Metroid Dread was announced in 2005 for the Nintendo DS, went quiet, was rumoured for a decade and a half, and then turned up in October 2021 on Switch as if the intervening sixteen years had been a scheduling error. Produced by Yoshio Sakamoto and developed by MercurySteam with Nintendo EPD, it is Metroid 5 — the direct sequel toFusion, which came out on the Game Boy Advance in 2002. Nineteen years between instalments of a numbered series is a long time to think about what you are.

The remarkable thing is thatDread clearly used the time. This is a game with a very specific and slightly severe opinion about what a 2D Metroid is for, and the opinion isn’t the one most of the genre’s descendants arrived at. The rest of the metroidvania field spent twenty years adding — skill trees, roguelike runs, dialogue, builds.Dread subtracts. It plays like somebody re-readSuper Metroid, wrote down the three things that made it work, and threw the rest overboard.

Movement is the whole subject

PlayDread for ten minutes and the first thing that registers is how fast Samus is. She slides. She free-aims in any direction while walking. She has Flash Shift — a short teleporting dash, chainable — from early in the run. The Speed Booster is still here, the Shinespark still fires her diagonally through the architecture, and the Spider Magnet reads walls as surfaces rather than obstacles.

None of that is decoration. InSuper Metroid (SNES, 1994) the pleasure was the moment your capability changed the map: a Grapple Beam turned a ceiling into a road, and a wall you’d walked past four hours ago became a door.Dread pushes that idea to its limit. Nearly every upgrade in the game is amovement upgrade — a new verb for crossing ground — and the ones that are weapons mostly function as keys. So the entire progression is one continuous statement: you have become better atgoing, and here’s a place that punishes anyone who can’t go well.

MercurySteam’s own history explains the second pillar. TheirSamus Returns (3DS, 2017) introduced the melee counter, andDread refines it into the game’s other axis. Enemies telegraph, you press the button on the beat, Samus knocks them into a free-aim slow-motion window, and you convert the parry into a kill. It’s a rhythm layer inside a movement game — the same instinct that runsSekiro, scaled down and applied to a corridor of frog-things.

The counter does something structural, though. It makesstanding your ground viable in a series whose combat has historically been a tax on exploration. Old Metroid enemies were furniture: you shot them, or you walked past them, and either way they were an interruption. Countering makes each one a tiny beat you can choose to play. That is the single largest change to Metroid’s minute-to-minute sinceSuper, and almost nobody talks about it because it’s not what the game was marketed on.

The E.M.M.I. zones, and why they work

They marketed it on the robots, and the robots are more interesting than their reputation.

E.M.M.I. are near-invulnerable machines that patrol sealed sections of ZDR. Enter their zone and the music drops, the map tints, and one of them starts hunting. Your beams do nothing. Caught, you get a single frame-perfect counter attempt with an extremely narrow window — succeed rarely, and die usually. The escape is the zone’s exit, and the exit is a door you have to reach while a machine that outruns you closes in.

Read as stealth, this is thin. There’s no meaningful hiding, the Phantom Cloak is limited, and the AI is more of a pursuit than a puzzle. Read aslevel design, it’s superb, and the reason is the same reason the counter works: it’s a tempo device.

An E.M.M.I. zone converts a map you know into a map you mustexecute. You’ve probably crossed that room before. You know where the exit is. What you don’t have is time to think, and so the zone tests the movement vocabulary the game just gave you — slide under, Flash Shift through, magnet up the wall — at speed, under pressure, with a fail state. It’s the Speed Booster puzzle with legs. And when you finally acquire the Omega Cannon and turn on the thing that’s been chasing you for forty minutes, the release is enormous precisely because the game spent forty minutes making you run.

The complaint that the zones break the pacing has it backwards.They are the pacing.Dread has no dialogue, few cutscenes, and no dramatic engine of any kind; the E.M.M.I. zones are the only device the game has for creating pressure and then removing it, and the reason the run feels like it has a shape is that the shape is made out of hunts and their endings.

The real ancestor is theMetroid II Metroid encounters — a hunt through a corridor with a countdown attached — given modern animation and an actual off switch.

Where it fights itself

Dread’s severity has costs, and the honest ones are worth naming.

The world is a machine rather than a place. ZDR is efficient, legible, beautifully signposted and slightly airless.Super Metroid’s Zebes had rooms that existed to be looked at, dead ends that were just dead ends, and a general willingness to waste your time in the interests of atmosphere. ZDR has almost no waste. Every corridor is a test, every room does a job, and the map is so well-designed that you’re rarely lost — which is a strange thing to complain about until you remember that being lost on Zebes was the entire experience. The signposting is so good it occasionally does your exploring for you.

Bosses run hot. The fights are excellent — sharp, readable, fast — and they arrive at a difficulty the rest of the game doesn’t prepare you for. Kraid is a wall. Escue and the Chozo Soldiers ask for a counter precision the corridors never demand. There’s a genuine gap between “very good at moving” and “very good at bosses”, andDread doesn’t build a bridge across it.

And the Aeion abilities — the resource-driven kit, Phantom Cloak and the rest — are the least-used thing in the game, for the same reason the prosthetics are the least-used thing inSekiro: the core loop is too complete to need them.

The verdict

Dread is the best-playing 2D game Nintendo has published in years and one of the most conservative, and those two facts are the same fact. It says a 2D Metroid is a movement game with a map on top, and then it executes that thesis with a precision the genre’s sprawling, generous descendants can’t match. It’s also the fastest-selling entry the series has ever had, which is a slightly funny outcome for a game whose main innovation is deciding what to leave out.

I’d hand it to anyone who thinks they like metroidvanias, because it will tell them whether what they actually like is the map or the running. Switch is the only place to play it, and it does not need a better machine.

I came to this from the wrong side. My 2D exploration-platformer of the eighties wasTurrican on the Amiga — Factor 5’s answer to this shape, all sprawl and firepower and no economy at all.Dread is the discipline that game never had, and playing them a lifetime apart makes the argument for restraint better than any review can.

For the descendants:Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown takesDread’s movement-first thesis and adds the systemic depthDread refuses, and it’s the better game for a lot of players.Animal Well goes the other way entirely and puts the whole progression in your head.

Spoilers below

Raven Beak is the argument’s conclusion, and he’s brutal. The final fight is a counter test — a long, escalating, four-phase demand that you read a Chozo warrior’s animation set with the precision the E.M.M.I. demanded and the corridors never did. It is the hardest thing in the game by a distance, and it lands because it is the only fight that asks for both halves of the toolkit at once: the movement to survive the arena, the counter to make progress in it.

The story around it is the partDread actually cares about, and it’s more pointed than the series usually manages. Samus’s Metroid DNA — theFusion inheritance, the thing that has been a plot device for two decades — becomes the resolution. She wins by being the monster the series has spent five games having her exterminate. That’s an ending with a real idea in it: the X parasites, the Chozo, the Federation and Samus herself are all the same story about a weapon that outlived the people who built it.

And then the game ends, cleanly, after roughly nine hours, with no post-game grind, no season, and nothing left to farm. Nineteen years of waiting for a thing that respects your evening. It closes the sentenceFusion started, and it closes it hard.

Red Candle Games spent six years being known for two horror games and one international incident. Detention (2017) put White Terror-era Taiwan into a 2D side-scroller and got a Netflix series out of it. Devotion (2019) put a Taipei flat into first person, shipped with a piece of art mocking a head of state buried in a prop, and was pulled from Steam inside a week; the studio eventually re-released it through its own storefront in 2022. That is the reputation Nine Sols arrives against — a small Taipei team known for atmosphere, dread, and being difficult to buy.

Nine Sols, which came to PC on 29 May 2024 after a Kickstarter, is a 2D action game about deflecting. It is the least likely third act imaginable, and it is the best thing they have made.

The deflect is an investment, not attrition

Everyone will tell you Nine Sols is Sekiro in 2D, and everyone is right enough to be unhelpful. The comparison is worth making precisely, because the place where the two designs diverge is where Nine Sols becomes its own thing.

FromSoftware’s deflect inSekiro is attrition. Every parry you land pushes an enemy’s posture bar up and holds it there; the fight is a slow crowbar applied to a gauge, and the reward for perfect play is that the gauge stops draining. Deflecting is how yousurvive. Damage is the by-product of surviving well enough for long enough.

Nine Sols hands you a different contract. Your protagonist Yi carries the Foo Talisman: land a deflect, and you stick a charge to the enemy. The charge sits there. It does nothing on its own. You detonate it with a separate input, and that is where the damage lives. The parry is a deposit. The detonation is the withdrawal.

That single split changes the emotional texture of every encounter. In Sekiro you are pressing forward through defence. In Nine Sols you areaccruing — and the moment you notice you have three charges banked on a boss who is about to wind up something you cannot afford to interrupt, you have the specific, delicious anxiety of a man holding a full hand of chips at a table that might close. Greed becomes a mechanic. Do you cash out for a guaranteed chunk, or hold for one more deflect and risk eating the hit that wipes the ledger?

Then there is the Unbounded Counter, the charged answer to attacks marked in red that a normal deflect will not touch. It costs charge, it demands you hold the input through a window where you are committed, and it converts an unblockable into an opening. The red attacks are, in effect, the game asking whether you have been paying attention to the rhythm or merely surviving it.

Every one of those systems is a way of asking the same question: are you willing to standcloser than is comfortable? Nine Sols has no dodge worth the name in the FromSoftware sense; retreat is a losing strategy, and the game teaches this by making the rewards for proximity structural rather than cosmetic. It is generous with the lesson and merciless if you refuse it.

Why 2D is the right plane for this

There is a genuine engineering argument buried in Nine Sols, and it is the reason the Sekiro comparison flatters it.

Sekiro’s hardest problem is the camera. A deflect window measured in a handful of frames is a contract between the game and your eyes, and a 3D camera can break that contract without either party being at fault — a pillar intervenes, a boss steps behind you, the lock-on swings and you have lost the tell you needed. Every player who has bounced off a From game has a story that is really a camera story.

A 2D plane makes the contract enforceable. The tell is always legible. When Nine Sols kills you — and it will, repeatedly, and the second half is a step up that some players will find unreasonable — you know exactly which frame you got wrong. That legibility is worth more than any amount of tuning. It is the same reasonPrince of Persia: The Lost Crown felt so clean in the same year: constraining the axis is a feature.

The older ancestor here is not any Soulslike at all. It is the 8-bit fighting game. I spent a genuinely stupid portion of 1987 on International Karate + on a C64, and the thing IK+ understood — the thing Barbarian and its stablemates understood — is that a fight staged on a flat plane at a fixed distance is a conversation aboutspacing and timing, with no third dimension to hide the information in. Nine Sols is that conversation with thirty-seven years of animation budget attached. Yi’s sword has weight because you can always see the gap.

The frame, and the word “taopunk”

Red Candle coined “taopunk” for this, and the marketing instinct is a bit groan-worthy until you actually look at the place. New Kunlun is a Solarian colony rendered in hand-drawn art that puts Taoist cosmology on top of decayed industrial infrastructure, and thecombination is doing work rather than decorating. Cyberpunk’s usual grammar is Western corporate rot with a neon overlay. Nine Sols swaps the underlying philosophy out and the aesthetic reorganises itself around a different idea of what decline means.

Yi is one of the Nine Sols, awake after a long absence, hunting the other eight. The humans of New Kunlun are called Apemen and are treated roughly as you would expect a species to be treated when the people running the place regard them as raw material. The story is delivered in the Red Candle manner: patient, mostly environmental, unhurried about handing you the shape of it.

The build layer is jades — equippable modifiers you slot to shape Yi around your own bad habits. It is a light system by the standards of the genre, and I mean that as praise. The jades tune; they do not rescue. You cannot build your way out of failing to deflect, which is the correct decision for a game whose entire argument is that you should learn to deflect.

Where it fights itself

Two things.

The first is the difficulty step in the back half. Nine Sols is a game with a teaching curve of real elegance for its first stretch and a spike in its last that reads as the developers designing for the players who survived the first stretch. That is a defensible choice and a real cost, and anyone telling you the game is “fair throughout” is grading on the curve of having finished it.

The second is length. This is a fifteen-to-twenty-five-hour game with a platforming layer that is competent rather than inspired, and there are stretches of traversal between the combat set-pieces that exist because metroidvanias have traversal. The fights are where the design is thinking. The corridors between them are where it is filling.

Neither is fatal. Both are the kind of thing worth knowing before you commit twenty hours of your life, which is the only reason I raise them.

The verdict

Nine Sols is the rare homage that has an argument with its source. It took Sekiro’s central verb, worked out that the verb could be a currency rather than a gauge, and built a whole economy of greed on top of it — then staged that economy on a plane where you can actually see what you are doing. The result is a combat system that does something Sekiro does not: it makes you complicit in your own deaths. You did not fail to react. You held for one more charge.

That Red Candle got here from two horror games, via a delisting that would have ended a lesser studio, is the sort of career arc you do not get to see very often. Play it on PC. Give the first three hours the patience they ask for; the game is teaching you a verb, and it will not start speaking properly until you have it.

If you want the other end of the same year’s indie spectrum, the fifty-game argument of UFO 50 is worth your time next, andSignalis is the piece to read if what draws you here is Red Candle’s other register.

Spoilers below

Yi’s hunt has a shape you can see coming from a distance, and Nine Sols is comfortable with that. The revenge frame is a delivery mechanism for a question about what New Kunlun wasfor, and the answer — that the colony’s survival was engineered on top of the Apemen as a resource, with the Sols as the architects and Yi among them — recasts every fight you have had up to that point. You have been killing your colleagues over a decision you helped make.

The design consequence is the interesting part. The late bosses are the ones with the most personal claim on Yi, and the combat system’s greed loop lands hardest there, because the game has spent twenty hours training you to hold charges for one more deflect and the last fights are the ones where you most want it over quickly. The mechanic and the fiction end up asking the same thing: can you stand close to this a moment longer than is comfortable?

The Shuanshuan material — the small human boy Yi ends up responsible for — is the counterweight, and it is the reason the ending has any weight at all. Red Candle have always been better at the domestic scale than the cosmic one. Detention was a school. Devotion was a flat. Nine Sols is a colony, and the bit that works is still a kid asking for a story.

Animal Well has no attack button. You spend a couple of hours waiting for it — the metroidvania contract has been the same since 1986, you get a weapon early and better weapons later — and it never arrives. What arrives instead is a bubble wand.

Billy Basso built the game alone over roughly seven years, on his own engine, and Bigmode published it on 9 May 2024 for PC, PS5 and Switch. It is about thirty-odd megabytes. That number gets quoted a lot as a novelty and it’s actually a design fact: everything in this world is procedurally lit, hand-authored and reused, and reuse is the entire principle the game runs on.

The toolset is a set of questions

Take the bubble wand. It fires a bubble that floats up and pops after a moment. Stand on it and you get a platform. Fire again while airborne and you get another, so the wand is a double-jump, and a triple, and an arbitrary-height climb if your timing is good enough — the skill ceiling is entirely yours and the game never mentions it.

The bubble is also a light source. It’s also something an enemy will follow. It’s also a thing you can push into a place you can’t reach. One item, and by the time you’ve had it for an hour you’ve used it in four incompatible ways, none of which the game taught you.

Every tool works like this. The yo-yo goes out and comes back and can trip a switch you’re standing away from, or bonk something, or hold a plate down for exactly as long as its travel allows. The slink walks along a floor and up a wall. The flute makes a noise, and noises mean things to animals. The disc has physics. The firecrackers make light and sound and pressure at once, which is three different keys in one hand.

This is the design that makes the missing attack button work. In a normal metroidvania, an item is apermission — the double jump means the ledges marked “double jump” are now available. Here an item is averb with properties, and the properties interact with a world that was built with those properties in mind rather than with the item’s advertised purpose. The door doesn’t open because you have the key. The door opens because you noticed that a bubble floats, and there’s a fan, and the fan is on.

Why the fear works without combat

Removing combat should have removed tension. It doesn’t, and the reason is a change of relationship.

The animals inAnimal Well are hazards withbehaviour. The chained dog lunges to the end of its chain. The ostrich charges in straight lines and wrecks the terrain it hits. The chameleon watches. You cannot delete any of them, so you have to learn them — where the reach ends, what the pattern is, what makes them move — and the knowledge you build is the same knowledge you’ll need for the puzzle in that room, because the animalis part of the puzzle in that room.

That’s a much older relationship with an enemy than the modern genre’s. When a monster is a health bar, you solve it by arithmetic. When a monster is a machine you can’t switch off, you solve it by watching it. The dread that builds in the back half of this game comes almost entirely from things that could be trivially killed in any other metroidvania and here just keep existing.

The save system does its share. You light candles as you go, and a lit candle is a checkpoint — a small warm thing you made in a place that didn’t have one. Deaths are cheap. The tension comes from being somewhere dark that doesn’t know you exist.

The map is the puzzle

The pause map is a beautiful, mostly useless drawing of where you’ve been. You can stamp it with markers — a limited set of icons — and that stamping is the whole navigational system, because nothing else records anything. No quest log. No “you have not yet visited” highlight. No fast travel until you find it.

So the map becomes a notebook, and the notebook becomes the thing you’re actually playing with. What you stamp is a record ofyour own hypotheses: a stamp here means “there’s a hole I couldn’t reach”, a stamp there means “the fan does something”. Which means when you finally understand a system, the payoff arrives as a sudden re-reading of a dozen stamps you made hours ago and didn’t understand at the time.

I mapped games on graph paper in the eighties because the C64 gave you no other option, and the thing I’d half forgotten until this game reminded me is that the paper wasn’t a chore. It was where the thinking happened. Sixteen bits of RAM saved on a map screen bought a whole category of player engagement, and the industry spent thirty years buying it back with waypoints.Animal Well just declines the purchase.

The ancestor

Everyone saysLa-Mulana, and everyone is right. Nigoro’s 2005 game (remade in 2012) is the direct forebear: an interlocking underground, puzzles solved by cross-referencing information from other rooms, an in-game notebook, and a total refusal to signpost. If you lovedAnimal Well’s middle layers,La-Mulana is where they came from and it’s harder.

Fez (Polytron, 2012) is the other parent, for the metapuzzle architecture — the game underneath the game, cracked collectively by strangers on forums. And further back, the eight- bit arcade adventures:Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum and C64 in 1984, a house of rooms with no explanation and no mercy, where the community mapped it because the game plainly wasn’t going to.

For the modern relatives,Tunic does the same withholding through a fake instruction manual and is the closest sibling in spirit.Blue Prince takes the same “the room is the riddle” idea somewhere architecturally stranger. AndMetroid Dread is the useful contrast: the genre’s founding studio, doing the orthodox version, extremely well, with every door colour-coded.

Where it fights itself

The obscurity has a floor and a ceiling, and both are real problems.

The floor: some of the first-layer solutions read as guesswork rather than deduction, and there’s a difference between a game that withholds information and a game that hasn’t given you enough to reason with. A few of the mid-game item uses land on the wrong side of that line, and the honest experience for most players involves at least one wiki tab.

The ceiling: the later layers are, by design, community puzzles — the kind of thing solved by a hundred people pooling screenshots for a week, involving out-of-game reasoning that no individual is expected to complete. I admire the ambition and I’ll say the quiet part: that content isn’t reallyfor you, playing alone, in 2024 or later. It’s an artefact of a moment, and the moment has passed. The game’s first ending is complete and satisfying. Everything past it is a different hobby.

The verdict, argued

Animal Well is the most confident piece of design I’ve played this year, and the confidence shows up assubtraction. No attack. No tutorial. No objective marker. No dialogue. What’s left is a world where every object has properties, every animal has behaviour, and every locked door is locked by your own failure to notice something that’s already on screen.

That’s the whole pitch and it’s a real one. One man, one engine, seven years, thirty megabytes, and a design that gets more out of a bubble than most studios get out of an arsenal. The size is aconsequence of building a game out of interactions rather than assets, and that’s the thing to take from it.

It’s on PC, PS5 and Switch, and it plays fine on all three. Go in blind. Stamp the map. Resist the wiki for as long as your pride holds.

Play next:Tunic, immediately, andBlue Prince after.

Spoilers below

The first ending is a lie of omission, and it’s the best-constructed lie in the game.

You collect the four flames, you open the door, you leave, and the credits acknowledge you. It’s a complete metroidvania: a couple of hours of clean, weird, well-paced work with a proper shape. Then you find tools the first layer never asked for, and the world you finished turns out to have been the tutorial layer of a considerably larger object.

Layer two is the eggs. Sixty-four of them, scattered through rooms you’d already cleared, reachable with tools used in ways the first layer never demanded. The bubble wand you’d been double-jumping with becomes a precision climbing rig. The yo-yo becomes a measuring device. Nothing new is added; the same verbs are asked harder questions. That’s the design thesis proven on itself — the game demonstrates that its own toolset had depth it never showed you, which is a claim most games make in marketing and none of them can cash.

Then layer three, and this is whereFez’s ghost walks in. The bunny mural. Sixteen rabbits hidden behind puzzles that reach outside the game — pattern-matching across rooms, information that only means something once you’ve seen an unrelated wall two hours away, and at the far end a set of solutions that were genuinely cracked by a Discord full of strangers in the weeks after launch, working together, screenshotting everything.

I’m ambivalent about that last tier and I’ve said why. What I’m not ambivalent about is what it reveals: the entire game was built downwards from the metapuzzles, and the two-hour metroidvania on top is theskin. The reused rooms, the sparse decoration, the thirty megabytes, the animals that persist because you can’t kill them — all of it exists so that every screen can be evidence for something you haven’t thought of yet.

Which is why the locked room is the right frame. You stand in the same rooms the whole time, in front of the same objects, getting slowly less stupid. The labyrinth was always this size.

In 1991 I could not play Monkey Island without the cardboard wheel. You’d line up the pirate’s hair with the pirate’s chin, read off a date, type it in, and the game would let you past. Lose the wheel and you owned a coaster. Every Amiga in the country had a shoebox of this stuff: code wheels, Lenslok, and the lookup tables that made you find page 14, line 3, word 6 in a manual you’d otherwise never open.

Publishers did that to stop people copying disks. What it actually did, by accident, was make the manual part of the machine. The game was on the disk and the game was also on the kitchen table, and you couldn’t run one without the other.

Tunic is what happens when someone takes that accident seriously.

What it is

Andrew Shouldice released Tunic in March 2022 after roughly seven years of work, published by Finji. It came to Xbox and PC first and reached PlayStation and Switch in September of the same year. It has spent the time since drifting through subscription services and sales, which is how most people meet it now — a small isometric action-adventure with a fox in a green tunic, obviously wearing the first Zelda’s clothes.

That’s the trap. It’s dressed as an homage and it’s actually an argument.

The manual

Scattered through the world are pages of an instruction booklet. Not lore fragments — an actual manual, laid out like something that fell out of a 1987 box: glossy illustrated spreads, a map, diagrams, a bestiary, arrows pointing at buttons. You collect the pages and you can open the booklet at any time, and the booklet is where the game keeps everything it hasn’t told you.

The manual is almost entirely written in a language you cannot read.

There’s an invented script — Trunic — running through every page, and the first time you open it your eye slides off it and lands on the pictures. Which is the point. You start reading the manual the way a nine-year-old reads a manual for a game they don’t own yet: guessing from diagrams, inferring from arrows, building a theory of what the game must contain out of pure iconography.

And then a page teaches you something real. There’s a spread that shows you how to dodge-roll, and until you find it, you do not dodge-roll — the button worked all along, and you simply did not know the verb existed. Later there’s a page that shows you a mechanic so fundamental that finding it retroactively re-explains everything you’ve been walking past for six hours.

This is progression made out ofknowledge rather than items. The character never gets a new ability. You do.

Why it works

Metroidvanias gate you with objects, and objects are honest but inert: the game withholds the double jump, gives you the double jump, and the space of what you can do expands by exactly one predictable increment. You knew the double jump was coming. You’ve played this before.

Knowledge gating has a different shape. When Tunic hands you a page, your entire back catalogue of memories re-sorts at once. Every strange wall, every suspicious statue, every geometric thing you clocked as decoration — the page doesn’t open one door. It opens all the doors of that type, everywhere, retroactively, and the game didn’t have to build a single new room to do it.

That is enormously efficient design, and it’s also the reason the game can’t be patched into being easier. You cannot hint your way around it, because the thing being withheld isn’t in the save file.

The related trick is that Trunic is not decoration. It’s a real cipher — a consistent mapping to English phonemes, learnable, and people did learn it, sitting down with the pages and cracking the script like a philology homework. The manual is fully readable if you do the work. Shouldice built an entire functioning writing system and then made almost nobody need it, which is the single most confident act of restraint in the medium.

Chants of Sennaar went at the same problem from the front, making the decipherment the loop and giving you a notebook to be wrong in. Tunic buries it and lets you walk past. Both work. Sennaar is the better teacher; Tunic is the better ambush.

The manual as an artefact

Look at the pages themselves and you find the second layer of the joke. They’re faithful to a specific era of print — the slightly off registration, the airbrushed box-art idiom, the bilingual clutter, the way European manuals crammed six languages into a booklet none of us read. There are hand-scrawled annotations in the margins in biro, because of course there are; every used manual in every second-hand game I ever bought had somebody’s map of level three in the back.

Those annotations do heavy lifting. They’re the previous owner. Somebody was here, they figured some of this out, and they left you circled hints in a hand that isn’t the manual’s. It gives the game a social texture without a single line of multiplayer code — the same trick Souls messages pull, achieved with a pen.

None of this is nostalgia bait, and I’m allergic to nostalgia bait. The point isn’t that manuals were nice. The point is that manuals were asecond information channel the game couldn’t see, and when that channel died — when everything moved in-game, into tutorials and tooltips and quest markers — designers lost the ability to withhold. If the game must teach you everything it can do, then everything it can do is a checklist. Tunic reopened the channel and immediately used it to lie to you.

Where it fights itself

The combat is the weak link and always was. It’s a slow, stamina-gated, roll-and-poke system with a shield, and it wants to be taken seriously enough to be tuned but loose enough to be forgiving, and it settles in an unhappy middle. The bosses have real teeth and the moment-to-moment fighting doesn’t have the precision to make that teeth-baring feel fair. There’s an option to switch off damage entirely, and I don’t think it’s a defeat to use it; the game’s actual content is above the neck.

The isometric camera is the other tax. Tunic hides things behind geometry deliberately — an entire class of secret depends on a path being invisible from your fixed angle — and this is genuinely clever the first six times. After that it’s a game where you occasionally walk into walls hoping. Depth ambiguity as a puzzle mechanic has a low ceiling, and the game finds it.

And the mid-game asks you to do a lot of running. The world folds beautifully and the shortcuts open, and there’s still a stretch around the halfway mark where you’re crossing three biomes because a page told you something and the thing it told you about is a long way away.

The verdict

Tunic is a game about the pleasure of not being told, and it holds a position almost nothing else in the medium is willing to hold: that the player is capable of figuring it out and will enjoy the figuring more than the finding. It spends its first hours letting you believe it’s a small polite Zelda tribute so that the betrayal has somewhere to stand.

Play it anywhere — it’s on everything now, and it’s light enough to run on a toaster. Play it with a notebook and a pen, actually, and be ready to be embarrassed by how long it takes you to notice you’re allowed to draw things.

The pairing I’d suggest isReturn of the Obra Dinn, which runs the other great knowledge-progression system of the era, andInscryption if what you liked was being lied to about what kind of game you’d bought.

Spoilers below

The Holy Cross is the whole thesis, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen a game do with an input.

There is no new item. There’s a sequence of directional presses, and the manual has been showing you where to use it the entire time — hidden in the page borders, in the decorative frames, in the fold. The instruction was in your hands from the first page you picked up. You looked at it a hundred times. It was printed on the paper.

And so the game’s real final ability isliteracy. Once you see the border code, you go back through every page you’ve collected and read the game’s own documentation as a walkthrough, which is precisely the ritual the code wheel and the lookup table trained a generation to perform — go to the manual, find the page, read off the answer, come back. Shouldice took the most hated piece of 1980s anti-piracy friction and rebuilt it as the reward.

The two endings sharpen it. You can beat the Heir with a sword, which is the answer the game’s combat has been training, and it’s the lesser ending. Or you can gather the pages, understand what the fox has been doing to the previous heirs, and end it another way entirely — an ending available only to a player who read the paperwork. One route is reflexes. The other is attention. The game knows exactly which one it thinks is worth more, and it never once says so out loud.

There is a moment about two hours into The Lost Crown where you get the dash, and the game stops being a competent Metroidvania and becomes something you have to be physically removed from. It’s the air-dash, the Shadow of the Simurgh, and it does what every dash does — crosses a gap, cancels a state, opens the old rooms — except that Ubisoft Montpellier tuned the acceleration curve on it with what I can only describe as malice. It snaps. Sargon leaves a smear of light and arrives somewhere with the momentum still in your thumbs.

I have been playing platformers since a C64 and a tape deck, which is to say I have been playing platformers for long enough to be extremely boring about how things feel. This one feels correct.

What it is and what happened to it

Ubisoft Montpellier released Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on 15 January 2024, on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch and PC. It’s a 2D side-on Metroidvania. You play Sargon, the youngest of a warrior band called the Immortals, sent to Mount Qaf to retrieve the kidnapped Prince Ghassan and finding that Mount Qaf has some opinions about the passage of time.

Montpellier are the studio behind Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, and you can feel that pedigree in every frame of the animation. They are also, historically, the studio Ubisoft lets make the strange one.

The release window was a bloodbath. The Lost Crown landed in the middle of January, four days before Palworld appeared from nowhere and ate the entire conversation for a month, and a fortnight before Tekken 8 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. A mid-priced 2D Metroidvania under a dormant brand, from a publisher whose business is open worlds with towers in them, went out into that and — predictably — struggled to be heard. Ubisoft did release a demo, and the demo is genuinely one of the better ones anyone has shipped; it just needed someone to look at it.

The game deserved better weather.

The parry is the whole conversation

Combat is built on a single flash. Enemies telegraph attacks with a yellow glow, and a yellow-glow attack can be parried on a tight window. Some attacks glow red, and a red attack cannot be parried at all — you dodge, or you eat it.

That’s it. That’s the grammar. And it works because the game commits to it absolutely: the yellow-red distinction is honoured by every enemy in the game including the final ones, the window doesn’t shift depending on the arena, and the parry animation gives you a distinct, tactile, slightly ridiculous counter-flourish that makes you want to do it again.

The obvious ancestor isSekiro, and the debt is unhidden. What Montpellier changed is instructive. Sekiro’s parry is a posture economy — you’re parrying to build towards a break, so the parry is a resource action, and missing one costs you accumulated work. The Lost Crown’s parry is a state action. Hitting it doesn’t build a meter towards a win condition; it opens a window. The pressure is lower and the rhythm is faster, which suits a 2D plane where you can see the whole fight at once and there’s no camera to fight.

That decision is why the game reads as breezy where Sekiro reads as an exam.Nine Sols took the same parry into 2D and kept the exam. Both are right. They just want different things from you.

Layered on top: Athra, a meter you fill by fighting well and spend on special attacks, and an amulet system where you slot buffs into a limited number of sockets. The amulets are the light-RPG layer and they’re fine — a couple of them change how you play, most of them adjust a number. The build depth here is shallow and I don’t think that’s a flaw; the game’s argument is that execution is the interesting axis, and it stakes everything on that.

The map system is the actual achievement

Here is the part I want people to steal.

Metroidvanias have a memory problem. You find a locked thing at hour two, you get its key at hour nine, and in between you are supposed to have remembered a particular ledge in a particular room out of two hundred. The genre’s answers are map markers you place manually, which are a symbol soup you stop reading, and wikis, which are a confession of failure.

The Lost Crown gives you Memory Shards. You stand at the thing you can’t do yet, press a button, and the game takes a screenshot and pins it to that spot on the map. Later, when you have the tool, you open the map and you’re looking at an actual picture of the actual obstacle, and you know instantly whether your new ability solves it.

It’s obvious. It’s so obvious that its absence from twenty years of the genre is an indictment. And it does something subtler than convenience: because logging a puzzle is now cheap and precise, the designers could afford to be much denser with locked content than they otherwise could. Mount Qaf is packed with things you can’t do yet, and the density never becomes anxiety, because the game gave you a filing cabinet.

CompareMetroid Dread, which solved the same problem by narrowing the map into a mostly-linear tube with guided doors. Nintendo removed the navigation burden by removing the navigation. Montpellier kept the sprawl and gave you a better tool. Theirs is the harder trick and the more generous one.

The accessibility options are cut from the same cloth. There’s a platform assistance option, adjustable enemy damage, a guided or exploration mode for the map. None of it is buried in a menu apologising for itself. You can dial the game to the shape of your evening, which for a design this tightly tuned is a remarkably confident thing to allow.

Where it fights itself

The story is the weak axis. The Immortals — Vahram leading, Anahita among them — are drawn broadly, the voice performances swing between committed and stranded, and the plot’s shape is visible from the second hour. Mount Qaf itself is a better character than anyone standing on it.

The art direction is the other place opinion divides. The environments are gorgeous, the animation is superb, and the character designs land somewhere near a mid-budget anime and will not be to everybody’s taste. This got a lot of attention at reveal and it is, having played it, the least interesting thing about the game.

The bigger structural complaint: the back third leans on combat arenas — lock the doors, spawn three waves — as a pacing tool, and after twenty hours of the best 2D platforming Ubisoft has ever produced, being asked to stand in a box and fight is a demotion. The platforming challenge rooms in the late game are the answer the designers already knew was better. There should have been more of those and fewer boxes.

The verdict

The Lost Crown is the best-feeling 2D action game a major publisher has shipped in a decade, and its map system is a genuine contribution to a genre thirty-eight years old. It moves, it’s generous, it respects both your reflexes and your schedule, and it is completely uninterested in wasting your time — which from a company that built its reputation on 200-hour checklists is close to an apology.

Buy it on whatever you own. It runs well everywhere, including Switch, which given the density of what’s on screen is its own small piece of craft.

The tragedy is a scheduling decision. Somebody at Ubisoft looked at a calendar in January 2024 and decided this was the moment, and then Palworld happened, and the best thing the company put out in years went past most people at a distance.

If it hooks you, go and playMetroid Dread for the other end of the design argument, and thenNine Sols when you want the parry to hurt.

Spoilers below

The time-loop material in the back half is where the design and the fiction finally shake hands. Mount Qaf’s temporal instability stops being set dressing the moment you get the abilities that let you manipulate it directly — the shadow clone you place and recall, the frozen platforms — and the game starts building rooms that are essentially a musical bar you have to play in the correct order.

That’s when it becomes clear what the Simurgh powers are really for. They aren’t traversal upgrades with a story hat on. Each one is a new verb in a puzzle grammar, and the late-game rooms conjugate all of them at once: place the clone, dash to it, recall, use the recall’s momentum to reach the thing the dash alone couldn’t. Those rooms are the peak of the whole game and there are maybe a dozen of them.

Vahram’s turn is telegraphed roughly the instant he opens his mouth, and the betrayal lands anyway, for a purely mechanical reason: you fought alongside him in the opening, so the game taught you his moveset as an ally before it made you answer it as an enemy. Nobody says anything clever about it. The game just trusts that your hands remember. That’s the whole design philosophy in one boss fight.

Dead Cells left early access on 7 August 2018, which makes this month its fifth birthday and a reasonable moment to ask a question the launch reviews couldn’t: does the thing hold? Plenty of 2018’s roguelites are now a footnote and a Steam sale. Motion Twin’s is still receiving expansions —Return to Castlevania landed in March this year — and is still the game every new hybrid gets measured against. The word they coined for it, “RogueVania”, has outlived the marketing that produced it, which almost never happens.

The reason is a weld. Two genres that should reject each other were joined, and the joint holds under load.

The two things that shouldn’t fit

A roguelike is about a run: procedural, disposable, and meaningful only because death erases it. A Metroidvania is about a map: handmade, persistent, and meaningful because you memorise it and come back with the double jump. One genre throws the level away. The other asks you to live in it. Welding them naively gives you a procedural map nobody can memorise, which is the worst of both — the tedium of backtracking with none of the mastery.

Motion Twin — the Bordeaux worker co-operative that made this, before spinning off Evil Empire to carry the post-launch work — solved it by separating what is random from what is fixed. Thebiomes are fixed: the Prisoners’ Quarters, the Promenade of the Condemned, the Ramparts, the Ossuary. Each has a fixed character, fixed enemies, fixed exits. Theinteriors are procedural. So the map you memorise is the graph of biomes and how they connect, and the corridor you’re walking through right now is disposable. You learn the country and improvise the street. That’s the whole trick, and everyone who copiedDead Cells copied that before they copied the sword.

The Metroidvania half is then delivered through runes. The Vine Rune, the Teleportation Rune, the Ram Rune, the Spider Rune and the Homunculus Rune are permanent traversal unlocks, earned once from specific fights, and each one permanently opens branches of the biome graph that were previously closed. This is exactly a Metroidvania gate — a door you couldn’t open, then can — laid over a structure that resets every death. You lose your gear. You keep your keys. It is a startlingly clean idea and it took the genre most of a decade to arrive at it.

The flask is a design argument

Here’s the part I think people undervalue.Dead Cells gives you a health flask with a small number of charges per run. It is the only healing you can rely on. Everything else in the economy — the cells you bank, the gold you spend, the gear you pick up — is abundant. Health is not.

That single scarcity does an enormous amount of work. It makes every trade legible: taking a hit costs a fraction of a finite resource, so “I’ll just tank this” is a decision with a visible price rather than a shrug. It converts the combat from a damage race into a bookkeeping problem you solve with your thumbs. And it makes thepace of the game non-negotiable in a way a health bar alone never manages.

Timed doors are the other half of that argument. Scattered through the biomes are doors that open only if you reach them under a time limit, and behind them is good gear. Nothing forces you through one. The game simply prices dawdling and lets you decide. That’s a far more elegant instrument than a chase sequence or a countdown, because it produces the behaviour by making it attractive instead of compulsory. You start speedrunning the early biomes for a reward, and by the time you notice, you’ve internalised a movement grammar — roll, hit, roll — that the later biomes require.

By the time you’re on 5 Boss Stem Cells, the difficulty tier that gates the true ending, Malaise makes the argument explicit: it accumulates over time, buffs the enemies, and is pushed back by killing things. Aggression stops being a style. It becomes the only sustainable metabolism.

Where the loop fights itself

The build system is the seam. Weapons scale with one of three stat colours — Brutality, Tactics, Survival — and you raise a colour by choosing scrolls at the end of each level. Commit early and hard, and the numbers explode. Spread across colours and you end a run with a broad, weak character who dies to the first elite that respects itself.

This is a legible, teachable system, and it’s also a tax on the thing the game otherwise does best.Dead Cells is at its finest when you’re improvising with whatever the floor gave you. The scaling maths quietly instructs you to stop improvising and start filtering: a purple weapon in a red run is litter, however interesting it is. The game hands you a toybox and then explains that three quarters of the toys are wrong today. Custom Mode, added in 2020, is Motion Twin’s own admission of the problem — it lets you delete items from the pool so the drops match the build you wanted anyway.

The other seam is the Collector. Cells are the meta-currency; you bank them at checkpoints and spend them on permanent unlocks, and losing a run before a checkpoint loses the cells you were carrying. The intent is tension. The effect, often, is that a good run’s most stressful moment is a bank transfer.Hades answered this better two years later by making death a narrative beat and the currency almost unlosable, which I’ve arguedat length elsewhere.Risk of Rain 2 answered it byputting a clock on the whole thing and letting greed do the rest. Both are downstream of this game’s willingness to put a real cost on the meta-layer.

The ancestors

The obvious lineage isRogue Legacy (2013) for the meta-progression andCastlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) for the map, andDead Cells nods so hard at the latter that it eventually licensed it. Fine, and true, and not the interesting answer.

The real ancestor of howDead Cellsfeels is the 16-bit European action-platformer, and specifically the Factor 5 lineage. I had a C64 from the mid-eighties and an Amiga from ‘87, and the thingTurrican understood in 1990 — the thing most of its imitators didn’t — was that a movement system is a rhythm instrument. You playedTurrican’s levels the way you’d play a phrase, with the run and the roll and the fire button as a chord.Dead Cells has that exactly: the roll’s invincibility frames, the way a weapon’s animation commits you for a fixed number of frames, the sound design snapping on the connect. It’s an instrument game wearing a roguelite’s clothes.

That’s also why the procedural interiors don’t hurt. When the pleasure is in executing a phrase, the room can be arbitrary. The run is the composition. The map is the key signature.

The verdict

Five years and five content drops on —Rise of the Giant,The Bad Seed,Fatal Falls,The Queen and the Sea,Return to Castlevania — it has the rare distinction of having been correct on day one and better every year since. The weld holds. The flask still hurts. The movement is still the best in the genre, and I include everything that has arrived since in that.

Its flaw is honest and structural: a colour-coded build economy that fights the improvisation it otherwise sells, patched over with an options menu. Live with it. Custom Mode exists for a reason and using it is not cheating, whatever the forums say.

It’s on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, mobile — and the Switch version remains the one I’d point at, because this is a game built in eight-minute phrases and eight-minute phrases belong on a handheld. Start on 0 Boss Stem Cells. Take the timed doors. Pick a colour and stay married to it.

If the movement is what grabs you,Metroid Dread is the handmade version of the same instrument — no procedural anything, every corridor authored, and a demonstration of what the fixed map buys when you commit to it fully.

Spoilers below

The Hand of the King is the fight the whole design points at, and it’s a deliberate anticlimax in the best way: after a dozen-odd biomes of improvisation, the final boss is a pure test of the grammar. No gimmick, no phase where your build stops working, just the roll timing you’ve been practising since the Prisoners’ Quarters, asked for at speed. Motion Twin resisted the urge to make the last fight a puzzle. It’s an exam.

The true ending needs 5BC, and that gate is the smartest editorial decision in the game. Everything the story has to say about the island concerns a plague that keeps reanimating what it kills, and 5BC is the tier where Malaise forces you to kill continuously to stay alive. You have to run the disease’s own metabolism before the game will explain the disease. A mechanic and a story agreeing with each other is a rarer event in this genre than the trophy list suggests, and Motion Twin got there by hiding the payoff behind the difficulty that proves the point.