Dead Cells is amazing. I actually prefer it to Hollow Knight, and I cant recommend it enough. I also don't get how it doesn't count as a metroidvania.
Polygon/Parish: The 12 best indie metroidvania games
- Thread starter Nocturnowl
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Dead Cells is amazing. I actually prefer it to Hollow Knight, and I cant recommend it enough. I also don't get how it doesn't count as a metroidvania.
Level-based progression and metroidvanias are antagonistic concepts. In Dead cells you get through levels in a linear fashion. It's closer to a old castlevania progression than metroidvania.
Only it has routes and areas you can only unlock after learning various abilities from different bosses (and indeed, after you complete the game). With several boss cells you can take a completely different route though the game and can unlock areas that you can't preciously.
Do you have to be able to go backwards for t to count? That feels like a very thin line to me...
Totally wrong opinion in the case of stuff like Toki Tori and La-Mulana (2s) though, the latter doesn't even try to be a Metroidvania with a twist, paying homage to games that came before those, or at worst concurrently, with a very different focus in their gameplay.
It goes beyond that. I'd even say that procedural design doesn't mesh well with metroidvania progression. What makes a metroidvania a metroidvania is usually the fact that the different areas you go through are tied together, sometimes stacked upon each other, sometimes completely mixing between themselves (think of Maridia in Super Metroid).
The level design in Dead cells doesn't include these features.
If nobody's mentioned it as it barely fits (some in the list barely do) give Escape Goat 2 a look! Sublime, as was the first game (which was even more purely level based).
I got to playing Timespinner this weekend.
The throwbacks to SOTN, both in the soundtrack and the visuals, were fun. Moreover, the exploration of the past and present versions of the same world was a great way of structuring the progression loop of unlocking powers to access new areas, while not making the map too confusing. This is the closest any external game has come to emulating the feel of gameplay progression in a SOTN style Castlevania game imo. The weapon variety, the feel of combat and hit reactions were all a notch above most other metroidvanias. The story was light-weight, but there was a lot of optional reading material to pick up if you are into that kind of thing and ready to thoroughly explore. Great game, probably the best metroidvania I have played this year.
The throwbacks to SOTN, both in the soundtrack and the visuals, were fun. Moreover, the exploration of the past and present versions of the same world was a great way of structuring the progression loop of unlocking powers to access new areas, while not making the map too confusing. This is the closest any external game has come to emulating the feel of gameplay progression in a SOTN style Castlevania game imo. The weapon variety, the feel of combat and hit reactions were all a notch above most other metroidvanias. The story was light-weight, but there was a lot of optional reading material to pick up if you are into that kind of thing and ready to thoroughly explore. Great game, probably the best metroidvania I have played this year.
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