The original Metroid and Castlevania both turn 40 years old this fall. As the two series most responsible for creating the “metroidvania,” we’re taking this occasion to take a comprehensive view of the popular genre. This is Metroidvania Week.
When many people pick up a controller to play a game, they’re looking for one thing above all others: escapism. A break from the real world. There’s no better way to do that than to immerse yourself in another world. Getting lost in a completely fictional world is true escapism. These days, open-world games like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the most recent Legend of Zelda games do a lot of the work here, giving us maps full of icons to wade through. But the original escapist games came in the form of search-action games, colloquially known as metroidvania games by their fans.
The term metroidvania has been around since the early 2000s, and mashes together the names of two games that established the tropes of the genre early on, Metroid and Castlevania. A classic metroidvania game drops you at the entrance to an environment that feels massive (especially in the opening hours) and gives you a pretty straightforward quest like “defeat Dracula”–and then throws countless roadblocks in your path on the way to that goal (locked doors, impassable areas, area bosses), forcing you to crisscross a growing map of different, visually distinct areas, often with their own enemies and thematically appropriate challenges.
Those roadblocks are key to making the exploration feel like it matters. You can’t go anywhere you like at the beginning; you’ll need to unlock ways to open doors and new movement options to let you bypass hazards. When you eventually get through that barrier and into a new biome, that sense of wonder at seeing a new place can set in. Those roadblocks look a little different in open-world games; some games eschew these roadblocks entirely in favor of freedom, while others really only gate specific areas like dungeons and special challenges. But they’re still doing the same thing as those metroidvania games–trying to give you reasons to explore and then revisit parts of the map, exploring the world in detail.
At a basic level of mechanics and progression, these games are doing essentially the same thing: rewarding you for thorough exploration.
It’s easy to imagine a metroidvania in 3D–Dark Souls feels like one such example, with a map crisscrossed by shortcuts and riddled with secrets, and each area has a theme and a boss to match. And these themed areas are part of how a game ensures that it’s memorable. Elden Ring has the Siofra river, an underground river with a sky full of dazzling stars. Control, a game full of gray blocks, has areas like the Black Rock Quarry and the Astral Plane.
Many open-world games, especially those where you pick up quest-mandated weapons and earn new movement abilities, would function as a metroidvania without much change to its gameplay loops.
All of these individual features come together to make a place where you as the player have a unique level of agency to navigate and interact with the game world. You can explore at your own pace, discovering the world one biome at a time, and as you pick up classic abilities like double-jumping and air-dashing that allow you to master the game world, you get that feedback loop of satisfaction: “The hard work I’m doing is paying off.” As you acquire weapons and combat abilities, you choose which version of that character you want to be, what build. You have a clear goal and the agency to complete it how you like–something very few games can provide with similar density.
Only these two game genres offer this exact mix of personalization, approach, and achievement. That’s why a genre that’s been around for 30 years still holds such power for so many gamers.
