Metroidvania Still Feels Like A Niche Genre That Deserves Better

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.

Within the vast and overcrowded Steam store, there are over 3,100 titles with the “metroidvania” tag. Last year, Hollow Knight: Silksong accomplished a rare feat for an indie game, crashing storefronts upon its launch. And later this year, one of the genre’s namesakes is making a comeback in the form of the 2D action game Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse.

And yet, 40 years after the release of the original Metroid and Castlevania games, the genre influenced by those two beloved franchises still feels relatively obscure. The metroidvania or “search-action” genre has long felt like a middle child among the wider family of (arguably arbitrary) game classifications. For whatever reason, much of the gaming industry--particularly at the AAA level--seem hesitant to try their hands with entries to the metroidvania canon the same way they do with other budding genres.

The "metroidvania" tag on Steam is packed

Pick any time period in the history of games and you’ll recall moments when certain types of games were all the rage. From the cartoon-mascot platformers that plagued consoles in response to Mario and Sonic, to every publisher pushing out a “Halo killer,” and PUBG triggering an onslaught of battle royales, so many genres had their moment. The list goes on, particularly for subgenres spawning from specific games--your souls-likes, roguelikes, and such.

Metroid and Castlevania each underwent early peaks and long periods of radio silence. After Super Metroid--which set the template for metroidvanias that came after--a long drought followed, with Fusion and the Prime games reviving the brand, and stinkers like Other M beginning another dark era until MercurySteam’s Samus Returns and Dread. Castlevania followed a similar path, with Symphony of the Night followed with several similarly designed handheld entries until the franchise, after the 3D Lords of Shadow titles, fell into oblivion for over a decade.

That isn’t to say that the gaps during their respective hiatuses weren’t filled. The 2009 release of Shadow Complex served as a nice throwback to a then-abandoned genre, and a 2010s resurgence of metroidvanias occurred in indie scenes through games like Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, Ori, Dead Cells, and many others. What the genre lacked was any AAA support, with big publishers seemingly unwilling to cash in on the interest--possibly because there wasn’t that much cash to be made, based on data.

Despite their popularity, metroidvanias have never achieved big-budget success like God of War or Metal Gear

An unfortunate characteristic that Metroid and Castlevania share is their lack of blockbuster sales success. The best-selling Metroid game is Dread with a little over 3 million copies sold, while Castlevania’s biggest seller was Lords of Shadow, which didn’t even break 2 million. They’re far cries from Nintendo’s Mario and Zelda or Konami’s Metal Gear in terms of mainstream commercial triumph. While mega-publishers and popular IP have toyed with souls-likes and roguelikes (mainstream IP like God of War, The Last of Us, and even Splatoon have dabbled in the latter), metroidvanias never experienced a similar zeitgeist.

It’s hard to pinpoint why metroidvanias don’t have mass appeal. Perhaps it’s a lack of approachability, as these games can often be an unholy intersection of precision platforming and twitchy, unforgiving action gameplay. Maybe metroidvania maps generally being a large, restrictive macropuzzle for players to solve is a turn-off for casual players, as opposed to, say, open worlds with wider spaces to explore. Meanwhile, other budding genres like deck-building roguelikes and “bullet heaven” games like Vampire Survivors took off and contrasted with metroidvanias with their shorter dopamine-producing sessions. 

The lack of broad appeal for metroidvanias could be beneficial for the genre and its fans. Modern gaming trends are often victim to oversaturation and dilution--think about every clone of Balatro and Vampire Survivors that has flooded marketplaces. On the Steam store, the roguelike/lite tag has nearly 23,000 related games. While it’s an indicator of popularity and demand, that many games could make it hard for developers to cut through the noise and for players to discover something worth their time and money.

If a sizable percentage of new Steam releases were Hollow Knight clones, some of the metroidvania magic would be lost. Ultimately, the metroidvania style of game doesn’t have to have a stranglehold on video gaming to be considered successful. The least of genre fans’ worries should be validation from the larger industry--the main concern should just be having a healthy selection of titles to play.

As a massive fan of search action, I wish that metroidvanias would occupy a space somewhere in the middle, where it has more mainstream attention without becoming a fad that gets overexposed and flames out. With more creators putting their own spin on the genre, growth and innovation would follow. I want to see a healthy scene, and one that isn’t overly dependent on the often-absent Nintendo and Konami, and entirely carried by indie developers with fewer resources and lower budgets. I want the metroidvania to have its moment, on its terms.