Outland, Shantae and Castle in the Darkness: A Trio of Mediocre Metroidvanias

Originally published November 22, 2018.

I recently felt that metroidvania itch, and with Guacamelee 2, La Mulana 2 and other promising games on my wishlist, I naturally decided to cheap out and play some games from my library instead. Doing so left me disappointed overall, as neither of the three metroidvanias I played ended up pleasing me much despite promising aspects in each. To be up front, I never finished any of these games, because I didn’t get the impression they would get better with time, if I’m wrong there I’d appreciate being corrected. I also don’t think any of them are wholly bad, they’re all decent and inoffensive so I don’t mean to bash them here. This will focus on the gameplay of these three platformers, so the aesthetics of each will not be weighted (the music and art of Shantae is good, and Outland has some good art, but aesthetics rarely carry a game and isn’t very productive to critique regardless).

I call them metroidvanias because that’s what I wanted from them, that’s what they were sold to me as, and they appeal to fans of that genre through metroidvania elements. However, I do not think Outland and Shantae are fully metroidvanias, as they feature linear levels played in a linear order from a level select, with optional or forced backtracking that add no depth or feeling of discovery to the experience. Castle in the Darkness doesn’t scratch the itch for me entirely because of how little verticality and interconnectedness there is in the levels, but that one does technically qualify.

The structure will be as follows:

• Game feel: The animations, sound effects, physics, etc. that determine how well it plays.
• Challenge: Whether the game challenges the player and introduces interesting gameplay elements and uses them effectively in the levels’ design.
• Minor issues: Game-specific hindrances, like a poor save system or finicky hitboxes.
• Structure and exploration: Structure of the game’s areas and map, interconnectivity and non-linearity. Also the individual levels and how non-linear or interesting those are, i.e. the dungeons in Shantae/CitD and the levels in Outland. The level design, its challenge and depth, is covered in other sections so this is more about how it approaches exploration rather than the quality of its content.
• Depth: This is important for longevity of the game, and is related to challenge. It’s whether the game manages to stay engaging over longer periods of time through combat, exploration or platforming that are dynamic and interesting, whether because of the player’s toolset and base systems or because of how those are used throughout.

Outland

• Game feel: The hitstop is the single positive factor I can point out in how this plays. Everything else is not impressive. The enemy and player character have slow and awkward animations, the wind-up of attacks have no impact and overall attack animations are slow and without much impact (except hitstop, but that’s not the only factor of attacks being satisfying). The jumping and movement are floaty and feel like they’re using default Unity physics emulation. The sound effects are basic and don’t add much, there’s not much of a reaction when you or an enemy is hit except for stagger (which doesn’t apply for every enemy), and the visual effects are on par with the animations (which is a shame because the art is better, but inconsequential to the gameplay) – just listen to this and how weak it sounds despite the whole screen breaking and sending you plummeting, or check out this dragon crashing into the earth. The music really doesn’t help, though for this kind of game it rarely does (Killer Instinct and Doom 2016’s dynamic soundtracks makes me interested in if it could work for an action platformer though). The ground pound is the weakest I’ve ever experienced in a game, especially when you need to do three of them just to break some blocks.
• Challenge: Thoroughly dull, I was intrigued when it did a stage where you have all your lategame toys to tease what the later stages are like, but subsequently let down as even that was trivial and with no interesting challenges or creative uses of the obstacles. So much of the platforming is more like an adventure game with no risk or challenge. It could get better later on, but I’m not too interested in spending hours on mediocre foreplay just to get some fairly good traversal challenges – I don’t see the combat and platforming being helped by the passage of time, as they suffer from lack of polish and depth which are universal. After watching the final boss fight, it isn’t even bullet hell and doesn’t seem harder than the first level where you have light and dark.
• Minor issues: Being the same element as a bullet means you don’t interact with it, i.e. you pass through and take no damage. You also need to be of the opposite color of an enemy to interact with them, i.e. hit attacks. However, you can still take contact damage or be attacked by them when you’re the same color, which is a bit unintuitive and took a bit of experimentation and getting used to. Some of the enemies aren’t knocked down/staggered by doing attacks, so dashing into them can just damage you and do nothing to them, there’s no clear streamlined way that it communicates how the enemies will work (see Metal Gear Rising using red glows for attacks you can parry and yellow glow for ones you can’t, or Nioh where human and yokai enemies have differently colored stamina bars for their differences in how their stamina, stagger and parrying works). This is perhaps more about game feel, and certainly makes it feel less polished. The player character is often very small on the screen and isn’t very clear to make out from the background, which makes some sections finicky (against the first boss I had to constantly look back and forth between the raining bullets and my character) – shoot-em’-ups are generally very good at both of these things and Ikaruga itself did it well.
• Structure and exploration: The game is not only split into zones that you go to via a level select screen, it splits even those zones into levels, and those levels again play very linearly (small side offshoots here and there). You can replay old levels with new powers to get some side content but it feels like the metroidvania elements are shoehorned in and they don’t add much. To top this off, doing any of the optional content (which is never very interesting or challenging) simply rewards you with some concept art, which is not indicative of bad content but certainly does nothing to make up for it.
• Depth: While the combat isn’t great (bosses have limited movesets and there aren’t enough mechanics and options on the player side to make up for that, colored enemies barely do anything), the powerups and abilities beyond that, namely the light/dark switching, provides some depth to the platforming. I quite liked Ikaruga when I played that, and Guacamelee and Titanfall 2 have proved that a switching worlds mechanic can be utilized very well and be extremely fun. The potential of the mechanic isn’t achieved due to the execution and the low level of challenge, however, so it ends up not mattering much.

Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

• Game feel: Thankfully this doesn’t stop at just having good music and artwork, it also has some impressive sprite animation, stylish sound effects, visual effects consistent with the art style, and great feedback whenever you deal and take damage. I can’t fault it here at all.
• Challenge: The difficulty level is a bit too low for the levels and most of the bosses to be engaging. For a proper metroidvania it would be satisfactory, as the platforming and combat wouldn’t be the only sticking points, but when exploration and level design is so lacking, these more basic pieces need to challenge to keep me engaged. There are some cool powerups but nothing too interesting in how they’re used.
• Minor issues: Save points don’t heal you but quitting/reloading or dying both do, meaning I quit every time I get to a save point to regen some hp, which can make some sections even easier. It doesn’t seem balanced around getting hp back from killing enemies so I wasn’t very tempted to avoid healing at save points. The consumables are also a bit weird, I never used them as it feels like cheating and they make it even easier (if you didn’t get them from enemies it would make more sense, but as-is you can just grind to get a lot of healing and other buffs). Some areas have snakes or flies that spawn without any warning, making for some cheap hits, reminding me of run-n’-guns. The knockback can sometimes cause unavoidable damage as the enemy walks into range for their contact damage, which i-frames on hit are there to get rid of. The ghost forest rescue mission is tedious as hell with screen after screen of oneshotting enemies. The moving cages locks your movement while active which prevents them from being anything more than simple teleportation spots and goes against the smooth feel of the rest of the game. It’s often unintuitive what you need to do to progress, similar to point-n’-clicks with their absurd logic (need squid oil? Better go seek out that one specific squid character instead of getting some from the squids I’m carrying around to make into hearts).
• Structure and exploration: The game is level-based and doesn’t have the guided non-linearity of a metroidvania. I found that fine in Guacamelee but that game had no, or little, backtracking to past stages, it was more “go through the dungeon, get to the end, get the powerup, use the powerup to 100% the dungeon, move on”. Here, there’s not much exploration at all, gaining a new ability unlocks 1-2 paths very close to where you got the ability as well as a few paths in past levels that you have to backtrack to just to get some collectibles. You are also forced to do some of that token backtracking to progress through the otherwise linear levels. The dungeons are alright but nothing special, with little going for them in terms of structure. In the end it’s about as much of a metroidvania as Celeste, and its platforming is not good enough to stand on its own.
• Depth: The game doesn’t have much going on, I like the recovery jump and backdash you can buy but the powerups are generally quite limited in how useful they are outside of specific designed screens, jumps or enemies that require their use. It’s lock-and-key design, and doesn’t add much depth to the core mechanics or level design. It’s still ok, the hat is probably the best of the bunch and makes the jump a bit more interesting, and the moveset isn’t too bad. It’s more that the level design doesn’t require you to use the mechanics and challenge you.

Castle in the Darkness

• Game feel: Animations and sound effects aren’t great, but they do the job decently.
• Challenge: It’s simple but doesn’t waste your time, not afraid to challenge you from the start. The rpg mechanics with incrementing hp and damage doesn’t work out very well IMO, every area starts with very strong enemies and by the end they feel the same as last area, that is also on the enemy designs being very simplistic though.
• Minor issues: The frog’s contact damage remained after its death, so I died after beating him (he isn’t truly dead at this point, it technically makes sense, but there’s no indication that this is the case and is the most definitively cheap event in the game). Screen transitions don’t reset projectiles like it does enemies. Ice movement is a bit inconsistent with when it applies. I’ve had a random crash and some lag which is surprising for such a simple game. The plant boss overlaps animations making some attacks unreactable. Screen transitions sometimes transport you to a very different location on-screen, so if there is an enemy there you may die before knowing where you are. It doesn’t waste your time with cutscenes and such, but despite simplicity it really doesn’t feel very clean with a lot of hitbox/hurtbox strangeness besides these issues.
• Structure and exploration: Too little verticality and little interconnectedness, but each area is at least not very linear. I’m not entirely sure if the areas are possible to do out of order entirely, but it seems like there’s some of that so the overarching structure isn’t constrained by linearity either. All in all it’s pretty fun to explore individual levels and decide where to go next when there are several possibilities, but backtracking is very inorganic and relies on using teleporters to go back to old areas and just replaying most of its content with new powers that unlock side content and rewards.
• Depth: Its simplicity ultimately works against it when it comes to longevity. It might work for a flash game that lasts an hour or two with more rapid powerup progression, but when every boss has two attacks, half your toolset doesn’t work against most of them (many are immune to magic, others are pointless to use anything but magic against), and every area seems designed for a specific toolset in mind (meaning there’s not so much customization in how you approach areas, it’s more just that some areas require the boomerang, others a sword etc.), then it has no change to remain compelling over time. Despite a decent level of difficulty, it rarely gets interesting or in-depth with how it challenges you. Many new areas just feel like the same content but with a bit more damage and hp which will eventually be offset by finding better weapons and armor. Platforming takes a back seat to the combat so that can’t be relied upon either.

Conclusion

At the end of this, as I slip into the comfort of Pyre after frustration with trying to enjoy these, I’m left with a feeling of appreciation for other games. Hollow Knight chiefly, as it was one of the first metroidvanias I played – I thought it was pretty good, more modern than the classics but in a similar style for sure. The non-linearity was well done but didn’t seem special when put beside Super Metroid and even Symphony of the Night (which I didn’t particularly like, but it was for reasons besides the level design and structure). But now I really understand why so many praise it, how it stands out among other indie metroidvanias.

Guacamelee was fun despite being mostly linear, same with Ori and the Blind Forest, so it just seemed like a different focus, HK had better level structure but Guacamelee had better dungeons and Ori had better platforming, and none of them suffer for the ways in which they are inferior to each other (White Palace is the closest thing to it, but it’s mostly a systemic clash and the only proper flaw as a platforming challenge is the lack of information – and it’s only one small part of the game). Ori doesn’t have good combat, and it basically has no combat as it’s shoved so far into the background even the bosses have no combat to them. Guacamelee doesn’t have great structure and exploration, so it gives you your next destination and lets you hurry along. These three games, in contrast, commit to aspects that they don’t execute on, and are overshadowed all to easily by their peers as a result.