I did not really proofread this post because it is not a script or an article this is simply the amount of thoughts I normally have on a subject like this.

Metroid

Probably my favorite game genre is the Metroidvania. I even like the term - I've seen people disparage it, and if that's you, go find out what party chemical you're low on and buy supplements, because you clearly hate it when people have fun.

I play almost every well regarded Metroidvania that comes out, and I've probably completed more of them in the last ten years than any other game genre.

Part of what I love about the term Metroidvania (MV for short) is how it's both very specific and very broad. We can all agree that some games that are called MVs only resemble Super Metroid (SupMet) and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SotN) in remote ways, and yet I doubt you can think of a better term, nor can you deny that it does describe a very specific set of gameplay qualities.

They're qualities anyone could have come up with - and indeed several developers did, in largely-forgotten titles, often for platforms that aren't well known in the US. But Nintendo nailed the concepts down so perfectly that, after years of trying to figure out how to make games that Felt A Way, everyone saw what Nintendo had done, pounded their fists on the table, pointed and said, "That. That's what I was trying to say."

That doesn't mean that all MVs are "clones" - but some certainly are, and there's no question that the majority are made with the specific gameplay of SupMet firmly in mind. I have no doubt that the developers, designers and artists working on Symphony of the Night spent the whole process with copies of Super Metroid running on SFC's on their desks.

I imagine managers regularly walked by and said, "Make it work more like Super Metroid. Look at how Samus moves and fights and takes damage. Do it like that." The result deviates considerably, and yet obviously owes its existence, in any form we'd recognize, to its idol.

Nonetheless, the reason that SotN made it into the genre name is because it is more than a clone. It started from the SupMet DNA, but contributed more to the concept of exploratory action-adventure, in one great big push, than any other one game in history - except, I would argue, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap (WBIII), which may not be a big contributor to the modern genre, especially in the indie sphere, but was just as big-brained as Nintendo or Konami's work.

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap

If you haven't played WBIII, you should. Either the original, or the brilliant remake and galaxy-brained spiritual successor that both came out over the last couple years.

If WBIII is not widely known nowadays, it is only because SupMet and SotN were enough newer, and for hardware sufficiently more globally popular, that they overshadowed it. Any gamer with taste who got a copy of Wonder Boy III in 1989 would have Straight Up Shit Themselves, so the fact I had never heard of it until five years ago makes me think that most of the world slept on it.

Had Nintendo not chosen to continue the Metroid series, and had Konami decided to pivot to casino slot machines in the 80s, there would have been a void that slowly pushed this game into the public consciousness, in the way that many once-Japan-only-but-now-classics eventually were, and we wouldn't be talking about Metroidvanias now - we'd be talking about Wonder Boys. WBIII was a different, but equally powerful take on exploratory action-adventure, and I do wonder how much influence it may have had anyway that we just don't realize; certainly, some of the people working on SotN and SupMet played it.

In any case, WBIII deserves so much column space particularly because it was such a novel take, which set it apart from most that followed. A tremendous number of MVs are carbon copies of Konami's offering, with even less shame than Konami had displayed. Axiom Verge and Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth are photocopies of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. They are not "inspired"; they are SotN with a different skin.

Nobody disputes this, as far as I know, and few really consider it a disagreeable practice. In much the same way that the disparaging term "Doom clone"* came and went in just a couple years, I think any notion that MVs are too derivative to rate as art in their own right disappeared from the popular discourse decades ago. Metroidvanias Are Fun, And Fine.

* Its usefulness notwithstanding. I assert that "Doom clone" never meaningfully applied to more than two or three games, of such poor quality that nobody bought them anyway. Yes, Duke Nukem 3D was certainly one, but that's nearly it. Magazine writers of the time regularly asserted that Doom had produced a wave of clones; I cannot find any evidence of this.

Esper Bouken Tai / Blaster Master (Sleeper Metroidvanias)

I am a big fan of calling things Sleeper Metroidvanias. Games that one can argue are MVs - in more than a "coffee is bean soup lololol" way - but which one would not immediately recognize as such.

Indeed, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is one. It will not immediately set off your Metroid Senses. It does not contain any of the standard structural elements, like the "hallways" that transition between areas, or very tall rooms flanked by regularly-spaced doors on either side that pepper most MVs.

In fact, WBIII's level design is very freeform - unsurprising for a late 80s platformer, when many elements of game design had not yet solidified into hard expectations in players minds. At times, the game will stun you with its novelty. This wasn't uncommon prior to the 90s; look at Mighty Bomb Jack or Esper Bouken Tai, which don't even agree that a platforming character's jump should fit within one screen.

Esper Bouken Tai is a good reference, in fact, because it may qualify as a Sleeper Metroidvania itself. I haven't played enough of it to be sure, but I think it contains the most important element: the Closed Open World.

From the beginning, you can see an enormous amount of space to explore, but your progress to new areas is blocked by missing tools or the inability to move in certain ways. As you explore and collect powerups that grant you new abilities, you are spurred to return to earlier areas and try to apply them to open up new spaces.

Again, not sure if that's right, haven't had the patience to bomb through that game yet.

There are much closer examples. Blaster Master is so close to being a pure Metroid clone that it actually does include the "hallways" between rooms, and definitely sticks to the "tools and movement tech" principle for progress-gating.

Here, if you aren't convinced: When you start Blaster Master, you see a wall to your left and an open field to your right, making it clear that your only option is to go to the right. But above you, far higher than your jump can reach, is a platform.

Even having never heard of Metroid, and even if you were accustomed to the "minimal internal consistency" design style of 80s videogames where things didn't need to make any sense, you still instantly know that platform isn't just for decoration.

The game rapidly confirms this: as you proceed into the world, you see quickly that they do not make false platforms: When there's no way to get up to a particular spot, there won't be any tiles that look like ledges sticking out of it. So even as you proceed to the right, this ledge at the very left sticks in your head.

You remember it, and you keep wondering and wondering if eventually it'll make sense. Even as you proceed far, far, far to the right, deeper and deeper into new areas, which connect to even more new areas, you never quite forget that platform.

And sure enough, after defeating the third boss, you gain HOVER: a weak jetpack that you immediately realize will get you up to that platform, prompting a breathless trip back to the exact spot where you began the game, hours and hours ago.

There you find that, yes, you can reach that platform, and from there, another one, and from there, another. When you complete your climb up what is, in the context of this game's sense of scale, Mount Everest, you find a gateway to a brand new area. The dopamine is like a gut punch.

That's Metroid, Baby!!! Go Met(roid)s!!!!!

Not only is Blaster Master definitely A Metroid, it's a really GOOD one. Atmospheric, challenging, satisfying, and with very little reliance on Metroid's distinct level design style.

In fact, much like Wonder Boy III (or more recently, the Axiom Verges) it's an MV that will shock you with the novelty of its criss-crossing, never-the-same-thing-twice level design. It manages to nail both "yawning, expansive open-world area" and "claustrophobic spelunking" so perfectly that I'm shocked nobody has ever really directly cloned it.

I can't sum it up any better than this: At least 20% of the game world is completely pointless. They designed areas with interesting geography that appeals to your sense of exploration and wonder, for absolutely no reason. You explore them, find nothing, and then leave. Going there accomplishes nothing except to make the space feel more real. If it were smaller, it would feel like a videogame. Instead, it feels like a world.

The minds of game designers had not yet grown from "large" to "galaxy" at that time (although imo the sequels all failed to understand what made the game good, even decades later) so nobody thought to fill those areas as we would now: with sidequests, NPCs with their own little lives, and environmental storytelling.

I've been thinking about this game, Sunsoft's One Good Product, literally my entire conscious life and if I ever make a game of my own, "Blaster Master but it leans in way more to the mysterious, alien architecture of its world" is one of the concepts on the table.

Commander Keen

When I was a micro child, my parents did not buy me games. My brother got games; I did not. He decided he was done with the NES and wanted to play PC games, so that's where the money started going, and the only PC games he got were ones I had no interest in.

I wanted Super Mario World; I got Super Mario Bros. 3, because that's the last NES game they bought. I could snake his copy of Jane's Advanced Tactical Fighters or whatever if I wanted. I could even borrow Warcraft if I wanted to have a bad time and then lose. Yeah, we had Doom, but I got tired of it.

The only other thing I had was a stack of those awful shareware discs of which I've opined many times. Everyone knows what their deal was by now, although I think most people don't bring up how the people who made them were almost certainly all get-rich-quick scumbags who didn't bother to think for a second about the quality of their "product," given that they had no product and were just aggregating other people's work.

Yes, shareware was more or less intended to use that exact distribution method, but that doesn't mean they weren't thinking, "hey, if we give this stuff away, dirtbags will scrape it up and put it on discs in order to make a quick buck, and people will buy the discs and get our program." It's like trees benefiting from birds eating their fruit and shitting the seeds all over the place. Anyway.

Those discs were full of sludge. They were not remotely curated. The creators went to FTPs and BBSes, downloaded literally everything, cleared out the things that were just patches (sometimes, lol) and that was that. The "WIN" folder always contained 500 redundant implementations of solitaire. There was no filtering, and they didn't make any attempt to rate games by quality or even release date.

This meant that my childhood contained a lot of Forest Gump Gaming, a sort of thing that basically has not existed for almost 20 years, where you spin the revolver drum (CD into a random game folder,) pull the trigger (type GO.EXE,) and find out whether it dispenses a delicious morsel or a bullet. Some games were lethally bad. Very, very few were "good" by any measure. Certainly a lot were interesting, but rarely anything I wanted to play - which, at the time, was mostly platform action games, like I had on my NES.

Platform games - hell, action games in general - were few and far between on the PC, even in the 90s. When I say this, people usually bring up some pitiful handful of games and I roll my eyes at them. The front runner is Jazz Jackrabbit, who wasn't just a Sonic clone, he was a bad Sonic clone.

Yes, it was one of my favorite games, because I had nothing better. It plays like an Amiga title that caught a glimpse of an Actual Professional Videogame at the mall and immediately Found Jesus, but couldn't finish cleaning its act up before it got released.

Yeah, it's "cool", and yeah, it's better than anything else on the PC, but the motion sucks, the framerate sucks, the art direction is positively amateur, and the best thing about it is the music. I grew up idolizing that game and I have every right to shit on it now that I've played the games that it was trying and failing to mimic.

Commander Keen was also pretty bad. It's better made, but not very satisfying. I hate the movement. It's ironic, given that Keen was derived from a a project to clone Super Mario Bros. 3 which id actually succeeded at. I've played Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, and while it isn't perfect Mario movement, it's close enough; a little tuning would have nailed it.

For Keen, however, id chose to alter that nearly-perfect motion. I don't know if the general walking and air control differs that much, but the thing they changed the most was the jump.

For no reason that I can ascertain, they decided to give Keen this enormous four-frame windup before a jump, and I hate it. I hated it then, I still hate it, and I think everyone hated it. Nobody replicated it, and nothing else had done it before that I'm aware of. It's just a bad idea that makes the game feel clunky.

Notably, Keen was also not a Metroidvania, and this didn't help it in my eyes. It was a plain, simple, largely linear action game, where the only progress mechanic was the collection of level-specific keys, and the only new movement tech was the pogo stick, which you collect near the beginning of the first game and keep throughout the series.

Should plain, simple action games not exist? I don't know, ask someone else if they want them, but for me, I realized (much later than I wish) that the only part of gaming that I get anything out of is that thrill of "false problem solving."

MVs have the perfect loop for my kind of brain, where you see Problems, store them in your head until you have a lot stocked up, and then when you pick up a Solution, you feel many of those Problems dissolving away at once.

I call it "false" because, of course, the problems are designed to be solved, and we solve them by doing what the game pushes us to do. We aren't coming up with clever solutions, but we feel like we are. It's masturbatory; so is all entertainment.

That element, of finding tools to solve problems, is present in most games that I've ever enjoyed, in some fashion. Dr. Sparkle, in his Chrontendo series, starts talking about the spread of "RPG Elements" to all game genres somewhere in, like, episode 10 or 11, and he has a very good point about how many games suddenly implemented forms of character progression, but I think the spread of "action-adventure elements" is just as notable.

Megaman, another of my childhood favorites, let you collect weapons to make boss fights easier, but also, some of them let you access new areas, and some are straight-up movement tech, like the gun that makes platforms.

Acquiring the ability to create your own platforms enabled you to access a few things in levels that you'd seen but been unable to reach the first time through (which became more common in the later games,) and it also made navigating the Wily stages possible at all.

Yes, you HAD to collect those items; they weren't optional, you didn't have to search specifically for them (until the later games!) but once you reached the Wily stages where they were mandatory, you still felt that satisfying thought: "aha, this is meant to be impossible for me, but I found tools that have made me unstoppable."

Is Megaman a Metroidvania? No, for many reasons. And sadly, if Capcom had tried to go in that direction, they would have simply made Metroid But Not From Nintendo, and clones of that degree had a dismal success rate in the NES days.

But it turns out that I don't need a game to be much of an MV to still be satisfying enough. I just want some amount of progression, and for exploration to be more about finding things than killing things.

And unfortunately, while I did have a couple Megamans, and in fact I had Metroid (which I didn't understand how to play at all, ironically,) I otherwise had no access to new action adventure games, even if I'd known they existed. By age 8 I had played every NES game I had a hundred times over (at least, as far as I could get - which wasn't much.)

Other than one or two new cartridges that filtered in over the years from one place or another (Crystalis was my favorite game for like a decade after I realized how many of my favorite Action Adventure elements it nailed) I couldn't really get new NES games, and didn't know how to find any I wanted even if I could.

The only source for "new" games I had were these awful shareware discs that always seemed to contain a few more games I hadn't seen yet, every time I looked. So, I just kept scraping through them randomly, picking games here and there, hoping I'd find something that satisfied me without knowing what it was I was looking for. Somewhere in there was Elfland.

Elfland (1992)

I wrote this post because I was thinking about Elfland. It was on one of those shareware discs I had, and I came across it probably four or five times. It's bad, like Keen.

It seems pretty clear that Elfland was modeled on Commander Keen. It came out two years later, so the developer had almost certainly seen the game, and while it doesn't quite mimic Keen's motion to a T, it does include the unique pre-jump windup.

It's only a frame or two, but it's definitely there, and as I said earlier, no other game I can think of had this, so I assume that's where the creator got the idea.

Ironically, if you play with default settings, Elfland seems like it has just as many windup frames as Keen, but this is actually due to a bug in the sound code that causes the game to freeze for a few frames before every sound effect plays. Laugh Out Loud!

As a kid, I played Elfland once or twice and concluded that it was "kiddy." Yes, I was one of Those Children, who hated everything "made for children." Your character in this game looks fairly childlike, and at the time I associated Elfland's bright colors (the only ones EGA supported, but I didn't know that) with edutainment software. So I wasn't predisposed to like it, but it had some elements that really stood out to me.

The game seemed curiously "complete," having a menu interface (not universal at all, even by the 90s, in low-end PC software) with animations, a lot of frames for each sprite, and decently complex enemy motion, like birds which travel in big lerped arcs as they pursue you, changing direction unpredictably. It also had sloped surfaces, trees you could climb, multiple ammo types, and an inventory system.

Many of those were pretty remarkable for the time and the platform. Action-adventure was still figuring itself out even on consoles, so there was very little for devs to draw from there, let alone on PC. Those things made the memory of this game stick in my head, but I didn't investigate it further for many years, because I remembered it being Garbage.

Some of the things that bothered me include:

The sound. Even though it had Adlib music, I believe the sound was PC-speaker-based noise with the occasional poor-quality 1-bit PCM sample. Rough stuff, which didn't make the game feel very inviting.

The graphics. I remembered them as "kiddy," but when I look now, they just look amateurish. EGA graphics had good resolution, but a very limited color palette. All the same, devs could do a lot better than Elfland's single creator did - Programmer Graphics, you know how it goes. The background and characters alike are very simplistic and flat, with very little in the way of lighting or depth effects, so it ends up looking like the Greek vase paintings of Moraffware and other bargain basement DOS titles, whose art style communicated instantly, when launching a game at random, that you were not about to see smooth realtime graphics.

The difficulty. It was punishingly hard, by the standards of my eight-year-old self. I did not figure out how to enjoy videogames without being Mad or Frustrated or Pissy or Entitled until my mid to late 20s, so I completed absolutely no games until that time, and in fact, mostly made no progress in any game due to my total refusal to figure out what the rules were and play by them.

I started Duke Nukem, marched forward while shooting, got killed, and either restarted and did it again, or quit and gave up. That was Games, to me, for most of my life.

As a growed-up, when I revisited many of the games I was unable to progress in as a child, I found that many were in fact infuriating to play, but others simply required me to think about what I was doing before doing it, to plan my actions, and when I died, to think about why I died and how to avoid it next time.

Elfland is not "garbage," because if you follow the above approach, you will finish the game. I did so on a stream a couple days ago, and completed it in about an hour and a half, which is probably not atypical for an early 90s shareware title played by an adult with gaming experience.

I did have to do some "savescumming," but we hadn't really invented that term at the time - in fact, games were probably designed around the practice. PC titles of all sorts rarely had anything like a checkpoint system, because you were expected to press S or F7 every time you made progress. If you died without saving, you were simply thrown back to the main menu and expected to start over.

I'm sure this modulated the difficulty of games. Developers knew that most players would probably save immediately before a difficult jump, boss fight, etc. making the cost of a reattempt nothing more than a few menu selections.

That's probably why Elfland contains a few pixel-perfect jumps over deadly drowning pools, very little in the way of health refills, enemies that are infuriating to hit, and at least one brutally difficult boss fight.

None of those things are impossible to overcome, or even that frustrating if you don't consider a death to be upsetting, and if you're okay with the idea that saving and loading is a normal part of gameplay, then why would you be?

Most of the really "mean" stuff occurs in a dungeon that's supposed to be a deathtrap you can't survive, so who's surprised that it's full of things that really, really want to kill you? And given that, it's surprisingly well-balanced by some measures.

Consider these points and counterpoints:

• Bad: There are "bats" that can sort of follow you through walls, move erratically in random diagonals, seemingly a couple tiles at a time, and can make a beeline down towards you at an angle. Your primary attack only shoots directly forward, making it nearly impossible to jump up and get them before they hit you.

• Good: However, you CAN pick up specialty homing ammo. You don't get much of it and you have to strategize heavily, because it will home to anything on the screen, so you need to make sure there's nothing else nearby before you use it, and it will bonk on corners, so you have to pop out underneath the bat and then fire. It's precise, but far from undoable.

• Bad: There are snakes and rats that are shorter than you and tend to be sprinkled in a few at a time, in places where you can't jump over them.

• Good: But your weapons can hit them, without crouching or anything, so they aren't hard to kill, they're just slow obstacles.

• Bad: There are purple creatures that take a few shots to kill, and rush at you so fast they're almost impossible to avoid

• Good: But they only rush if they're facing you when you're on the ground. If you approach them from behind, you can murder them effortlessly.

• Bad: All the ammo in the game is limited. If you run out, you are simply defenseless. Enemies also can't be killed, only stunned, so as you move through a room one way and then back in the other, you will have to shoot almost every enemy at least twice.

• Good: But the game often showers you with ammo, so unless you act like a total doofus, you won't run out - you just need to be careful about how much you use, especially if you're in an area that isn't littered with drops.

And so on.

At first I thought the combat was unnecessarily mean, but really, you just have to adjust to it, similar to the Dark Souls experience of realizing that you simply aren't supposed to tank anything. Getting hit at all in one of those games is very close to a lose condition, and you're supposed to approach every fight strategically to avoid it.

Elfland is a Darksouls. In this essay, I wi

But seriously, it's remarkable how much thought was put into the game. Many aspects of it clearly benefited more from brainstorming than from simply duplicating other games, and for the most part, it's well programmed.

Art aside, the EGA graphics still don't look as good as any console released since literally a decade earlier simply because the PC graphics hardware sucked, but given the limitations of the PC, it's all remarkably well implemented, and comes in just under Keen in terms of smoothness of play, scrolling, responsiveness, and so on.

Is it good, per se, though? Mmm. No.

I don't recommend you play it to enjoy as a game. It's frustrating, sloppy and amateurish, and indeed, when I finished the first episode on stream, I ran a poll and 2/3 of people did not want to see the second half.

There are probably several reasons for this having to do with it's genuine problems, above and beyond what I noticed as a child. For instance, when you descend into unlit areas, it uses a palette trick - which seems like a remarkably advanced trick compared to the games basic graphics - to cycle the entire screen to a much dimmer color scheme. A very cool trick, but it makes the game hard to actually make out.

The music is also comprised entirely of three (total) 20-second-or-so loops that play throughout the entire game, changing only when you enter or leave a dungeon. Combined with the atrocious sound, the game is not pleasant to listen to.

And while the game contains NPCs (whoa!), their dialogue is presented entirely in the form of monospaced text, in a green-on-brown color scheme that's literally painful to read. I got a lot of "tl;dr"s and "I'm not reading that" from chat when those popped up during my stream.

So yes, it's a 1992 indie PC game - this is what they were like. But it does contain novel ideas, more than most of those did. It contains approaches to gameplay that, if not particularly well thought out, I hadn't seen before, and even where not particularly satisfying or polished, they don't make the game unplayable.

The world contains a lot of space, more than you'd expect for this period, and with less linearity than you'd anticipate. The game map is relatively large and sprawling, it rewards exploration, and it contains something that I'd previously seen almost entirely in Blaster Master: Useless areas.

In the first segment of the game (before arriving at Gorgimer's Castle, where most of it takes place) you leave the elf village, heading left.*

* One of my favorite bits of personality in any game I've played: The characters never break the fourth wall, except to refer to things as being "left" and "right" of your current position. They speak in perfectly reasonable diegetic voice, but then tell you that something is "left of the village." It's extremely funny, and also convenient, because as a kid I would have struggled with interpreting "west of here."

As you work your way towards the castle, you come across a hole in the ground. This is a cavern you can explore, which accomplishes nothing. There are enemies in there, and little mazes, and it's 100% skippable. There's no keys, nothing you need to kill, just ammo - and you don't need it to make it to the castle, which will then shower you in ammo of all types.

This is the juice that gives me life. I want a game world to be full of useless things, little spaces that just need to exist. This game is supposed to contain monsters and troll dens, so of course you'll stumble across one on your quest. If you go down inside you'll likely die for little gain. Of course! Why wouldn't you? It's a dark hole where monsters live. Nobody told you to go in there.

Even the more structure parts of the game contain a lot of backtracking (a core component of the MV genre) - I criss-crossed the dungeon four or five times in its entirety as I tried to figure out what it wanted me to do, and while I may have just been wandering lost, I'm pretty sure that at least once, the game required me to go all the way left to get something, then all the way right to use it, and then all the way left again to a newly accessible area.

Much of the level design itself is simple platforming and mazes, but there were a couple puzzles, and in the convention of The Best Games, I had to discover a couple mechanics by reading the environment.

For instance: Water will kill you in this game - but it won't kill you instantly. That should have been a sign right away that the game intended to make that a mechanic, but I didn't figure out until an hour into play that the purple squids, which ride up and down continuously in bodies of water, are not enemies, but platforms.

I realized this when I noticed that one of the items that's critical to finishing the game is a bundle of rope at the bottom of a pool of water, right next to a squid.

Yes, that's right: To complete the game, you have no choice but to jump into the water, tank some damage, retrieve the rope, and then ride the squid back up to the surface (yes, the game has atrocious collision detection, I thought that was implicit) and hopefully escape before you die.

This is where the design really falls on its face. The game has very rare health powerups and no "lives" system, so unless you know exactly where a static grapes or potion spawn is, you can't recover any health. If you're at two bars and there's no powerups within a screen's width or so, the game is essentially unwinnable unless you have the reflexes of a speedrunner.

In fact, this is one of a couple ways to softlock. The obvious other one is to simply run out of ammo in a place that can't be escaped without stunning an enemy. The only option left at that point is to load... or restart. Woe be to the 8 year old who luckily made it all the way into the dungeon without saving, then ran low on health or ammo.

This wasn't all that unusual for the time, especially on PC. Commander Keen and Secret Agent Man, to pick a couple examples, could also be made nearly unwinnable if you simply blasted all your ammo into the air. But it's certainly tough to go back to now.

Conclusion (Disappointing)

Per the overall theme of this post: is Elfland (1992) a Metroidvania?

No, not even a sleeper. But you can kind of see how it was moving in that direction, and it's remarkable how it can feel like one without really hitting the qualifications.

It is certainly an action-adventure, and in fact, like Wonder Boy III, what I find intriguing is that it doesn't seem to have strong Metroid influences. If the creator had seen the game, I don't know that he took much away from it.

Instead, Elfland depicts an original approach to action platforming, with puzzle elements and some minimal progression mechanics,* and it does at least have you search for items more often than things to kill, which is good enough for me.

*You don't collect new movement tech, but at one point you do have to find bombs to blow open a wall to progress.

Irritatingly, it is possible to waste the bombs by using them as ammo in normal combat, which you only get in one or two places, softlocking your game.

If this dev had gone a little bit harder, I think this game could have been an MV. As it stands, I think it's just a remarkably fresh accomplishment for a single developer working during the PC's indie interregnum, and honestly if you have a little patience you should check it out, just for that "alternate universe" experience.

Currently, I am playing Tunic. It's a better Metroidvania.