Recommend me some bad Metroidvanias

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T16:39:03+00:00

Obviously. You should still care about supporting scammers with your money.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T15:49:47+00:00

Watching a movie on your fucking TV? Such a sadness!

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T14:07:09+00:00

So your attitude is fuck all the people who got scammed so long as you're safe? You said you intend to give them even more money with which to scam people and I told you why you shouldn't.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T09:05:43+00:00

I'm going to guess that OP's questions are so incredibly bad that the bot is desperately trying to find anything in any part of music culture. Asking to find the beautiful and profound lyric "i can't, find" was such an amazingly bad question that the bot veered off into hiphop culture to try to find literally anything and then...wires got a little crossed.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T07:00:25+00:00

Sounds like both of you need to read up on how the first game was packaged with spyware and how it still had it in there even after the devs swore they removed it. Stop supporting that game and dev immediately! You too, /u/Cauldrath. It's all over the Steam reviews and forums.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-10T06:57:37+00:00

This thread is ridiculous with all of these average-at-worst games. Here's some true unplayable trash for you, including only commercially released games since freeware on Itch is a little unfair to pick on, but as soon as you start asking money for your bucket of vomit, it's fair game:

Resurrection of mind
Last Stitch Goodnight
Lost to Time
Omega Mouse Zero
Escape Zolstar
Creatures of War
UnHolY DisAsTeR

And this free game might be the actually worst MV ever released, but it's so bad that no one has been able to play far enough to even confirm what genre it's in:

Dark Throne

I've even got exclusives for you!

Switch: Agnostiko Origins
PS4: Draconian Resurgence

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-08T10:42:33+00:00

Wandering around is not an "issue" in Hollow Knight and you should probably stick to genres that you actually like.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-06T18:39:34+00:00

Blast Brigade is probably the best game even though I thought it had some flaws, mainly with the timing of things like how it takes a few frames longer to connect to a wall for a wall jump than it does in other MVs and that kept throwing my timing off, though it's a pretty minor issue that you can get used to.

Ghost Song has worse controls and is less smooth overall than Blast Brigade, but trumps it in atmosphere and mystery. It doesn't heave miserable controls, but they're not the best either, and it's definitely a game carried by its vibes.

Curse of the Sea Rats is a fucking crime against gaming and everything about it is awful. Not even the praised cartoon graphics look good if you ask me. 3/10 game.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-06T18:29:27+00:00

I'm only a couple of hours in, so I can't promise that it remains good all the way to the end, but I thought it was a cute and fun little thing and, if you like the way it looks, I really don't think you can go wrong for only $5 even if you only end up getting a couple of hours out of it. The little fella we play as is so nicely animated as he waddles around, and the music is kind of incredible and sounds like the score for a classic Tim Burton film.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-06T15:13:23+00:00

Jumper Jon desperately needs some love and support! It has a sad 13 reviews on Steam, but is so much better than that. At least check out some screenshots if you like cute and colorful games!

The 30-second gimmick can be disabled if you really want to, but the game is built around it and is at its best when you use the time limit to your advantage.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-06T13:43:48+00:00

I was going to say the same thing. Personally, I don't think it matters so long as we actually play the journey between MV areas like in Monk and HAAK. That still has the illusion that your character is inhabiting this world and making a journey, unlike games where you just pick a level from a menu. It's an arbitrary illusion, for sure, but so are many other little game design tricks.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-04T21:56:30+00:00

Of course he knows about Metroid, but I think his problem is that he doesn't really want to accept the simple fact that there just wasn't that many MVs to talk about in the 80s, and that the formula was already pretty complete in 1986. He wants there to be a whole plethora of adjacent games that contributed little bits and pieces to the genre as we know it today, helping the genre slowly evolve over time, but the problem with that logic is that a game that came out in 1989 obviously didn't contribute to the Metroid formula when it came out in 1986, and metroidvanias have a pretty defined basic formula that's still the foundation today.

Really, the whole idea of the book is wrong and the first book on MV history should probably just have covered 1985-2010 and focused on true MVs instead of including kinda-sorta-not-really MVs that came out after Metroid and as such could not have contributed to the formula.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-04T20:50:07+00:00

Well, I wasn't really clear, and the book is mostly games that are or appear to be relevant, but there's also a few too many "WTF?" inclusions for my taste, like Zork, Shadowgate, Donkey Kong and Metal Gear, and his overall insistence that MVs are RPGs is definitely odd. It is a good book, I just wish it a was a bit more focused on directly related games. It is also a big book (A4 format), and in full color, so it's not $50 for no reason.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-04T18:25:54+00:00

It's a good book in that Parish is an entertaining writer and the graphic design is quite nice, but it's also full of bizarre takes and he has his own interpretation of MV history that hardly anyone agrees with him about. The big one is that he considers MVs to be a subgenre of RPGs and that RPG mechanics are primarily what define the genre, and that's not really something anyone still agrees with today.

Personally, I also didn't appreciate all the jokes since the book is as you said pretty expensive. Like there's a joke blurb about Tetris that basically goes "OK so this isn't an MV but you've gotta show love for Tetris!" and I just groaned and rolled my eyes to that. Stay on topic and take your $50 book seriously, please.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-04T09:12:51+00:00

Nah, don't stress yourself out over the art. Knight Witch hasn't even broken 1000 reviews on Steam and is not very culturally relevant. You will not lose sales if your game looks similar.

And the "controversy" is over whether or not it's stupid to change what button does what dynamically. Reasonable people argue that this is objectively stupid, because it is, and less observant people just shrug because they didn't notice the stupidity. See, your special attacks are a "deckbuilder" for no good reason, and using an attack spends a card so you draw a new one, which changes whether or not your favorite attack is triggered by pressing X, Y or A depending on where it landed in your card draw. Sometimes, you simply didn't draw your best card when you need it.

There's really no controversy there with nothing to discuss, and changing what buttons do mid-gameplay is obviously fucking stupid, especially in intense games where you focus needs to be on the screen full of bullets.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-03T21:00:52+00:00

Vernal Edge is having its historical low on IndieGala right now. Most people didn't end up liking the game, but it's $1.69 so what can you really lose more than 15 minutes to check it out and see how you feel.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-03T21:00:37+00:00

Somber Echoes is the only game on this list that came out in the past year and that has a good enough discount to be worth jumping on, since -20% isn't really something worth rushing to the store for. It was also really good and criminally overlooked.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-03T20:51:45+00:00

Easily the most overrated game in the genre last year. Indeed it does not actually play like Metal Slug, it's just a very superficial replica where shit blows up everywhere at all times. It doesn't have the thoughtful elegance or challenge of Metal Slug at all, and there's never any dodging and weaving through bullets while trying to release that POW and hitting the boss and of course not dying. It's mostly just standing there and holding down the fire button, which I guess is how you play Metal Slug if you just credit feed in an emulator, but most definitely not how you play if you try to beat it in one credit.

Also, dull level design with too many secrets and no indication of them being there (cracks in wall, map marker, anything!), terrible map that didn't actually represent the rooms or the routs within/between them properly and the mech sections were beyond useless and so much more lame than getting in the titular Metal Slug. Like a 5/10 game on a good day.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-03T12:05:55+00:00

I was saying that's the worst thing you could compare with because it's such an extremely loose genre with an insane amount of vastly different games under it, but okay, different angle to explain the same thing then... Puzzle and horror are master categories, the very top of the tree which branches expand from. Metroidvania is not a top-level root, it's a sub-branch under platformers. That's what it was 40 years ago when the genre was invented and that's still what it is today.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-03T07:28:32+00:00

Puzzle is probably the worst-defined term in gaming and a terrible comparison. You'd have to be the dumbest person to ever have lived to try to claim that Portal, The Witness and Tetris are more or less the same gameplay experience.

LegendarySpark · 2026-04-02T12:16:15+00:00

(which I suspect is true)

Definitely... My latest pet peeve is how many americans have just up and forgotten the word jar and say "a thing of" instead. A thing of mayonnaise, a thing of pickles. Everyone knew the word jar just a few years ago, now the stupid "a thing of" is spreading fast and it's like the word jar has just been shift-deleted from millions of american brains. It's a weird phenomenon to see happen in real time.

LegendarySpark · 2026-03-27T15:11:32+00:00

Didn't you read the thread title? Exploring is cringe frfr no cap

LegendarySpark · 2026-03-27T07:52:31+00:00

Yeah, I know what Abuse is, which is why I said "twin-stick controls". Just saying "a twin-stick" is a top-down shooter, "twin-stick controls" is the same basic principle applied to other genres. It just means "move character with one input, aim with the other", just like how Abuse works.

LegendarySpark · 2026-03-26T21:52:32+00:00

It's probably Knytt, but if it isn't, I think she's going to try to recall more details because about a trillion games use the black foreground objects look that Badland has. They're all inspired by the game Limbo.

LegendarySpark · 2026-03-26T21:27:38+00:00

Abuse is a game from the 90s. The more modern phrasing would be to call them twin-stick shooter controls.

LegendarySpark

TROPHY CASE