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.
