The Metroidvania Canon

The genre is named after two games, and by now that name is doing active harm. Half the things in this canon owe Metroid nothing structural, and Castlevania’s contribution is a stat screen. Koji Igarashi, who is more responsible for the portmanteau than anyone alive, has spent years politely suggesting we call it something else.

What the label points at is real, though, and it’s simpler than the name: these are games where the world is the progression system. You don’t unlock a level. You unlock a verb, and the verb retroactively rewrites the map you’ve already walked.

The mechanic underneath

Here’s what actually has to be true. The world must be continuous and it must be legible enough that you remember it. When you pick up the high jump, the game’s value comes from the ledge you saw forty minutes ago and filed away — which means the design labour goes into making you notice and remember obstacles you can’t yet pass.

That’s the craft. Everything else is decoration. A game that gates you with an ability you acquire ten seconds earlier has the shape of the genre and none of the substance, because nothing in your memory got rewritten. The dopamine is entirely in the locked door and the delay before the key.

Knight Lore (Ultimate Play the Game, 1984)

Before the name existed. Tim and Chris Stamper’s Filmation engine put an isometric, room-by-room castle on a 48K ZX Spectrum, and the design is pure gate logic: rooms you can’t cross, objects you need, a world you map in your head because the game gives you nothing.

The genealogy here is European and mostly forgotten in genre histories written from a console perspective. Knight Lore’s descendants went to Head Over Heels, which made the gating a two-body puzzle, and the whole lineage is a canon in its own right.

Metroid (Nintendo R&D1, 1986)

Yoshio Sakamoto and Gunpei Yokoi’s team gave the NES a world with no map screen at all, which is the reason people who played it in 1986 remember graph paper. The Morph Ball and the Bombs are the founding gate, and Brinstar’s sprawl is genuinely disorienting.

It’s in the canon as a first principle rather than a good time. The original is hostile in ways later entries sanded off, and the sanding was correct.

Super Metroid (Nintendo R&D1, 1994)

The template, and still the best-taught game in the genre. Super Metroid’s opening ten minutes contain no text instruction of consequence and teach you the entire control vocabulary through architecture — the famous first room where a Chozo statue demonstrates the move you need is a design lesson people are still copying badly thirty years on.

What Super Metroid understands that its imitators don’t: the map is a promise. Every sealed door you pass is a debt the game is taking on, and the game pays every single one. Nothing is decorative.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami, 1997)

Igarashi’s game, and the one that added the other half of the compound. SotN bolts an RPG’s loot and levelling onto Metroid’s world logic, which changes what exploration is for — you’re now looking for numbers as well as verbs, and the two currencies pull against each other productively.

The inverted castle is either the greatest second act in the genre or a padding exercise with a good trick attached. I’ve argued both sides at different ages and I no longer think it matters: the first castle alone would carry it.

Cave Story (Daisuke Amaya, 2004)

Five years, one man, freeware. Cave Story is the genre’s indie year zero — before Kickstarter, before Steam Greenlight, before any of the infrastructure that made the 2010s possible — and it’s a fully realised thing with a weapon-levelling system that downgrades when you take damage.

That’s the mechanic worth stealing. Your firepower is a resource you’re constantly bleeding, so competence compounds and mistakes have a tail. Almost nobody has copied it.

Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017)

Three people in Adelaide. Hallownest is the biggest world in the canon that still feels hand-placed, and the design position that matters is the map itself: you can’t see where you are until you buy a Quill and find Cornifer, so early exploration is genuinely uncharted.

Withholding the map is the single best decision in the game. It restores the thing Super Metroid had by accident of hardware and the genre had comfortably automated away, and it turns a UI element into an earned reward.

Dead Cells (Motion Twin, 2018)

The hybrid, and it’s in the canon for being an honest experiment. Motion Twin took the world-verb structure and ran a roguelike through it, so the gates persist across runs while the level layout doesn’t.

The result reveals something: permanent traversal unlocks in a procedural world feel thinner, because the map you rewrote is gone next run. The genre needs a fixed geography to pay its debts. The roguevania blueprint works, with that caveat attached.

Metroid Dread (MercurySteam, 2021)

Nineteen years after Fusion, and the series remembers what it is. Dread’s EMMI zones are the interesting design object: scripted pursuit sections that suspend the exploration loop entirely, and they work because the contrast makes the rest of the map feel safe.

It’s the most mechanically confident Metroid, with a movement model tuned to a standard the 2D entries never reached. The series remembering itself is the whole read.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2024)

The one nobody expected from a publisher that spent a decade in open-world formula. The Lost Crown’s contribution is the Memory Shard: photograph anything, and the picture pins itself to your map at the exact location.

That solves the genre’s oldest annoyance — remembering which ledge needed which verb — without solving the puzzle for you, because you still choose what’s worth photographing. It’s a genuine advance in a genre that mostly iterates on feel. Ubisoft nearly buried it anyway.

Nine Sols (Red Candle Games, 2024)

Red Candle came from horror and brought a Sekiro deflection system into a 2D map, which sounds like a genre collision and plays like a thesis: when combat is a rhythm you must learn precisely, the world’s gates start gating skill alongside traversal.

The taopunk art direction is the surface. The design fact is that Nine Sols is the first metroidvania where I stopped thinking about the map. The Sekiro parry in a taopunk frame is the shortest description.

Animal Well (Billy Basso, 2024)

Seven years, one man, a custom engine, 33 megabytes. Animal Well is the genre stripped to its actual load-bearing element: a world dense with things you can see and can’t yet reach, and a toolset of objects with physics deep enough that the community found uses Basso arguably didn’t plan.

There’s no combat. There’s barely any text. The map is the game and the game is the map, and the layered secret structure runs down further than any single player was meant to reach alone. The metroidvania as a locked room is exactly right.

The genre’s standing problem

The map screen. Every game here has to decide how much to tell you, and the honest answer is that the more it tells you, the less the genre works — a fully annotated map with markers for every unreachable ledge turns exploration into a to-do list. Hollow Knight withholds it. The Lost Crown lets you build it. Most of the rest just hand it over and lose something.

There’s a broader case that the map screen is an admission of failure, and the metroidvania is the genre where that argument bites hardest, because the map is the reward system rather than a convenience layer.

The second problem is scale. Hallownest works at its size because Team Cherry hand-placed every room over four years, and the studios attempting that budget are vanishingly few. The genre’s recent output splits accordingly: small, dense, and secret-laden at one end — Animal Well is 33 megabytes and took seven years — and sprawling at the other, where the sprawl usually means repeated encounter design and corridors whose only job is distance. Density is the whole value proposition. A metroidvania with dead space has misunderstood why anyone walks back.

Where to play them

Knight Lore runs in any Spectrum emulator; Rare’s Rare Replay collection has it on Xbox. Super Metroid and Metroid are on Nintendo Switch Online. Symphony of the Night is in the Castlevania Requiem and Dominus collections. Cave Story is free from Pixel’s site and sold as Cave Story+ everywhere. Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Animal Well, Nine Sols and The Lost Crown are all on current platforms.

Start with Super Metroid, and time how long it takes before you’re reading architecture without noticing you’re doing it. Then Animal Well, thirty years later, doing the same job with none of the furniture.