As of the last few years, more and more people have been using the term "Metroidbrainia" to refer to games "like metroidvanias but with unlocks in your head rather than in the game". Even since then, I regularly see, on this sub and elsewhere, debates about which games should be included or not, or how good they are at being metroidbrainias, whether it should have a different name or not, with people essentially talking past each other because everyone is talking about different things.

The latest example, which prompted my post, being this post in which someone declares OW to be the best one according to some arbitrary metric applied to an also arbitrary set of games.

I genuinely feel that, as time passes and people get more used to it, using "metroidbrainia" as a catch-all term is really leading people to completely miss what's good about each of these games, as if the "knowledge-basedness" of it all is an inherent quality that makes them good.

Is Outer Wilds being knowledge-based really the end of it, is it the thing that made you love it? I'm asking, because while I do see discussion of plenty of the game's aspects, usually "knowledge keys" and "knowledge unlocks" are terms that dominate discussions of OW's design, as well as other games of this "genre". It's gotten to the point that people can't seem to differentiate its mysteries from, say, Tunic for example, without just measuring what % of their unlocks are knowledge-based and what % are classical.

The term, I would argue, doesn't even differentiate itself much from "Metroidvania". People have formalized the notion of "knowledge keys" and "knowledge unlocks", such that these things aren't meaningfully different to classical unlocks. So what if I could've input this code myself before the game told me what it was? How is that different from finding a key in a chest?

You could argue I've picked an extreme example here, that the process of finding >!the Ash Twin Project!<, for example, is very different than simply finding and inputting a code. But how different, exactly? A broad term like "Metroidbrainia" cannot say, so we should go further. Here's an excellent blog post by Bruno Dias arguing for a more precise taxonomy.

The point

I think that all of this stems from an overfocus on mechanics when describing a game, rather than what these mechanics do. What is the point of having knowledge-based unlocks (KBUs) in a game? Why did the developers do that? What do they mean to you, how do they affect your experience?

From what I've gathered from the various interviews, discussions, and presentations from OW's devs, KBUs are a means to an end. Their goal was for the game to be curiosity-driven, and they felt that classical rewards and powerups would create a motivation in the player that would distract from that goal. (Though, when asked about it at the end of one of his presentations, Alex Beachum doesn't seem to think that having only KBUs is even essential.)

Other games with KBUs will have different reasons for having them. More importantly, they will have a different effect on you, specifically, as they accumulate with all of the other aspects of the game to form your personal experience of it.

Why is Outer Wilds the only one to "do it right", like the other post said? Well, this is of course only a subjective opinion, and I can't be sure what that person really meant, but if Outer Wilds is your favorite game, and all the other "metroidbrainias" you've played don't get to its level, it'd be interesting to really dissect them to figure out, why is that? I'm asking about your experience of the game, not the game itself. How did KBUs impact that experience, if they did at all?

I know that for many people, OW ended up being mainly an emotional experience, that made them ponder on acceptance, and the creation of a future that they will not get to see. That is, in itself, an aspect that differentiates it a lot from other games of the "genre", and while I personally cannot speak about that, I think it'd be interesting to discuss in-depth how the game's design fits into such an experience.

My experience with Outer Wilds, and the uniqueness of it

Here is what I can talk about, though: I loved my time with it more than any other game, because of the curiosity-driven aspect. The game not only gave me a world and a story to wonder about, it also gave me the means to answers the questions I had about it, and every one of these answers was not mere trivia, it brought more questions, and with it, actionable knowledge that would empower me to answer said new questions. This loop, initiated by me, directed by me, giving me the answers to my questions (though not always the answers I expected), unrolled to form an adventure that truly felt like my own.

I cared about the intricate mechanisms of its ticking clock, I cared about how the clock came to be. And the game said that this care brings joy, excitement, apprehension, maybe even fear, that it is endless as knowledge always brings more questions, that this self-replicating process is a end in itself, an end that never ends. It said that it is good, that it is life.

There are plenty of modern "thinky" games that I dearly love, but they do not do that.

I do not care that much about the cryptic or even abstract worlds of Tunic, FEZ, or Animal Well.

I do not know why I need to learn that much about the >!geopolitical situation!< of Blue Prince's world, other than my uncle made a puzzle about it.

Heaven's Vault does not give me any say into what mysteries I can seek and answer, powerless as I am against the chaos of its stories and locations.

Even games like Her Story, Chants of Sennaar, or Return of the Obra Dinn, who put me in a well-defined world, in the shoes of a character whose motivations are diegetic, and allow me to use my understanding to progress, either peak before the end without much of an acknowledgement of my discoveries, or are otherwise fueled mostly by a desire to "see what's next" rather than a real drive to direct my own exploration and answer my own questions.

A recommendation

Honestly, over time, I had started to believe that this is maybe just a me thing, that I had made up all these differences arbitrarily and that I would never admit that any other game is truly "like OW" because no other game was OW. Thankfully, last year I played a game that reassured me that there truly is an aspect specific to OW, which is the one aspect I truly care about, and that I had found in no other game up until then. That game is Riven.

I don't see it discussed often, probably because it's old, but in my opinion it is sorely lacking among recommendations of "games similar to OW", because it's the only game that gave me a similar feeling of caring about the world, its stories and its intricacies, being the point.

I played the 2024 remake, which, from what I've gathered, some of the original fans don't like as much. But my experience absolutely mirrors the descriptions I've read of the original, minus the absurdly difficult puzzles (the remake's difficulty felt just right imo). It doesn't reach the same heights as OW for me but its world absolutely fascinated me, and it's always a delight when noticing a detail or taking the time to think critically about the logic of the world ends up being actionable down the line. (I felt absolutely ecstatic in a moment towards the end (vague) >!where the game suddenly put me in a tight spot and asked me to make a split-second decision, which turned out in my favor as I remembered an innocuous detail from much earlier in my playthrough!<.)

Honestly, the remake may as well have been a completely new game and no one would notice it originated from 1997. If you like these kinds of game there is no reason to put it off. (By the way, they recently released a bundle with OW!)

So, is Riven a metroidbrainia? Hell if I know. It's probably not that hard to make it fit. But what I do know is, what I've been looking for all along is the Riven-likes, of which I have now found the only other one in existence. This is what I want to play and this is what I want to make. Not a "metroidbrainia".