It’s very good at creating a world that curls around and intersects with itself, unlocking short cuts as you go so you don’t even need fast travelling. The first half of Dark Souls 1 is like the center of an onion that gradually acquires layers as you go. Mainly I’m concerned by so many indie games wanting to take the 2D open world route (yeah, I got bored of typing the new name) because designing them requires a certain amount of expertise if you don’t want them to become too much of a slog. Every now and again a big chunk falls off, but then it’s right back to the chipping. Something like Axiom Verge is, by comparison, a huge coal face, that you must chip away at forever. A game divided clearly into levels becomes more comprehensible, as does any other long-term goal divided into bite-size stages, and can give you a little bit of encouragement at the win screen of every stage. The average player might idly be interested in seeing how quickly they can do level 1-4 in Mario 3, but speedrunning the entirety of Symphony of the Night or Super Metroid is, frankly, the territory of the lunatic. The other main difference between the Mario-style level-by-level 2D platformer and the 2dplatworldbittoolnotcloseplorables is that the challenge aspect of the latter comes in a single massive dollop.
Then finding that I’d remembered wrong and I was actually supposed to go there after I’d found the penis extension power up and mastered the Pogo Knob ability. During the course of playing both Axiom Verge and Ori and the Blind Forest I found myself sorely wishing for some kind of fast travel function as I made my way for the umpteenth time to a square on the map that hadn’t been filled in yet, vaguely recalling that there was a door that my new ability could open. But I do think there’s a limit to how many times we should have to prove ourselves. Now, I am fond of 2dplatworldbittoolnotcloseplorables because I enjoy exploration as a mechanic, I like that 100% completion usually entails going to every single point of the world, and then the map screen simultaneously functions as a checklist. So for now let’s just call them ‘2Dplatworldbittoolnotcloseplorables’, just for the sake of expediency. ‘Seamless 2D open world’ is better, but if loading screens between rooms and areas don’t count as seams, then at what point does the definition change? What we’re talking about are 2D platformers in which the game world opens up bit by bit as you acquire the tools and abilities to access new regions, and areas do not get closed off once you are past them, the whole world remains interconnected and explorable. ‘2D open world’ doesn’t quite sum it up, you could describe Mario 3 that way. ‘ Doom clones’ and ‘ GTA clones’ were immeasurably better off after we started calling them ‘FPSes’ and ‘sandbox games’, and I’m sure the moment we come up with something better than ‘Metroidvania’ we’ll start using it, but nothing has managed to stick in the many decades since Metroid first appeared. They don’t have such a stupid name, for a start. But Shovel Knight had a traditional level-based structure and it was really good, so before everything descends into all Metroidvania all the time, maybe we should think about the benefits of the alternatives. Is it me, or is there a bit of a Metroidvania glut in indie platformers at present? I know I shouldn’t complain, since things might change and I actually like Metroidvania-style games quite a lot, and I know that the traditional level-based structure came largely out of hardware limitations and that these days there’s no reason not to have a huge open-ended world, freely explorable and interconnected.
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