[noise, low-stakes rant] I hate when people are prescriptive about language. When I say Metroidvania, people know the exact kind of game I'm referring to. In Japanese "探索型アクション" is just how the...
[noise, low-stakes rant]
'Search action' is a calque of a Japanese term that refers to the same thing as 'metroidvania'. It's increasingly preferred by Western fans of the genre
I hate when people are prescriptive about language. When I say Metroidvania, people know the exact kind of game I'm referring to. In Japanese "探索型アクション" is just how the cookie crumbled. I don't know what reasons of linguistic or moral purity or whatever that makes people want to pivot away from the term Metroidvania which works and does its job quite well, actually.
there hasn't been a new search action Castlevania in a long time now.
It's similar to roguelike vs roguelite where basically all modern games fit into the latter category if we're being pedantic but the former term is more broadly understood and thus more useful. A...
It's similar to roguelike vs roguelite where basically all modern games fit into the latter category if we're being pedantic but the former term is more broadly understood and thus more useful. A very small minority actually cares if a roguelike game is actually similar to Rogue the game.
Honestly I don't think I understand what "roguelike" means anymore, but I'm also low-key salty about how the word has been suffocated. Best I can tell, "roguelike" these days means "this game has...
Honestly I don't think I understand what "roguelike" means anymore, but I'm also low-key salty about how the word has been suffocated.
Best I can tell, "roguelike" these days means "this game has some sort of procedural generation and consequences for dying" which is so broad as to be useless.
Meanwhile, the words "rogue-playing game" have been living in my head as an idea for a genre of games that are basically "Skyrim, but it looks like NetHack".
There is a massive difference between NetHack and Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and Dead Cells and Binding of Isaac and Balatro and Slay the Spire. I don't think it's unreasonable to want different words to categorize these games differently along the spectrum of "inspired (in apparently even the meagerest of ways) by Rogue".
I guess we have those words though: "classic roguelike", "roguelike deckbuilder", etc.
I think the "consequence" to death specifically has to be that you start over, thus exercising the procedural generation. So softcore Diablo isn't a roguelike, because while there are absolutely...
I think the "consequence" to death specifically has to be that you start over, thus exercising the procedural generation. So softcore Diablo isn't a roguelike, because while there are absolutely consequences to death, starting over isn't one of them; you respawn in town and can immediately walk back into the same generated landscape you died in.
(Hardcore Diablo is a roguelike, though. Fight me.)
I think this game design feature dyad—procgen plus permadeath—is coherent and relevant enough to merit a term of its own, even though it's present in a pretty diverse group of games (e.g. turn-based, tile-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, Nethack, or Crawl; platformers like Spelunky; whatever Noita is; management sims like Dwarf Fortress or FTL; and yeah, hack-and-slashes like Diablo). "Roguelike" seems like an acceptable term for that to me, since we've got other terms to clearly identify the other distinguishing traits of Rogue.
I will: all roguelikes need complex tactical turn-based gameplay, or they aren't roguelikes. Diablo not being a roguelike is supported by the fact that it spawned a whole new genre, isometric...
(Hardcore Diablo is a roguelike, though. Fight me.)
I will: all roguelikes need complex tactical turn-based gameplay, or they aren't roguelikes. Diablo not being a roguelike is supported by the fact that it spawned a whole new genre, isometric ARPGs, which are all basically Diablo-clones, not roguelikes.
I think this game design feature dyad—procgen plus permadeath—is coherent and relevant enough to merit a term of its own, even though it's present in a pretty diverse group of games (e.g. turn-based, tile-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, Nethack, or Crawl; platformers like Spelunky; whatever Noita is; management sims like Dwarf Fortress or FTL; and yeah, hack-and-slashes like Diablo). "Roguelike" seems like an acceptable term for that to me, since we've got other terms to clearly identify the other distinguishing traits of Rogue.
The issue I have with this is that in actual roguelikes the gameplay loop is not just procgen plus permadeath, a core part of roguelikes has always been high complexity that simultaneously more or less attempts to be fair, meaning deaths are avoidable. So your motivation to keep playing is that you learn more stuff and get deeper because you have nearly endless amount of new things to learn, which is fun on its own and there's no need to extend this system.
Whereas roguelites, or simply procgen plus permadeath games, dropped this core factor (together with tactical turn-based gameplay), and as a substitute for complexity they usually add some sort of permanent progression.
This is the reason why I'm still kind of pissed that the term roguelike was bastardized because actual roguelikes and roguelites or whatever you call them simply scratch a different itch - when I want to play one of them I don't usually want to play the other, therefore the term has become kind of useless to me. Unline @hungariantoast I am not lowkey salty about this, I am openly calling it stupid and I am 100% pro-gatekeeping.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. ;) I think the reason not to bake turn-based into the definition is that it simply makes the term less useful. The purpose of genre...
all roguelikes need complex tactical turn-based gameplay
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. ;)
I think the reason not to bake turn-based into the definition is that it simply makes the term less useful. The purpose of genre labels is to distinguish different works; and for that purpose, we want labels to be somewhat broad and partly overlapping. It's more useful to describe Rogue as a "turn-based roguelike" and Diablo HC as a "real-time roguelike" than Rogue as a "roguelike" and Diablo as a "real-time procgen+permadeath hack-and-slash", since there are way, way more of the latter (and many orders of magnitude more players) and therefore a greater need to subcategorize. In fact, one reason not to include "turn-based" in the definition is just that "turn-based roguelike" is an incredibly niche, insular genre, which would make the term closer to jargon than a generally-usable genre label.
And if you don't include turn-based in the definition, then there's really not much qualitatively to distinguish Nethack from Diablo. Obviously Nethack is a far more complex game, with a massive truckload more game mechanics, but I don't think "how many disparate systems does a game need to be a roguelike" is a road either of us wants to go down.
Here's a question: is Noita a roguelike? It's not turn-based (or tile-based, if you don't take an incredibly perverse definition of "tile"), but ticks pretty much every other box: it has procgen+permadeath, tactical gameplay, and a huge variety of deep, diverse systems.
My issue with this whole topic is that "traditional roguelikes" play so, so differently from anything else, and with the bastardization of the term it became so much more difficult to find them...
My issue with this whole topic is that "traditional roguelikes" play so, so differently from anything else, and with the bastardization of the term it became so much more difficult to find them outside of forums and social media/steam/etc. groups focused on the genre. You can call Diablo a roguelike if you want, but generally people who are in the mood for Crawl or Brogue or Caves of Qud are not satisfied by Diablo and vice versa, that's the problem.
Also there's no need to call diablo a roguelike because pretty much everyone already knows what a diablo-clone/ARPG is. The label would perhaps be useful when Diablo came out and created a new subgenre, but at the time roguelikes were more niche than now, so even then... I'm trying to talk about the roguelike label from a practical perspective, and from that point of view talking about Diablo is kind of pointless.
"real-time procgen+permadeath hack-and-slash"
This thread is going in circles because you can just write this as "hack and slash roguelite". I know some people proposed that roguelites need to have permanent progression, but I think it serves well as a "with some basic roguelike elements" term, and in any case "roguelite, just without permanent progression" is a smaller deviation than "roguelike, just without the core roguelike gameplay style". Permanent progression is just the default feature added to roguelites as a substitute for the lack of complexity, but there can be other features instead of it.
Obviously Nethack is a far more complex game, with a massive truckload more game mechanics, but I don't think "how many disparate systems does a game need to be a roguelike" is a road either of us wants to go down.
I'm not interested in arguing about where the line is, but I do think it's a key element, yes. Many game qualities are a sliding scale, where on one end the game is clearly one genre and on the other end the game is clearly a different genre. Yet the genre labels are still useful and work for 95% of games. This is also the case in roguelikes vs their complexity.
Here's a question: is Noita a roguelike? It's not turn-based (or tile-based, if you don't take an incredibly perverse definition of "tile"), but ticks pretty much every other box: it has procgen+permadeath, tactical gameplay, and a huge variety of deep, diverse systems.
My point is "it makes sense to call it a roguelike if a fan of these days so called traditional roguelikes is likely to enjoy it when they feel like playing a traditional roguelike, otherwise the term is not useful". Therefore no, Noita is not a roguelike. I don't think that the fact that it labels a niche genre is an issue at all, that seem a bit silly.
I use roguelite when I mean roguelite because the average reader still sees roguelike. Even in speech, it's similar enough that most people won't notice. I think the difference between the two...
I use roguelite when I mean roguelite because the average reader still sees roguelike. Even in speech, it's similar enough that most people won't notice. I think the difference between the two words is useful to know, but it's not worth being prescriptive over.
Much like my longer reply below, i find that terminology useful for when I'm talking to the kind of person who might actually play a Rogue-like proper (Qud, Stone Soup, Rift Wizard) because yeah...
Much like my longer reply below, i find that terminology useful for when I'm talking to the kind of person who might actually play a Rogue-like proper (Qud, Stone Soup, Rift Wizard) because yeah it can get annoying saying "no like actual hard not just pick 3 do a run hard".
However i also don't care because I acknowledge that 99% of people don't play that niche genre, don't care, and if they do care, will take all of 10 seconds to explain the difference so we can continue the conversation at the same level of context.
It only really annoys me personally because yeah it can make the genre hard to research when I am jonesing for something Qudesque.
Everything in language is just vibes-based. You're allowed to say, "Trying to deliberately start a new term is silly," and others are allowed to say, "But here's why I think it's a good idea," and...
Everything in language is just vibes-based.
You're allowed to say, "Trying to deliberately start a new term is silly," and others are allowed to say, "But here's why I think it's a good idea," and you can go back and forth at it for as long as you'd like. Maybe people will change their minds... and maybe they won't. That's part of how language evolves.
Sometimes a term catches on because it just happens to be what society's influencers are saying; sometimes it's as a result of a more deliberate social movement or an article (I'm sure we've ALL self-prescribed at some point when we've learned a word we use is considered offensive); and sometimes a term catches on because some random blogger saying, "here's a new way you might consider classifying games".
Language is a free-for-all.
You can advocate for or against whatever you want. Being an overly stringent pedant is definitely no fun (for the pedant or for anyone else)… but if you really think you have a good reason people should change how they speak, speak up!
Sometimes, you'll make a point so good that people actually do change how they talk. And other times, people will say, "Nah, I'm going to continue to use the word 'literally' however I want and there's LITERALLY nothing you can do to stop meeeeee."
Edit: that being said, I think it does make sense to be cautious when it comes to prescriptivism given that it has long been used to discriminate on the basis of race, class, etc. (eg “Speak the Queen’s English or else!”). Prescriptivism rooted in bigotry is awful and we should be careful not to perpetuate it today (intentionally or unintentionally).
I'm definitely still much more in the habit of using the term Metroidvania, but I think it has pretty weak descriptive power to anyone who isn't already in the know. As the article mentions, to...
I'm definitely still much more in the habit of using the term Metroidvania, but I think it has pretty weak descriptive power to anyone who isn't already in the know. As the article mentions, to define the term you end up in this long rabbit hole of describing the history of the genre and its forebears. And then still having to move to a more neutral elaboration/explanation in the likely event your audience hasn't played a Metroid game or one of the subset of Castlevania games that qualifies.
I remember the period of time during which first person shooters were still more commonly called Doom Clones and not only was it silly and reductive but semantically less useful a genre label.
Lawnmowering is one of the terms I've not heard of before, and perfectly describes my least favourite type of puzzle game. On the other hand, Database Thriller sounds right up my alley. A few of...
Lawnmowering is one of the terms I've not heard of before, and perfectly describes my least favourite type of puzzle game.
On the other hand, Database Thriller sounds right up my alley. A few of the titles mentioned are horror, unfortunately, but Immortality has been wishlisted.
Lawnmowering is often the result of either fatigue or bad puzzle design. I often find that when I begin doing it, I need to step away and let my brain hit the problem anew. If I have problems with...
Lawnmowering is often the result of either fatigue or bad puzzle design. I often find that when I begin doing it, I need to step away and let my brain hit the problem anew. If I have problems with the same puzzle over many sessions, then I’ll begin lawnmowering again just to ensure that I don’t miss anything. A lot of point and click and interactive fiction games involve moon logic, so lawnmowering can be a valid solve strategy.
I've found these claims to vary wildly and it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on. There's some "moon logic" examples i've seen over the years that are either: Someone is just bad at the...
A lot of point and click and interactive fiction games involve moon logic, so lawnmowering can be a valid solve strategy.
I've found these claims to vary wildly and it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on. There's some "moon logic" examples i've seen over the years that are either:
Someone is just bad at the game, sorry.
They started brute forcing solutions rather than continuing to search for clues that would've made it obvious, so when they got the brute force to work they assumed it was bad (which again might be a player who's not great or might be bad signposting).
Actual "how the hell should anyone get this" moon logic (mostly in the realm of ARGs and extra content these days in my eyes).
Literally any questline in a FromSoft game. Sometimes even progression gates when you try to get into the Dark Souls 1 DLC or the "Show your Humanity" puzzle in Dark Souls 3 with a solution so...
Actual "how the hell should anyone get this" moon logic (mostly in the realm of ARGs and extra content these days in my eyes).
Literally any questline in a FromSoft game. Sometimes even progression gates when you try to get into the Dark Souls 1 DLC or the "Show your Humanity" puzzle in Dark Souls 3 with a solution so convoluted you probably can't find it yourself.
Edit: I looked up some more moon logic puzzles and here's two good ones.
You can unlock Luigi in Super Smash Bros Melee if the seconds on your game timer contain a 2. It's highly unlikely you figure this out before it accidentally happens to you.
Here's one I liked from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake copied from TVTropes:
You are attempting to bypass a gate, which has a high-voltage laser across it. Behind the gate, there is a guard, who has the ability to shut the gate off, and has been instructed to do so only at night. Your task is to somehow trick the guard into shutting off the gate. Thought about it? Good.
You must backtrack to a laboratory, where there's a pair of eggs which can be taken. One egg will hatch into a snake, which eats your rations - the other will hatch into an owl, which will eat the snake if it hatches while the snake is in your inventory. Hatch the owl, and head back towards the fence. Then, equip the owl. The owl hoots, and the guard, despite it being broad daylight, declares it's nighttime, and switches off the gate.
Eh there are some, but I did many unspoiled, and even then the "some" are probably just me eventually getting lazy. Hell i know they are because I know other people who did them just fine, but...
Literally any questline in a FromSoft game.
Eh there are some, but I did many unspoiled, and even then the "some" are probably just me eventually getting lazy. Hell i know they are because I know other people who did them just fine, but they're also the people who take physical notes. Fromsoft games do a shit ton of quest logic based on world building and visual cues mixed with actually engaging with the optional lore. It's mostly not moon logic so much as optional content to reward people who are bothering to engage with it.
You can unlock Luigi in Super Smash Bros Melee if the seconds on your game timer contain a 2. It's highly unlikely you figure this out before it accidentally happens to you.
That's just RNG. It shouldn't even be classed as moon logic. They could've had a hidden RNG seed with the same odds and you wouldn't call that "logic".
Here's one I liked from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Yeah that's the older era games where that absolutely was a thing, but also a limitation of the time. It's a 1990's game, don't think it had day night cycles.
Of course, a couple of those are fairly straightforward and you'll get most if not all encounters by playing the games and exploring. You will likely even finish some of these quests with some of...
It's mostly not moon logic so much as optional content to reward people who are bothering to engage with it.
Of course, a couple of those are fairly straightforward and you'll get most if not all encounters by playing the games and exploring. You will likely even finish some of these quests with some of their endings intact. Then there's those quests where you can't step into area xyz before checking location zyx since the NPC relocated to somewhere without leaving a clue because if you do step into that area before speaking to them three times and reloading the game you'll fail the questline entirely. Most of the times though, if you want another ending to a particular quest with maybe another reward, it often has an easy to miss step that may or may not be sign posted.
Saving Solaire is very unlikely to happen accidentally. Giving 30 Humanity to an otherwise unrelated-to-the-quest mute spiderlady stuck to a wall you can't even speak to unless you have the right item, just so a door opens elsewhere in another zipcode before you step foot in Lost Izalith isn't my idea of "earth logic" either.
Finding the DS1 DLC and Dusks questline is practically impossible, so much so FromSoft shared the solution online at launch.
The only hint you'll get is a note saying "Three third cords". Now go find 3 out of 4 items (two are missable) and consume them or you'll miss an entire ending to Bloodborne. You can miss one of them by not sending Arianna to the Chapel which you can only do after killing three bosses but before the Blood Moon. Don't use her blood while Adella is there, Adella will kill her.
The Lord of Hollows ending in DS3 is just silly. Talk to Yoel to draw out strength, die a few times so he at some point randomly has new dialogue, exhaust his dialogue and do it again but make sure you do not kill the Abyss Watchers because Yoel will just kick it and you fail the quest.
Find Anri in a very specific spot, tell her you don't know where Horace is, if you do the opposite the quest fails.
Don't kill the hidden Pilgrim that will assassinate her and while this one's easy, do so and you guessed it: Fail the quest.
Simlarly, kill a certain boss and Vyke won't spawn or kill Vyke incorrectly and you lock yourself out of Irina's quest in Elden Ring. No indication which is the right order of things.
Some of FromSoft's quests or puzzles are genuinely confusing and no amount of physical note taking will get you to the solution. Knowing that you need to become a Humanity sprite in DS3 to open the "Show your Humanity" door is possible to piece together, but there is no clue whatsoever where you can become one. Extra difficult because there haven't been any Humanity sprites in DS3 (as opposed to DS1). It truly is just luck of the draw whether or not you Chameleon while in the right area. White Branches work too but those even have additional RNG built in so you run the chance you won't even change into the Humanity sprite at all.
Moon Logic is pretty much the agreed upon consensus when talking about FromSoft questlines. Some things are a bit esoteric but otherwise good puzzles like casting Law of Regression in front of the Marika/Radagon statue, but others are just out there. And that's coming from a place of love. I've played all of them and enjoy them immensely, even the opaque questlines and puzzles, but I can't help but call them based in moon logic plenty of times.
As a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, where I think "moon logic" as a criticism originated (or at least became super popular), I don't think you're right on this one. There are...
As a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, where I think "moon logic" as a criticism originated (or at least became super popular), I don't think you're right on this one. There are certainly players out there who call every puzzle they can't solve "moon logic" but there are also a lot of puzzles that really rely on leaps of logic that would be incredibly unintuitive at best. There's something kinda nostalgic about the whole thing but there's so much that really would be absurdly near impossible to figure out on one's own.
My claim is it’s vastly less common than people think, especially these days. Myst was already brought up, like it was when it was new, and it confused me just as much then because literally every...
My claim is it’s vastly less common than people think, especially these days.
Myst was already brought up, like it was when it was new, and it confused me just as much then because literally every puzzle is sign posted. The point and click adventure games absolutely were brutal with all sorts of nonsense but it’s a mostly dead genre, and modern ones do their best to not do that.
Myst was always brought up and it’s where this fascination started for me because I beat the game with my dad, along with Riven and very little felt outright difficult let alone unfair.
I play them both every decade or so when my memory of all the puzzles wears off and it’s a very well designed game, and I’m pretty sure literally every puzzle has very reasonable hints, if not out right solutions.
Likewise yes I will concede some souls quest lines are BS, but given the original claim was “all of them” I don’t agree. Again more than half of them I’d guess I figured out naturally. Some are clearly designed for you to fail the first time, but “huh I found their corpse here” is itself a perfectly fine clue for a game intended to be played multiple times.
Oh yeah I do agree, I think a lot of people (including in this thread) wildly over-apply the term to things that aren't supposed to be clearly solvable puzzles in the first place (I think most...
Oh yeah I do agree, I think a lot of people (including in this thread) wildly over-apply the term to things that aren't supposed to be clearly solvable puzzles in the first place (I think most Dark Souls examples fall into this category) or just puzzles that they personally found difficult. Modern point-and-click adventure games sometimes play with the idea of moon logic puzzles as part of the genre's legacy, but actual puzzles of that nature are pretty rare these days. A puzzle being bad or difficult doesn't necessarily make it moon logic, and neither does the fact that you had to look it up!
I wouldn't put it past me that I'm just bad at the game, I am naught but a humble gamer. However moon logic really does exist out there, and I have encountered it many times. These are the three...
I wouldn't put it past me that I'm just bad at the game, I am naught but a humble gamer. However moon logic really does exist out there, and I have encountered it many times. These are the three that float to the top of my mind as either "gave up and looked up the answer" (1 and 2) or "did every single thing I could think of and solved it" (3)
SPOILERS AHEAD
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Text Game)
In the text adventure Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you don't remember to grab the junk mail off the floor of Arthur's house in the very early part of the game, you lock yourself later on trying to get the Babel fish translator from the vending machine on the Vogon space ship. The junk mail does not call itself out as being important in any particular way, nor (to my knowledge) was this how the Babel fish made its way to Arthur's possession in any version of the radio plays, TV series, or movies.
Myst (Macintosh)
In Myst you had to get on an elevator, press a button, then get off the elevator to make it move so you could access a secret entrance the elevator car had been blocking. Every other puzzle in the game was closer to, like, "solve this logic puzzle" and the like.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Nintendo DS)
In the Phoenix Wright games there can be a lot of this as well, it's hard to pull out exact answers but the whole logic of the game is "carefully and meticulously examine every single pixel in a room to find evidence, then carefully and meticulously examine every single item you're given, then carefully and meticulously listen to every witness's statements on the stand and pick exactly which piece of evidence contradicts their testimony, THEN when they 'revise' their testimony, start the evidence/testimony loop over and over." Very rarely is it always fully straightforward as to what piece of evidence disproves what piece of testimony. In the first Larry Butz case I only got through by brute-forcing the answer.
(Edit to correct some logic errors. See? I am bad at this.)
fwiw. I don't think it's useful to combine moon logic with the concept of pixel hunting, as those are two pretty much entirely independent problems that games like this can have (and luckily the...
fwiw. I don't think it's useful to combine moon logic with the concept of pixel hunting, as those are two pretty much entirely independent problems that games like this can have (and luckily the rereleases of the Phoenix Wright games all have QoL features that get rid of any pixel hunting issues).
I also just straight-uo disagree with you when it comes to the actual testimony side of things -- while everything may not always be super intuitive, it very much doesn't approach moon logic in terms of puzzle design. Moon logic is usually reserved for puzzles that are nigh impossible to solve without someone telling you the solution because the solution is that absurd -- puzzles like the Gabriel Knight cat hair mustache puzzle, which is infamous enough that it has its own wikipedia page -- and I don't think any testimony in any Ace Attorney game has been even close to that bad. Your Myst example is another bad one imo, because the whole point of criticizing a puzzle as moon logic is that the consequences don't logically follow from the things you need to do in the game to accomplish them. Moving an elevator to access something that is blocked by where the elevator was placed is an extremely clear logical path no matter how difficult it was for you to realize that's what you had to do.
Me having played most of these games, after reading the article I want to look into Ultros... EDIT: Oh, swell, it's one of the games I have unsolved in guessthe.game!
Me having played most of these games, after reading the article I want to look into Ultros...
EDIT: Oh, swell, it's one of the games I have unsolved in guessthe.game!
This feels dishonest in its own logic so it can justify it's self defined "better" catetgory. Yeah i doubt many people hate it, and dear god someone being "too dorky" in this day and age is...
This feels dishonest in its own logic so it can justify it's self defined "better" catetgory.
I hate the term 'metroidbrania'. I think many people who use the term seem to hate it, too; as Kate Gray writes on a Nintendo Life feature listing some of these games, the word "makes [her] feel like someone with a hobby so dorky that [she] can't talk about it with normal people."
Yeah i doubt many people hate it, and dear god someone being "too dorky" in this day and age is hilarious to me. What a cherry picked example
You'll never convince me that these games form a coherent genre, or even that you can group them under a general umbrella term.
Puzzle, and its of course a skewed list. 90% of it does easily. If you ignore the "yes listicles aren't great at figuring things out" outliers this is cake.
I think the reason why is that the term was originally coined to mean "games with open-ended exploration" – similar to a metroidvania1 – but using knowledge gating instead of traditional ability gating.
Congrats you just explained the vast majority of the games you said you couldn't put under one group.
In a "true" metroidbrania, what you know is the only real form of progression; a player who already knows all the secrets can start a fresh save and immediately go through the motions of beating the game, skipping over most of the game.
The problem there is that there's very few games that actually meet this description. Out of the list above, the only ones I'd put in that list are Animal Well, Outer Wilds, and Tunic. Because there's not enough games to put on a listicle, the term naturally expands so you can at least name 10. Because everyone is doing this independently, it expands in every available direction, until somehow Gone Home and Fez are now in the same genre. 'Metroidbrania' is thus dead on arrival; it can never usefully describe a game beyond a vague sense that it involves knowledge, puzzles, or deduction
"True" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because YES Tunic and Fez share dna....literally one is an inspiration for the other. If you simply limit the definition to "knowledge is often used as a progression gate", congrats, you've grouped your data without the awkward "and you can skip game if you know it" qualifier.
Understanding the secret language in Tunic.
OK pet peeve but this is one of the most awkward examples because you can do everything but the Arg without this (as I literally did). The knowledge checks that matter are so much more interesting and it's a CRIME to have it in the language translation bubble in my eyes because the brilliance of the game design is that's just bonus points at every possible puzzle level until the very very last.
otherwise, every classical puzzle game (eg, Portal, Stephen's Sausage Roll) is now a knowledge game.
So you agree they're all puzzle games...
Gah.
This isn't to say that I think the article is worthless. The higher level discussion is interesting and reminds me of plenty of stuff I've read and discussed for years (game vs toy for example). These frameworks are helpful for people really diving into the details of various games and help give more constructive discussion about it. But for a casual grouping for a crowd of people Metroidbrania is fine. Yes it's got a built in knowledge check caused by people trying to be too clever but it takes about 5 seconds to explain.
Which is why it annoys me that I feel like the opening boils down to "DAE hate when people say ATM Machine am i right?!"
I feel like your dislike of the opening paragraph biased you, since you seem pretty focused on the author's dislike of "Metroidbrania" compared to the other points. I personally don't like that...
I feel like your dislike of the opening paragraph biased you, since you seem pretty focused on the author's dislike of "Metroidbrania" compared to the other points. I personally don't like that term either, but putting aside semantics, I think the article does raise a good point about how it's not really good at describing a genre or subgenre.
Most subgenres denote specific core gameplay mechanics, especially when the name is derived from an existing game. Metroidvania games are typically platformers that involve exploring a map and unlocking new areas with items or abilities rather than beating levels. Roguelikes/roguelites have procedurally generated maps that vary with every run. Soulslikes are RPG games known for dark world-building elements and difficult combat.
There can be some unique takes and combinations with other genres, but those gameplay elements are fairly universal and will apply to most games with those labels. If a game uses one of those labels, players will have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the core gameplay.
But the games listed as “Metroidbrania” have all sorts of wildly differing gameplay. A game like Her Story is wildly different from, say, Tunic or Animal Well. I was legitimately surprised to see Inscryption come up since I know it as a deck-building game and card battler. The main connecting point is that progression is locked behind knowledge gates, but in terms of gameplay and mechanics, that can manifest in many different ways.
"Puzzle game" doesn't really fit as an umbrella term for all these knowledge-gated games either. They are puzzle games, but not all puzzle games rely on knowledge gates. I wouldn't put Portal in that category, for example, since that's not based on knowledge so much as creative thinking. To that end, I do think "knowledge" works as a good, broad term for this flavor of puzzle game since it doesn't imply any other specific gameplay elements or mechanics.
The greater takeaway I got from the article was trying to define and group the games into new subgenres based on gameplay. And right now, there's not really much language for describing these sorts of games, so finding games that scratch a particular itch can be tricky. After all, someone who enjoyed the platforming elements of Fez may not care to play solitaire in Occlude. "Database thriller" in particular stands out to me given how many games use that format.
I have seen plenty of games use these labels which do not fit the material you've described. I know many "metroidvania's" that are not platformers and rougelike is used for anything that has more...
Metroidvania games are typically platformers that involve exploring a map and unlocking new areas with items or abilities rather than beating levels. Roguelikes/roguelites have procedurally generated maps that vary with every run. Soulslikes are RPG games known for dark world-building elements and difficult combat.
I have seen plenty of games use these labels which do not fit the material you've described. I know many "metroidvania's" that are not platformers and rougelike is used for anything that has more than 1 run, especially without proc-gen. Soulslike is everywhere simply because it covers 2 major adoptable mechanics in a stamina/dodge based combat AND the estus limited healing between "safe" points.
But the games listed as “Metroidbrania” have all sorts of wildly differing gameplay. A game like Her Story is wildly different from, say, Tunic or Animal Well. I was legitimately surprised to see Inscryption come up since I know it as a deck-building game and card battler.
Inscryption is one of the games that shouldn't be on the list and is just an example of how the initial data is kinda cherry picked, as admitted by the author in their own methodology. The only thing about it that fits this AT ALL is the fact that there's some signposted secrets. Megaman X qualifies under the same logic. If you remove ARG content there's even less that makes Inscryption relevant to the list/genre, and I don't know anyone who'd call it a metroidbrania, or any of these other things.
The main connecting point is that progression is locked behind knowledge gates, but in terms of gameplay and mechanics, that can manifest in many different ways.
If you stretch a definition it can, but as I and the author already said you need some level of open ended exploration to make that part of the connection. Nearly every game has knowledge gates, a metroidvania is one where exploring to solve the knowledge gates is the loop vs something like a fighting game where you lab setups.
Just like how the main connection point can be "resting resets enemies and progress but gives you back your 'heals" for soulslikes.
"Puzzle game" doesn't really fit as an umbrella term for all these knowledge-gated games either. They are puzzle games, but not all puzzle games rely on knowledge gates. I wouldn't put Portal in that category, for example, since that's not based on knowledge so much as creative thinking.
Well you'd be the first person I know who wouldn't classify Portal as a puzzle game, and separating "knowledge" vs "creative thinking" is certainly quite the leap in my eyes. While there are "creative" solutions to some of the portal puzzles they come closer to speedrunning/unintended solutions than some sort of sandbox "here's the mechanics, figure out a way to solve" like scribblenauts.
Every level in portal is teaching you some new way to understand the mechanics yes, but you just combine those ways in a very specific order. The knowledge that you can maintain momentum is a gate. The knowledge you can do that by going through the same portal more than once is a gate. Yes really clever players can make momentum cannons and skip large parts of the puzzle, but that's not the intended/standard experience.
The greater takeaway I got from the article was trying to define and group the games into new subgenres based on gameplay. And right now, there's not really much language for describing these sorts of games, so finding games that scratch a particular itch can be tricky. After all, someone who enjoyed the platforming elements of Fez may not care to play solitaire in Occlude. "Database thriller" in particular stands out to me given how many games use that format.
Sure, and as I said I think that's fine. I think the framework of trying to make an excuse to do this because "oh this word is too dorky" or "i don't like this category" is foolish.
The list is missing 12 Minutes, which I highly recommend.
The problem there is that there's very few games that actually meet this description. Out of the list above, the only ones I'd put in that list are Animal Well, Outer Wilds, and Tunic.
The list is missing 12 Minutes, which I highly recommend.
I don't think most fans of "metroidbrainias" really include 12 Minutes, much like several other examples the author of this article includes are never called metroidbrainias imo. Not every game...
I don't think most fans of "metroidbrainias" really include 12 Minutes, much like several other examples the author of this article includes are never called metroidbrainias imo. Not every game that includes puzzles or even time loops is a metroidbrainia. But I'll admit I might be biased in this particular case because 12 Minutes is an incredibly badly written game and is not a game where you can ignore its awful story.
I think being nitpicky about genre names, is pointless, imo. Not a bad exercise per se but I gave up on that when people were trying to force Souls games into JRPG because FromSoft are from Japan,...
I think being nitpicky about genre names, is pointless, imo.
Not a bad exercise per se but I gave up on that when people were trying to force Souls games into JRPG because FromSoft are from Japan, or WRPG because it isn’t anime/turn based.
You got the eternal debate of Roguelike vs Roguelite as well.
Then you got games that overlap multiple genres, is Etrian Odyssey a JRPG or a “DRPG”(Dungeon RPG)… Gamefaqs has it as Western Style RPG last time I checked.
Then there’s technicality that basically all games you play the role of someone… so most games are RPGs.
That being said, I have no stake on Metroidvanias(Or “Search Action”)since it’s not a genre I’m into, but I think “Learn Action” is a horrible name.
Though I just accepted that genre names are part of language where they mean absolutely nothing except what we define it to be, and that definition can change.
Music genres are… weird, you have Goregrind, Shoegazing, Kawaii future bass, and more. So in my PoV it’s not like genre names are meant to make sense from their name.
[noise, low-stakes rant]
I hate when people are prescriptive about language. When I say Metroidvania, people know the exact kind of game I'm referring to. In Japanese "探索型アクション" is just how the cookie crumbled. I don't know what reasons of linguistic or moral purity or whatever that makes people want to pivot away from the term Metroidvania which works and does its job quite well, actually.
There hasn't been a new Castlevania period in a long time now. The second-to-last Castlevania is "search-action." The team behind it also later worked on Metroid Dread. It couldn't be more on the nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Lords_of_Shadow_–_Mirror_of_Fate
It's similar to roguelike vs roguelite where basically all modern games fit into the latter category if we're being pedantic but the former term is more broadly understood and thus more useful. A very small minority actually cares if a roguelike game is actually similar to Rogue the game.
Honestly I don't think I understand what "roguelike" means anymore, but I'm also low-key salty about how the word has been suffocated.
Best I can tell, "roguelike" these days means "this game has some sort of procedural generation and consequences for dying" which is so broad as to be useless.
Meanwhile, the words "rogue-playing game" have been living in my head as an idea for a genre of games that are basically "Skyrim, but it looks like NetHack".
There is a massive difference between NetHack and Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and Dead Cells and Binding of Isaac and Balatro and Slay the Spire. I don't think it's unreasonable to want different words to categorize these games differently along the spectrum of "inspired (in apparently even the meagerest of ways) by Rogue".
I guess we have those words though: "classic roguelike", "roguelike deckbuilder", etc.
I think the "consequence" to death specifically has to be that you start over, thus exercising the procedural generation. So softcore Diablo isn't a roguelike, because while there are absolutely consequences to death, starting over isn't one of them; you respawn in town and can immediately walk back into the same generated landscape you died in.
(Hardcore Diablo is a roguelike, though. Fight me.)
I think this game design feature dyad—procgen plus permadeath—is coherent and relevant enough to merit a term of its own, even though it's present in a pretty diverse group of games (e.g. turn-based, tile-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, Nethack, or Crawl; platformers like Spelunky; whatever Noita is; management sims like Dwarf Fortress or FTL; and yeah, hack-and-slashes like Diablo). "Roguelike" seems like an acceptable term for that to me, since we've got other terms to clearly identify the other distinguishing traits of Rogue.
I will: all roguelikes need complex tactical turn-based gameplay, or they aren't roguelikes. Diablo not being a roguelike is supported by the fact that it spawned a whole new genre, isometric ARPGs, which are all basically Diablo-clones, not roguelikes.
The issue I have with this is that in actual roguelikes the gameplay loop is not just procgen plus permadeath, a core part of roguelikes has always been high complexity that simultaneously more or less attempts to be fair, meaning deaths are avoidable. So your motivation to keep playing is that you learn more stuff and get deeper because you have nearly endless amount of new things to learn, which is fun on its own and there's no need to extend this system.
Whereas roguelites, or simply procgen plus permadeath games, dropped this core factor (together with tactical turn-based gameplay), and as a substitute for complexity they usually add some sort of permanent progression.
This is the reason why I'm still kind of pissed that the term roguelike was bastardized because actual roguelikes and roguelites or whatever you call them simply scratch a different itch - when I want to play one of them I don't usually want to play the other, therefore the term has become kind of useless to me. Unline @hungariantoast I am not lowkey salty about this, I am openly calling it stupid and I am 100% pro-gatekeeping.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. ;)
I think the reason not to bake turn-based into the definition is that it simply makes the term less useful. The purpose of genre labels is to distinguish different works; and for that purpose, we want labels to be somewhat broad and partly overlapping. It's more useful to describe Rogue as a "turn-based roguelike" and Diablo HC as a "real-time roguelike" than Rogue as a "roguelike" and Diablo as a "real-time procgen+permadeath hack-and-slash", since there are way, way more of the latter (and many orders of magnitude more players) and therefore a greater need to subcategorize. In fact, one reason not to include "turn-based" in the definition is just that "turn-based roguelike" is an incredibly niche, insular genre, which would make the term closer to jargon than a generally-usable genre label.
And if you don't include turn-based in the definition, then there's really not much qualitatively to distinguish Nethack from Diablo. Obviously Nethack is a far more complex game, with a massive truckload more game mechanics, but I don't think "how many disparate systems does a game need to be a roguelike" is a road either of us wants to go down.
Here's a question: is Noita a roguelike? It's not turn-based (or tile-based, if you don't take an incredibly perverse definition of "tile"), but ticks pretty much every other box: it has procgen+permadeath, tactical gameplay, and a huge variety of deep, diverse systems.
My issue with this whole topic is that "traditional roguelikes" play so, so differently from anything else, and with the bastardization of the term it became so much more difficult to find them outside of forums and social media/steam/etc. groups focused on the genre. You can call Diablo a roguelike if you want, but generally people who are in the mood for Crawl or Brogue or Caves of Qud are not satisfied by Diablo and vice versa, that's the problem.
Also there's no need to call diablo a roguelike because pretty much everyone already knows what a diablo-clone/ARPG is. The label would perhaps be useful when Diablo came out and created a new subgenre, but at the time roguelikes were more niche than now, so even then... I'm trying to talk about the roguelike label from a practical perspective, and from that point of view talking about Diablo is kind of pointless.
This thread is going in circles because you can just write this as "hack and slash roguelite". I know some people proposed that roguelites need to have permanent progression, but I think it serves well as a "with some basic roguelike elements" term, and in any case "roguelite, just without permanent progression" is a smaller deviation than "roguelike, just without the core roguelike gameplay style". Permanent progression is just the default feature added to roguelites as a substitute for the lack of complexity, but there can be other features instead of it.
I'm not interested in arguing about where the line is, but I do think it's a key element, yes. Many game qualities are a sliding scale, where on one end the game is clearly one genre and on the other end the game is clearly a different genre. Yet the genre labels are still useful and work for 95% of games. This is also the case in roguelikes vs their complexity.
My point is "it makes sense to call it a roguelike if a fan of these days so called traditional roguelikes is likely to enjoy it when they feel like playing a traditional roguelike, otherwise the term is not useful". Therefore no, Noita is not a roguelike. I don't think that the fact that it labels a niche genre is an issue at all, that seem a bit silly.
I use roguelite when I mean roguelite because the average reader still sees roguelike. Even in speech, it's similar enough that most people won't notice. I think the difference between the two words is useful to know, but it's not worth being prescriptive over.
Much like my longer reply below, i find that terminology useful for when I'm talking to the kind of person who might actually play a Rogue-like proper (Qud, Stone Soup, Rift Wizard) because yeah it can get annoying saying "no like actual hard not just pick 3 do a run hard".
However i also don't care because I acknowledge that 99% of people don't play that niche genre, don't care, and if they do care, will take all of 10 seconds to explain the difference so we can continue the conversation at the same level of context.
It only really annoys me personally because yeah it can make the genre hard to research when I am jonesing for something Qudesque.
Everything in language is just vibes-based.
You're allowed to say, "Trying to deliberately start a new term is silly," and others are allowed to say, "But here's why I think it's a good idea," and you can go back and forth at it for as long as you'd like. Maybe people will change their minds... and maybe they won't. That's part of how language evolves.
Sometimes a term catches on because it just happens to be what society's influencers are saying; sometimes it's as a result of a more deliberate social movement or an article (I'm sure we've ALL self-prescribed at some point when we've learned a word we use is considered offensive); and sometimes a term catches on because some random blogger saying, "here's a new way you might consider classifying games".
Language is a free-for-all.
You can advocate for or against whatever you want. Being an overly stringent pedant is definitely no fun (for the pedant or for anyone else)… but if you really think you have a good reason people should change how they speak, speak up!
Sometimes, you'll make a point so good that people actually do change how they talk. And other times, people will say, "Nah, I'm going to continue to use the word 'literally' however I want and there's LITERALLY nothing you can do to stop meeeeee."
Edit: that being said, I think it does make sense to be cautious when it comes to prescriptivism given that it has long been used to discriminate on the basis of race, class, etc. (eg “Speak the Queen’s English or else!”). Prescriptivism rooted in bigotry is awful and we should be careful not to perpetuate it today (intentionally or unintentionally).
I'm definitely still much more in the habit of using the term Metroidvania, but I think it has pretty weak descriptive power to anyone who isn't already in the know. As the article mentions, to define the term you end up in this long rabbit hole of describing the history of the genre and its forebears. And then still having to move to a more neutral elaboration/explanation in the likely event your audience hasn't played a Metroid game or one of the subset of Castlevania games that qualifies.
I remember the period of time during which first person shooters were still more commonly called Doom Clones and not only was it silly and reductive but semantically less useful a genre label.
Lawnmowering is one of the terms I've not heard of before, and perfectly describes my least favourite type of puzzle game.
On the other hand, Database Thriller sounds right up my alley. A few of the titles mentioned are horror, unfortunately, but Immortality has been wishlisted.
Lawnmowering is often the result of either fatigue or bad puzzle design. I often find that when I begin doing it, I need to step away and let my brain hit the problem anew. If I have problems with the same puzzle over many sessions, then I’ll begin lawnmowering again just to ensure that I don’t miss anything. A lot of point and click and interactive fiction games involve moon logic, so lawnmowering can be a valid solve strategy.
I've found these claims to vary wildly and it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on. There's some "moon logic" examples i've seen over the years that are either:
Literally any questline in a FromSoft game. Sometimes even progression gates when you try to get into the Dark Souls 1 DLC or the "Show your Humanity" puzzle in Dark Souls 3 with a solution so convoluted you probably can't find it yourself.
Edit: I looked up some more moon logic puzzles and here's two good ones.
You can unlock Luigi in Super Smash Bros Melee if the seconds on your game timer contain a 2. It's highly unlikely you figure this out before it accidentally happens to you.
Here's one I liked from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake copied from TVTropes:
You are attempting to bypass a gate, which has a high-voltage laser across it. Behind the gate, there is a guard, who has the ability to shut the gate off, and has been instructed to do so only at night. Your task is to somehow trick the guard into shutting off the gate. Thought about it? Good.
You must backtrack to a laboratory, where there's a pair of eggs which can be taken. One egg will hatch into a snake, which eats your rations - the other will hatch into an owl, which will eat the snake if it hatches while the snake is in your inventory. Hatch the owl, and head back towards the fence. Then, equip the owl. The owl hoots, and the guard, despite it being broad daylight, declares it's nighttime, and switches off the gate.
Eh there are some, but I did many unspoiled, and even then the "some" are probably just me eventually getting lazy. Hell i know they are because I know other people who did them just fine, but they're also the people who take physical notes. Fromsoft games do a shit ton of quest logic based on world building and visual cues mixed with actually engaging with the optional lore. It's mostly not moon logic so much as optional content to reward people who are bothering to engage with it.
That's just RNG. It shouldn't even be classed as moon logic. They could've had a hidden RNG seed with the same odds and you wouldn't call that "logic".
Yeah that's the older era games where that absolutely was a thing, but also a limitation of the time. It's a 1990's game, don't think it had day night cycles.
Of course, a couple of those are fairly straightforward and you'll get most if not all encounters by playing the games and exploring. You will likely even finish some of these quests with some of their endings intact. Then there's those quests where you can't step into area xyz before checking location zyx since the NPC relocated to somewhere without leaving a clue because if you do step into that area before speaking to them three times and reloading the game you'll fail the questline entirely. Most of the times though, if you want another ending to a particular quest with maybe another reward, it often has an easy to miss step that may or may not be sign posted.
Saving Solaire is very unlikely to happen accidentally. Giving 30 Humanity to an otherwise unrelated-to-the-quest mute spiderlady stuck to a wall you can't even speak to unless you have the right item, just so a door opens elsewhere in another zipcode before you step foot in Lost Izalith isn't my idea of "earth logic" either.
Finding the DS1 DLC and Dusks questline is practically impossible, so much so FromSoft shared the solution online at launch.
The only hint you'll get is a note saying "Three third cords". Now go find 3 out of 4 items (two are missable) and consume them or you'll miss an entire ending to Bloodborne. You can miss one of them by not sending Arianna to the Chapel which you can only do after killing three bosses but before the Blood Moon. Don't use her blood while Adella is there, Adella will kill her.
The Lord of Hollows ending in DS3 is just silly. Talk to Yoel to draw out strength, die a few times so he at some point randomly has new dialogue, exhaust his dialogue and do it again but make sure you do not kill the Abyss Watchers because Yoel will just kick it and you fail the quest.
Find Anri in a very specific spot, tell her you don't know where Horace is, if you do the opposite the quest fails.
Don't kill the hidden Pilgrim that will assassinate her and while this one's easy, do so and you guessed it: Fail the quest.
Simlarly, kill a certain boss and Vyke won't spawn or kill Vyke incorrectly and you lock yourself out of Irina's quest in Elden Ring. No indication which is the right order of things.
Some of FromSoft's quests or puzzles are genuinely confusing and no amount of physical note taking will get you to the solution. Knowing that you need to become a Humanity sprite in DS3 to open the "Show your Humanity" door is possible to piece together, but there is no clue whatsoever where you can become one. Extra difficult because there haven't been any Humanity sprites in DS3 (as opposed to DS1). It truly is just luck of the draw whether or not you Chameleon while in the right area. White Branches work too but those even have additional RNG built in so you run the chance you won't even change into the Humanity sprite at all.
Moon Logic is pretty much the agreed upon consensus when talking about FromSoft questlines. Some things are a bit esoteric but otherwise good puzzles like casting Law of Regression in front of the Marika/Radagon statue, but others are just out there. And that's coming from a place of love. I've played all of them and enjoy them immensely, even the opaque questlines and puzzles, but I can't help but call them based in moon logic plenty of times.
As a fan of classic point-and-click adventure games, where I think "moon logic" as a criticism originated (or at least became super popular), I don't think you're right on this one. There are certainly players out there who call every puzzle they can't solve "moon logic" but there are also a lot of puzzles that really rely on leaps of logic that would be incredibly unintuitive at best. There's something kinda nostalgic about the whole thing but there's so much that really would be absurdly near impossible to figure out on one's own.
My claim is it’s vastly less common than people think, especially these days.
Myst was already brought up, like it was when it was new, and it confused me just as much then because literally every puzzle is sign posted. The point and click adventure games absolutely were brutal with all sorts of nonsense but it’s a mostly dead genre, and modern ones do their best to not do that.
Myst was always brought up and it’s where this fascination started for me because I beat the game with my dad, along with Riven and very little felt outright difficult let alone unfair.
I play them both every decade or so when my memory of all the puzzles wears off and it’s a very well designed game, and I’m pretty sure literally every puzzle has very reasonable hints, if not out right solutions.
Likewise yes I will concede some souls quest lines are BS, but given the original claim was “all of them” I don’t agree. Again more than half of them I’d guess I figured out naturally. Some are clearly designed for you to fail the first time, but “huh I found their corpse here” is itself a perfectly fine clue for a game intended to be played multiple times.
Oh yeah I do agree, I think a lot of people (including in this thread) wildly over-apply the term to things that aren't supposed to be clearly solvable puzzles in the first place (I think most Dark Souls examples fall into this category) or just puzzles that they personally found difficult. Modern point-and-click adventure games sometimes play with the idea of moon logic puzzles as part of the genre's legacy, but actual puzzles of that nature are pretty rare these days. A puzzle being bad or difficult doesn't necessarily make it moon logic, and neither does the fact that you had to look it up!
I wouldn't put it past me that I'm just bad at the game, I am naught but a humble gamer. However moon logic really does exist out there, and I have encountered it many times. These are the three that float to the top of my mind as either "gave up and looked up the answer" (1 and 2) or "did every single thing I could think of and solved it" (3)
SPOILERS AHEAD
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Text Game)
In the text adventure Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you don't remember to grab the junk mail off the floor of Arthur's house in the very early part of the game, you lock yourself later on trying to get the Babel fish translator from the vending machine on the Vogon space ship. The junk mail does not call itself out as being important in any particular way, nor (to my knowledge) was this how the Babel fish made its way to Arthur's possession in any version of the radio plays, TV series, or movies.Myst (Macintosh)
In Myst you had to get on an elevator, press a button, then get off the elevator to make it move so you could access a secret entrance the elevator car had been blocking. Every other puzzle in the game was closer to, like, "solve this logic puzzle" and the like.Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Nintendo DS)
In the Phoenix Wright games there can be a lot of this as well, it's hard to pull out exact answers but the whole logic of the game is "carefully and meticulously examine every single pixel in a room to find evidence, then carefully and meticulously examine every single item you're given, then carefully and meticulously listen to every witness's statements on the stand and pick exactly which piece of evidence contradicts their testimony, THEN when they 'revise' their testimony, start the evidence/testimony loop over and over." Very rarely is it always fully straightforward as to what piece of evidence disproves what piece of testimony. In the first Larry Butz case I only got through by brute-forcing the answer.fwiw. I don't think it's useful to combine moon logic with the concept of pixel hunting, as those are two pretty much entirely independent problems that games like this can have (and luckily the rereleases of the Phoenix Wright games all have QoL features that get rid of any pixel hunting issues).
I also just straight-uo disagree with you when it comes to the actual testimony side of things -- while everything may not always be super intuitive, it very much doesn't approach moon logic in terms of puzzle design. Moon logic is usually reserved for puzzles that are nigh impossible to solve without someone telling you the solution because the solution is that absurd -- puzzles like the Gabriel Knight cat hair mustache puzzle, which is infamous enough that it has its own wikipedia page -- and I don't think any testimony in any Ace Attorney game has been even close to that bad. Your Myst example is another bad one imo, because the whole point of criticizing a puzzle as moon logic is that the consequences don't logically follow from the things you need to do in the game to accomplish them. Moving an elevator to access something that is blocked by where the elevator was placed is an extremely clear logical path no matter how difficult it was for you to realize that's what you had to do.
+1 for Immortality, it's an excellent, excellent game.
Love the Venn diagram in this article. Helps me discover new games and lets me know what to expect!
Me having played most of these games, after reading the article I want to look into Ultros...
EDIT: Oh, swell, it's one of the games I have unsolved in guessthe.game!
This feels dishonest in its own logic so it can justify it's self defined "better" catetgory.
Yeah i doubt many people hate it, and dear god someone being "too dorky" in this day and age is hilarious to me. What a cherry picked example
Puzzle, and its of course a skewed list. 90% of it does easily. If you ignore the "yes listicles aren't great at figuring things out" outliers this is cake.
Congrats you just explained the vast majority of the games you said you couldn't put under one group.
"True" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because YES Tunic and Fez share dna....literally one is an inspiration for the other. If you simply limit the definition to "knowledge is often used as a progression gate", congrats, you've grouped your data without the awkward "and you can skip game if you know it" qualifier.
OK pet peeve but this is one of the most awkward examples because you can do everything but the Arg without this (as I literally did). The knowledge checks that matter are so much more interesting and it's a CRIME to have it in the language translation bubble in my eyes because the brilliance of the game design is that's just bonus points at every possible puzzle level until the very very last.
So you agree they're all puzzle games...
Gah.
This isn't to say that I think the article is worthless. The higher level discussion is interesting and reminds me of plenty of stuff I've read and discussed for years (game vs toy for example). These frameworks are helpful for people really diving into the details of various games and help give more constructive discussion about it. But for a casual grouping for a crowd of people Metroidbrania is fine. Yes it's got a built in knowledge check caused by people trying to be too clever but it takes about 5 seconds to explain.
Which is why it annoys me that I feel like the opening boils down to "DAE hate when people say ATM Machine am i right?!"
I feel like your dislike of the opening paragraph biased you, since you seem pretty focused on the author's dislike of "Metroidbrania" compared to the other points. I personally don't like that term either, but putting aside semantics, I think the article does raise a good point about how it's not really good at describing a genre or subgenre.
Most subgenres denote specific core gameplay mechanics, especially when the name is derived from an existing game. Metroidvania games are typically platformers that involve exploring a map and unlocking new areas with items or abilities rather than beating levels. Roguelikes/roguelites have procedurally generated maps that vary with every run. Soulslikes are RPG games known for dark world-building elements and difficult combat.
There can be some unique takes and combinations with other genres, but those gameplay elements are fairly universal and will apply to most games with those labels. If a game uses one of those labels, players will have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the core gameplay.
But the games listed as “Metroidbrania” have all sorts of wildly differing gameplay. A game like Her Story is wildly different from, say, Tunic or Animal Well. I was legitimately surprised to see Inscryption come up since I know it as a deck-building game and card battler. The main connecting point is that progression is locked behind knowledge gates, but in terms of gameplay and mechanics, that can manifest in many different ways.
"Puzzle game" doesn't really fit as an umbrella term for all these knowledge-gated games either. They are puzzle games, but not all puzzle games rely on knowledge gates. I wouldn't put Portal in that category, for example, since that's not based on knowledge so much as creative thinking. To that end, I do think "knowledge" works as a good, broad term for this flavor of puzzle game since it doesn't imply any other specific gameplay elements or mechanics.
The greater takeaway I got from the article was trying to define and group the games into new subgenres based on gameplay. And right now, there's not really much language for describing these sorts of games, so finding games that scratch a particular itch can be tricky. After all, someone who enjoyed the platforming elements of Fez may not care to play solitaire in Occlude. "Database thriller" in particular stands out to me given how many games use that format.
I have seen plenty of games use these labels which do not fit the material you've described. I know many "metroidvania's" that are not platformers and rougelike is used for anything that has more than 1 run, especially without proc-gen. Soulslike is everywhere simply because it covers 2 major adoptable mechanics in a stamina/dodge based combat AND the estus limited healing between "safe" points.
Inscryption is one of the games that shouldn't be on the list and is just an example of how the initial data is kinda cherry picked, as admitted by the author in their own methodology. The only thing about it that fits this AT ALL is the fact that there's some signposted secrets. Megaman X qualifies under the same logic. If you remove ARG content there's even less that makes Inscryption relevant to the list/genre, and I don't know anyone who'd call it a metroidbrania, or any of these other things.
If you stretch a definition it can, but as I and the author already said you need some level of open ended exploration to make that part of the connection. Nearly every game has knowledge gates, a metroidvania is one where exploring to solve the knowledge gates is the loop vs something like a fighting game where you lab setups.
Just like how the main connection point can be "resting resets enemies and progress but gives you back your 'heals" for soulslikes.
Well you'd be the first person I know who wouldn't classify Portal as a puzzle game, and separating "knowledge" vs "creative thinking" is certainly quite the leap in my eyes. While there are "creative" solutions to some of the portal puzzles they come closer to speedrunning/unintended solutions than some sort of sandbox "here's the mechanics, figure out a way to solve" like scribblenauts.
Every level in portal is teaching you some new way to understand the mechanics yes, but you just combine those ways in a very specific order. The knowledge that you can maintain momentum is a gate. The knowledge you can do that by going through the same portal more than once is a gate. Yes really clever players can make momentum cannons and skip large parts of the puzzle, but that's not the intended/standard experience.
Sure, and as I said I think that's fine. I think the framework of trying to make an excuse to do this because "oh this word is too dorky" or "i don't like this category" is foolish.
The list is missing 12 Minutes, which I highly recommend.
I don't think most fans of "metroidbrainias" really include 12 Minutes, much like several other examples the author of this article includes are never called metroidbrainias imo. Not every game that includes puzzles or even time loops is a metroidbrainia. But I'll admit I might be biased in this particular case because 12 Minutes is an incredibly badly written game and is not a game where you can ignore its awful story.
I think being nitpicky about genre names, is pointless, imo.
Not a bad exercise per se but I gave up on that when people were trying to force Souls games into JRPG because FromSoft are from Japan, or WRPG because it isn’t anime/turn based.
You got the eternal debate of Roguelike vs Roguelite as well.
Then you got games that overlap multiple genres, is Etrian Odyssey a JRPG or a “DRPG”(Dungeon RPG)… Gamefaqs has it as Western Style RPG last time I checked.
Then there’s technicality that basically all games you play the role of someone… so most games are RPGs.
That being said, I have no stake on Metroidvanias(Or “Search Action”)since it’s not a genre I’m into, but I think “Learn Action” is a horrible name.
Though I just accepted that genre names are part of language where they mean absolutely nothing except what we define it to be, and that definition can change.
Music genres are… weird, you have Goregrind, Shoegazing, Kawaii future bass, and more. So in my PoV it’s not like genre names are meant to make sense from their name.