was decently ironed out in the meantime.

Karhu
Care to elaborate? I'm only a couple of hours in. Does the game get much worse later on or it that you think it poor from the start? The character art in cutscenes and writing is poor for sure, but again that doesn't offend me as much in this sort of game.

 

[Alex]

I played ShovelKnight but HollowKnight is better huh? Ok thanks.

Shovel Knight was inspired by a few NES/Famicom games, specifically The Legend of Zelda 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, and the MegaMan series generally. (...)

I thought the main influence were the Duck Tales games?

 

[Jvegi]

Are those games ok with a keyboard? Pressing 'w' and 'd' at the same time for diagonal movement makes me think I'm doing games wrong. Perhaps I'm just bad at games. I can never get too deep, the difficulty pushes me back. Even Ori got too tiresome at some point.

I think I'll try Hollow Knight again, perhaps I just need some practice. I could also play Axiom Verge, I have it for free on Epic, HK would require some high seas mischief.

 

[Grauken]

Are those games ok with a keyboard? Pressing 'w' and 'd' at the same time for diagonal movement makes me think I'm doing games wrong. Perhaps I'm just bad at games. I can never get too deep, the difficulty pushes me back. Even Ori got too tiresome at some point.

I think I'll try Hollow Knight again, perhaps I just need some practice. I could also play Axiom Verge, I have it for free on Epic, HK would require some high seas mischief.

I play almost all 2d games on PC with a gamepad, its just more comfortable, and most of them are primarily designed for them (exceptions are games like Abuse with 360-degree aiming, though you can do it on gamepads as well, but in these rare cases keyboard + mouse is better). You can get used to play platformers with a keyboard, I did it in my youth after all for almost 2 decades, but I wouldn't want to go back to it these days

That said, to answer your question, most of them allow the use of a keyboard and you shouldn't struggle too hard with diagonal movement.

 

[Ash]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

That's like saying you only play Ultima games and don't care for other RPGs

No it isn't. RPGs are massively broad, even the Metroidvania itself existed initially as a subgenre of RPG (Symphony of the Night) but has since moved away from that to some degree unfortunately. Metroidvanias have some diversity to them but there is no genre as broad as the RPG.

 

[Grauken]

no genre as broad as the RPG

the Action genre is much more broad than RPG, Strategy is just as broad as RPGs

That said, there are subgenres to metroidvania as well of which the Castlevania variants are one, so yes, my metaphor still works

even the Metroidvania itself existed initially as a subgenre of RPG (Symphony of the Night) but has since moved away from that to some degree unfortunately.

demonstrably false, neither are metroidvania a subgenre of RPGs but rather the Castlevania strain of them brought in some simplistic RPG elements, but the Metroid strain is usually completely devoid of that

 

[ghostdog]

I have never cared that much for the genre outside Castlevania. Am I missing out?

That's like saying you only play Ultima games and don't care for other RPGs

No it isn't. RPGs are massively broad, even the Metroidvania itself existed initially as a subgenre of RPG (Symphony of the Night) but has since moved away from that to some degree unfortunately. Metroidvanias have some diversity to them but there is no genre as broad as the RPG.

define RPGs

Spoiler

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Are those games ok with a keyboard? Pressing 'w' and 'd' at the same time for diagonal movement makes me think I'm doing games wrong. Perhaps I'm just bad at games. I can never get too deep, the difficulty pushes me back. Even Ori got too tiresome at some point.

I think I'll try Hollow Knight again, perhaps I just need some practice. I could also play Axiom Verge, I have it for free on Epic, HK would require some high seas mischief.

I managed to beat Hollow Knight with a keyboard, but the platforming is really quite difficult, since the RPG-derived character progression elements assist in combat but not in jumping around. Of course, you do obtain extra movement abilities, as is customary for a Metroidvania, which might allow you to complete to a platforming section you had failed earlier, but a great many platforming challenges are mandatory with a certain set of (useful) abilities, and in order to obtain any ending past the first (worst) one you will need to complete a zone filled with extraordinarily difficult platforming even with the full set of abilities.

 

[toughasnails]

One thing I really liked about Haak is that for once you actually have a number of optional movement-expanding upgrades that you get through exploration or certain quests, which take away most of the difficulty from the trickier platforming near the end on. So the game actually does offer you an alternative if you aren't precision platformer type, as long as you are ready to invest extra time.

 

[JDR13]

Anyone playing Ghost Song? If so, how is it?

 

[Grauken]

Anyone playing Ghost Song? If so, how is it?

Just bought it