as a big fan of Metroid games, I’m kinda frustrated by the indie trend of “metroidvanias” because I don’t think there’s any “Metroid” in them. pretty much every single one of them is a fantasy (or fantasy-adjacent) 2D hack-and-slash game. yes they do have powerups that allow you to traverse more of the map, but that’s just as much of a Castlevania thing as a Metroid thing

so these games feel moderately Castlevania-inspired, but not even remotely Metroid-inspired. and let’s be honest - what they’re actually copying is Hollow Knight. they should be called Hollowvanias or something. don’t get my hopes up by putting the name of one of my favorite game series in there

anyway idk I dislike how these big indie trends keep missing the point of what I like about the games they’re based on. the same thing happened with “roguelikes” where all they took away from actual roguelikes is to have procedural generation and permadeath, and then they made up a bunch of mechanics on top of that which I think are fine but don’t really add that much to the game. when they could be drawing from the rich tradition of actual roguelikes instead

come to think of it, the new Doom games kinda did the same thing where they flanderized what a Doom game is, added a bunch of weird stuff on top, and lost what I enjoy about Doom in the process