What Can Hollow Knight and Metroid Learn From Each Other?

In 2017 the rich subculture of indie metroidvania games, which had been gestating in the absence of either series that had given the subgenre its name, delivered its greatest accomplishment, Hollow Knight — a game it may as well have been working up to from the beginning.

Just six months later, Metroid itself, the absentee king-father of the genre, returned in a collaboration between Nintendo and the last developers of the Castlevania series, Mercury Steam. Samus Returns for the 3DS was the result.

As a long time fan of metroidvania, I was thrilled by the arrival of these new titans, skirmish between established veteran companies and enthusiastic amateurs, each trying in their own way to raise the subgenre to new heights. Which one would come out on top?

The common feeling is that, at the end of the day, Hollow Knight usurped the throne. If this is true, and Metroid was left in the dirt, I wouldn’t complain too much — sometimes only a challenger to the status quo can raise the bar.

Though I won’t go as far to flat-out deny that interpretation, I think the result is far more interesting than just that. Samus Returns also broke new ground in ways I don’t think it is always appreciated for. Both games are packed with such innovations, quirks, and flaws that it would be an injustice not to examine them properly against each other.

And perhaps, along the way, we will discover what makes a good metroidvania in general.

Theme

The best games of the Metroid series are about the superb tension of being isolated, lost, and in mortal danger on an alien world. Samus navigates elaborate caves filled with deadly flora and fauna, and is prevented from feeling too powerful as she regularly runs into environments that are inhospitable and enemies that are overwhelming until she collects enough power-ups. Most games that adopt the Metroid formula adopt this oppressive atmosphere, too — it fits the mechanics.

What is Hollow Knight about? It takes the theme of Metroid further, and more literally, than the original series ever did. The player a literal bug who falls into the contorted underground home of bigger, nastier bugs. This theme fits this type of game like a sword fits a scabbard. Bugs evoke the needed feelings: they are small and delicate, as your character is supposed to be begin with; but bugs also inspire fear, and they can be deadly.

The variety of the bug kingdom is well represented in Hollow Knight, from majestic to disgusting. Each area has its own “family tree” of bugs. In the Hive area, the popcorn enemies are small bees, the more troublesome enemies are fully grown bees, and the boss is a bee-knight who protects the bee-queen. You’ll only find bees in that one area of the game (and a few areas that connect to it, serving as an organic clue as to where the hidden hive is located). All other areas have their own unique enemies. Not just colour-swaps, but original designs of bug, each hand drawn and animated and with its own moveset.

Samus Returns is also a bug hunt of sorts, but by comparison much more limited. Metroid II, the game which Samus Returns is based on, explored the life cycle and ecosystem of the metroids. It did so within the limitations of the Game Boy. There were five types of Metroid and a smattering of minor enemies. Samus Returns, as a remake, could have taken that theme, that general framework, and done it with the benefit of modern hardware and a larger budget. They could have expanded and fleshed out what we saw in many interesting ways. Instead, they largely just did what Metroid II already did but with new graphics.

To say Hollow Knight has ten times more enemy and boss variety than Samus Returns is doing Hollow Knight a disservice. It’s more like twenty times — something like that, anyway. There are so many good bosses in Hollow Knight I couldn’t list even a half of them, plus lots of special one-off encounters and minibosses. Samus Returns pretty much just has that robot and the queen metroid. That’s not typical for the Metroid series, but Hollow Knight is still exceptional.

This may become a theme in this article, but Hollow Knight is a very generous game. Samus Returns is much more restrained in how much it wants to give to the player. Hollow Knight’s policy is “give them everything”. By the time I have finished with Hollow Knight, I feel like I’d seen 70% of the game. With a Metroid game it’s more like 95%. I’m not referring to the in-game item counter with those percentages, understand. I’m talking about content that is meaningful to me. With Metroid the post-game is usually just mopping up upgrades. With Hollow Knight there are entire areas, enemy types, bosses, and music tracks you’d never seen before.

And isn’t that exactly what you want in a metroidvania? More things to find and fight? More secrets behind hidden walls. More optional bosses. Hollow Knights delivers in spades. I think this goes a long way to explain why it is so revered among fans of the genre, and I don’t deny it for a second.

Hollow Knight is also an incredibly beautiful game, full of subtly stunning character designs and sublime handcrafted animations and environments. In every way the production values of this game are higher than you would expect from a three-man team, from the flashy visual effects to the complex sound design.

I think Samus Returns is also a beautiful game, even though it gets less praise for it. The 2.5D style (that forces the limitations of two dimensions on a 3D character in a 3D world) is hard to make look convincing and natural, but Samus Returns achieves it effortlessly. The backgrounds are ripe with wild, otherworldly beauty. Samus is animated so fluidly I would find it hard to go back to her sprite-based games, and that’s high praise.

One area Samus Returns can’t compare in is story. Hollow Knight goes further in this regards than Metroid, perhaps any metroidvania, ever has. It is filled with charming characters that come and go during your adventure. Their story is interwoven with yours, stories that branch and have multiple outcomes. You’ll be surprised to find them as you explore the environment, and even more surprised when they occasionally get involved in the combat. You will find it hard not to care about at least some of them as you go. Samus Returns doesn’t have NPCs at all, so there’s not much to compare, but Hollow Knight does have a lesson, which is that despite convention a metroidvania can have a supporting cast without sacrificing the key emotions associated with the subgenre. In fact, as some of those side-characters end up dead, the feelings of isolation and dread are only heightened by their involvement. Metroid is, in a sense, a horror series, and such stories benefit from a cast of innocent bystanders to be terrorised.

Metroid: Other M did attempt to add NPCs to the Metroid formula, and it was terrible. The only other Metroid game with a supporting cast was Prime: Hunters, which introduced a small circus of other bounty hunters. They didn’t have much in the way of story, but they did randomly pop up for fights. Maybe it’s time we learned more of Noxus, Sylux, Weevil, and, especially, Anthony (remember him?). There is potential simmering here.

Movement

When a category of games has as much traversal, exploration and backtracking as a metroidvania, it is a matter of success or failure their movement and controls are tight and satisfying. Ideally, getting from place to place should be a joy, a game unto itself.

It’s no surprise that two premier titles of the genre get this right. I’m going to have a lot of good things to say about both of them, but they’re most interesting in how different they are. Getting Samus around is more about precise movements in confined areas, and that is satisfying in its own way. Hollow Knight is much more free form and open.

I love how athletic Samus feels, rolling into balls and pulling herself up from ledges in quick, snappy movements. she has many more “modes” of movement with their own distinct animations/poses: running, walking, grabbing, climbing, jumping, somersaulting, rolling, aiming, hanging etc. Even just dropping from platform to platform with Samus has a nice feel, a nice weight to it. I think she controls and animates better in Samus Returns than she has in any Metroid game before: her jumps are less floaty than in Super, as much as I crazy-love Fusion’s super-slick sprite animations the polygonal Samus model has its own advantages. She is certainly much more animated than the Hollow Knight’s Knight — which, by the way, is what I will refer to him as from now on. Don’t get me wrong, the Knight is nicely animated too, but there is a lot less variety.

In this video, Joakim Sandberg, the maker of Iconoclasts, points out that the fun of controller Samus is the sense of flow, of being able to deal with enemies obstacles without breaking momentum, moving and still being able to shoot in multiple directions for instance. The metroidvania template means lots of moving across large areas so it would make sense that the more successful ones would allow you to effortlessly combine traversal and combat (as opposed to pure combat games where you might even want to restrict movement for the sake of balancing the combat). Mercury Steam’s Castlevanias were more combat focuses games. I would say that’s where their talents lie (funnily enough, same situation with Team Ninja, who worked on Metroid Other M but I digress). True to this, they introduced the counter attack to Metroid, the sort of move traditional found in brawlers, and also the free aim mode to give more shooting options — but both new moves require Samus to be standing still.

I think these changes are fun in isolation, but a common opinion is that they betrayed the philosophy of flow key to the series (I’ll have more to say on these new moves in a moment, but let’s assume that this interpretation is true for a moment).

Now look at Hollow Knight. You can jump over enemies, hit them from above, and not only continue without being slowed but actually get a boost upwards that might let you continue onward in a different direction. You can combine this pogo hop with air dashes and double jumps to stay airborne indefinitely. You’ve got so much freedom in movement that it’s always a pleasure to get around these levels, even when backtracking. You’re so graceful — it almost feels like parkour at times. While Samus Returns took away the ability to endlessly wall jump, Hollow Knight includes it, and it’s just crazy fun to use. Again, if a big part of the game is traversal you’d better give the player as many fun traversal options as you can, not take them away. Hollow Knight gives you a bag of movement options that you can chain together and freestyle with. Just think of one passage upwards: you can double jump through it, you can wall jump on either wall, or the most stylish in my opinion, you can wall jump on one wall and then turn back on yourself, then dash into the horizontal. And the whole while you’re free to attack in any direction. It’s free-form, snazzy, and a tonne of fun.

There’s only one tiny thing I don’t like about Hollow Knight’s movement system, and that is that dashing constantly is faster than running. I hate feeling like I’m pumping water just to get where I’m going. I don’t know how you would solve this without it screwing up combat, though.

The Knight flits around like an armoured mosquito. Samus is more like a stag-beetle acrobat. Each fits the level design of their respective game, which I will get into more in a bit. No losers here, then.

***

In order to understand more about what makes the movement of these characters great, I watched speedruns of both games. I expected Hollow Knights to be more exciting to spectate, because I found moving around in that game more exciting when playing. That wasn’t quite the case, though.

It’s actually Samus Returns which is more fun to watch. This might be partially superficial: I seriously suspect Samus Returns being more zoomed-in than Hollow Knight means there is more screen movement and so it looks more kinetic, looks faster, something like that. But it also looks like a harder speedrun to pull off. The Hollow Knight speedrun doesn’t look like much I couldn’t do myself, just cleaner, tighter. A Samus Returns run somehow looks like something more complex, as if the runner is taking routes I didn’t even know existed, falling through the levels with style, like Buzz Lightyear.

Later, I watched a speedrun of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. It is utterly packed with usual little movement tricks, so a speedrun of that game looks totally different to how a normal person would play it. Like, you can knock the bones the skeletons throw out of the sky while jumping over them so that you can move past them without stopping. It looks fun, but I bet a lot of people don’t even know you can. They don’t have much reason to try — it probably only saves a millisecond. You can also play Aria quite safely. I think a “slowrun” of the game would look super boring. But Hollow Knight, to get back on topic, does demand that you use the few movement “tricks” it gives you to get through the game, eg. pogo hopping. I’m not a speedrunner, but my impression is that Hollow Knight is less complex at a high level, but I think it is more complex at a low level — puts was it has in front of players ask them to get the most out of it, to have fun and do it as part of a regular playthrough. I think the same might be true of Ori And The Blind Forest. That’s another game people think of as tough to beat, by the way. I can’t imagine a speedrun of Ori being crazy exciting… but then, so I really need to see one? Didn’t it already feel like I was an acrobat while I was playing the game?

If we return to Samus Returns for another example, consider the power-bomb boost, which is using a power bombs to shoot across a map without losing momentum until you hit a wall. Hollow Knight has a similar ability in the crystal boost. In Samus Returns, I didn’t even know about this move up to and even after completing the game. I saw for the first time in a speed run. In Hollow Knight, it’s part of the main game. Also, because it is easier to pull off, and has no cost, your can experiment with it more and might find areas where you can get some long crystal boosts for fun and to save time getting places. It is part of that toolbox of movement options that you are expected to use as part of the main game. Now, Samus Returns’s version might be more interesting to speedrunners because it has a cost (one power bomb), so it has routing implications. It’s cool to watch them do it: every power-bomb boost looks like it was meticulously planned, starting at super precise points that you wouldn’t have guessed to try, and crossing screens in a single bound.

It depends where your priorities lie. Do you want a game that’s got a higher skill ceiling at the top levels, or one that forces you to us interesting play styles even on your first playthrough?

***

When asking what makes movement in these games as engaging as possible, we have to consider more than just controls and abilities. Other systems have an effect too. I want to mention Hollow Knight’s mana system. In Metroid, you health and ammo for killing enemies. This works fine. In Hollow Knight, you get geo (ie. money) for killing enemies, but you also get soul (ie. mana) even if you only hit them (whether you kill them or not). So this is a little more encouragement to mix hits to the enemy into your movements, perhaps by vaulting off the with a sword strike instead of double jumping over them. This makes the journey a little more action-packed.

Hollow Knight also has the Hunter’s diary: kill enough of each enemy and you get an entry in a diary about that enemy type. It’s a nice bit of background lore and even more reason to get into fights.

Samus should really get herself one of those: she’s a bounty hunter, isn’t she?

***

I have been looking at the footage for Hollow Knight: Silksong. I don’t want to examine it in too much detail because I’m excited to go into the game fresh, but I think Hornet has a different look to how she moves. She’s still very light and mobile like the knight, but a little more animated and athletic. Making a game with a new character is a good opportunity to revise basic controls and movement, so I wonder if Hornet may come with some changes that brings us to an ideal between Samus and the Knight. We’ll see.

Combat

Hollow Knight did something no Metroid has achieved yet, and that is make a metroidvania with action as good as the dedicated side-scrolling action games. Hollow Knight stands up to Mega Man X/Zero, Contra et al. as a great combat game.

Even the Castlevania series, which had equally fantastic (or better) enemy and boss designs as Hollow Knight doesn’t quite compare as a holistic combat experience because Castlevania is spliced with RPG mechanics like an inventory of consumable items you can use to tank your way through difficulty fights, a levelling up system that makes a finely tuned balance for every encounter impossible, and such a wide array of skills and spells that you’re bound to find something to cheese a fight with. Plus, even after over a decade of work on the formula little annoyances like enemies being able to fly off the screen have persisted.

As for Metroid, I’ve never felt like major encounters were designed so that I could learn the patterns inside out and avoid all attacks if I played well enough. Rather, I think Nintendo expects you to take damage — all the more reason to hunt down those energy tanks, perhaps.

In Hollow Knight, not only can you learn every enemies patterns and play against without having to tank damage, but each enemy has such an interesting variety of attacks that it is a pleasure to do so. Some enemies are just terrifyingly fast, like Nightmare King Grimm, and require your calm. Other, like God Tamer, are two bosses that attack independently, and require your foresight. Some bosses, like Radiance, have attacks that overlap, where one starts before the other has finished, and require your attention. But in all cases, if you commit, you can turn every battle into a deadly flamenco of avoidance and attack.

(For hierarchical clarity, if you compare only bosses, Hollow Knight is still not on the level of Cuphead — their attacks are not as complex, and I only wish there were more multi-phase bosses in Hollow Knight — but as that’s the only think Cuphead does it seems like an unfair comparison)

Samus Returns does make some small changes that make Metroid a tighter, more balanced combat experience. Boss attacks do seem more dodgeable, for instance. The new combat moves — the counter and free aim — are satisfying to use. But it’s not really enough to compare. The variety in both enemies and bosses is too small, their attacks too generic.

But, in compensation to Samus Returns, I will say something nice where most people have been negative. Fans have noted that enemies now take lots of shots of your buster to kill, and the cynical conclusion they make is that this is a way to force players to use the counter attack, being the new move of the series. The negative consequence of this is that you spend more time standing around waiting for enemies to attack. But I think this change is positive and intentional. You can still kill enemies in one or two shots, but only with missiles (which you can fire while moving or quickly free aim if standing still, which still makes hitting enemies at awkward angles faster than in other games of the series). If you’re using more missiles, those missile tank upgrades are more relevant. Each upgrade provides distance from the uncomfortable situation of running out of ammo. I know it’s not what people are used to, but I think this change is a small, unexpected improvement to the formula. Missiles are your main damage dealer; your regular shot is now more of a peashooter, there as a backup or as a situational weapon, such as with the icebeam upgrade. That works for me.

***

I always remember going into a new area with dread in Metroid games. In Hollow Knight, the feeling is less so. Fear of the unknown is an integral emotion for Metroid-inspired games, so I have to ask what explains the difference in my reactions

First is that it’s incredibly easy to heal in Hollow Knight, so the feeling of spelunking with limited resources is lost.

Second, death is Hollow Knight is very forgiving. Much like Dark Souls, you don’t really lose anything, you just have to remember to collect your shit (but unlike Dark Souls, which inspired a delicious feeling of dread, it’s very easy to avoid enemies and they don’t follow you). In most Metroid games, you lose all progress since the last save point. That means you are very motivated to survive at all times.

Samus Returns doesn’t get a pass on this point either, however. It has an annoying compromise where if you die in the world you lose all progress since the last save, but if you die against a boss you go back to a checkpoint. So you get the annoyance of one system and the lack of tension of another. It’s a compromise. Some will be happy with it. I’m not.

I don’t know what the ideal death system is for a metroidvania, but I don’t think either game has quite hit on it yet.

Third, there’s an fundamental difference in style between the two games. In general, Hollow Knight is more “balanced”, but Metroid has greater “range”. A demonstration of this (that also ties into how the player handles the combat) is how you can upgrade each character. You can only get four additional “masks” of health in Hollow Knight, which is less than a 100% increase over what you started with. In Metroid games you end up with more like 1000% more health. The most powerful enemies in Hollow Knight still only do one damage to you (only rare attacks will do two damage), and that one damage hit is always scary. It doesn’t scale upwards like in Metroid, where the difference between attacks from early enemies and later enemies is whatever. So in Metroid you really can get obliterated by later enemies of you aren’t ready for them, and that adds to the dread.

Hollow Knight’s tighter battle system would be ruined if it was balanced so you could tank damage like in Metroid. There might be a best-of-both-worlds here, but if I had to choose I’d take Hollow Knight’s combat any day of the week. But I won’t say Metroid doesn’t benefit from its own style of doing things. As I say, it has the greater “range”, and that means a greater difference between Samus at her weakest and at her strongest. It means later enemies are more deadly, and that makes exploration more tense and exciting, too. It means when you get powerful enough to deal with those enemies, it is more of a power trip.

This ties closely into, and leads on nicely to, the upgrade path of each game.

Upgrades

Samus’s journey of elevation via upgrades is iconic and familiar to most gamers. Regardless of which Metroid games you’ve played, it’s a similar experience: gain the morph ball and bombs, gain a series of new beam weapons, gain the ability to infinitely jump, gain the ultra-durable varia and gravity power-suits, and usually finish with the ability to obliterate all lifeforms at a touch as long as you stay airborne using the screwattack. At each stage you’re almost playing a different character. Space jumping around feels different to running and jumping, and moving around as the morph ball is totally different again. Progression like this is fundamental to the excitement of a metroidvania, and I don’t think any game has done it as well as the Metroid series yet. Hollow Knight is no exception.

The essential upgrades in Hollow Knight are the dash, the wall jump, the ground pound, the crystal boost and the double jump. Before you get the first two (especially before you get the dash) you will feel very limited in your movement options, a little sluggish, but you get both of them early on, in the first third of the game for most players I would guess. After that, you feel like you can zip around the levels a bit. But from there, after the dash and the wall jump, the upgrades are not nearly as game-changing. The double jump gives you more mobility in combat and there are one or two areas that can only be reached with a double jump, but you’ve already got the wall jump and pogo hop, and it’s such a ubiquitous ability to give the player so late in the game. The crystal boost is situational, probably used a lot in speedruns but really only needed in a few places.

It doesn’t help that all of these abilities, except the ground pound, only allow you to get across gaps of different shapes. It’s not bad, per say, but gaps are not the most interesting type of obstacle that could stand in your way, are they?

To complete the game, you’ll also need either Isma’s tear or the shade cloak. The tear gives you resistance to acid that opens up a few alternative paths, but that’s it. The shade cloak is far more interesting. All it does for exploration is let you bypass a specific type of door, the void barriers, but it is also great fun to use in combat, letting you do a shadow dash on a cooldown that goes right through enemies and attacks. You usually puts you in a far better position that jumping over an attack, but if you don’t pay attention to the cooldown you’ll end up doing a regular dash right into an enemy or attack and taking damage. Love it.

But that’s it. By the end of the game you’re pretty much doing dashes and jumps similar to what you were doing all the way back at Mantis Village only a few hours into the game. It doesn’t look much different and it doesn’t feel much different and it doesn’t feel like you’ve grown exceptionally as a character.

Now, this doesn’t include Hollow Knight’s charms, which that make up some of that feeling of becoming a much more powerful warrior, if you equip the right charms (dashmaster, quick slash, nailmaster’s glory and sharp shadow, for instance). But I still put Metroid ahead. In Metroid you get the morph ball, an entirely different mode of moving through the environment with its own type of attack. You get upgrades to you beam ie. your main weapon, that not only make it more powerful but give it different properties, like the ice beam that freezes enemies, and give it an entirely different visual effect. You feel like a boss when you get to try out your new beam. In Hollow Knight you’ll be seeing the same sword-slash animation from beginning to end, no matter how much you upgrade it.

The most exciting thing to find in either game, in my opinion, are the new power-suits in Metroid. It’s the mixture of a new terrain-resistance which opens up new areas, the improvement to defence, and also, crucially, the change in Samus’s sprite. Hollow Knight doesn’t have any such “game changer” upgrades like the suits or the screw attack. I suppose that’s to be expected. Like I said, it’s a more “balanced” game. But you can’t deny that Metroid’s “journey to the screw attack” is a thrill.

Samus’s fundamentals are so strong they haven’t had to change much in decades. Perhaps mixing things up would only throw a spanner in the works. With Hollow Knight, I really hope they do mix things up: bigger changes with each upgrade, more visual changes, more unexpected and interesting abilities. I want to see his little mask change shape, his cloak change colour. It doesn’t have to imbalance the combat or diminished the oppressive atmosphere, it only has to be that by the time you’ve finished the game, the Knight feels like he’s really been on a journey and has changed as a character.

Levels

So, I did a backtrack of my own on this topic while replaying these games. Initially, I was very much in Hollow Knight’s camp. I don’t think Samus Returns endeared itself to me at the start when Samus gets a message that tells you “Amibo functionality is now enabled”. Trying to be cute? Kind of spoils the atmosphere, don’t you think?

My main issue was that save points, ammo and health stations are all kind of scattered around haphazardly, in a gamey sort of way. Makes me think of a shareware game. Now I’m not saying that can’t be mechanically well designed and fun to play just through arrangement of the basic element. But then you look at Hollow Knight and how the save-point benches are in rooms you would expect to find benches, how fast travel is meshed into the environment with these stag-beetle stations and tram-rails (the tram tunnels extending across the map even where you can’t actually board them). In comparison, Samus Returns’s level arrangement starts to look artistically lazy.

But those levels grew on me. Samus Returns has very organic feeling arrangements, as if you are discovering natural rock formations, each unique. Maps have an irregular quality to them which is intimidating and exciting, in each direction nooks and twists, a wild adventure. You can almost believe that this world wasn’t designed for you, that these ruins occured naturally by degradation of the code of another videogame, and you’re here to recover what you can. Destructible walls aren’t just for secrets: you’ll have to poke at the world a little until the gives way just to go where you are supposed to.

(The only exception to this theme of natural disorder are the rooms the Metroids hide in, which are boringly regular and rectangular.)

It was brave to give the player the scan pulse, but I like it: it shows you a little more of the intricate world, that something is on the other side of that wall, that there is a hidden path below you that you would have missed, but still leaves lots to the imagination.

What I’ve always loved about Metroid, on an aesthetic level, is that every block of the level could hide something — there was often no visual difference between fixed aspects of the level geometry and destructible blocks. I think of the sandy areas in Metroid II, and the way you could reveal a block’s properties with the scan visor in Super. This made it feel like the world had a system, had rules, had “physics”, wasn’t just made up of exceptions as decided by the designers. Which makes it more of a world, not just a painting.

Hollow Knight is more of a painting. That said, it also has lots of things in the environment that you can hit and destroy. Even the grass can be cut. Other details include enemies corpses staying on the ground, along with other debris. I think both games have a little too learn from each other, actually. I want to see all this taken further, and with more non-destructive interactions, too.

***

Hollow Knight’s levels have a lot of varied obstacles, many more than Metroid. You’ve got these bouncy plants, these laser shooting crystals, Deepnest is twisty and turny, Kingdom’s Edge is vertical and airy, and so on. But the difference is that a lot of the levels are made up of open space, so Knight has a lot of freedom to move. This means that, especially the second time you go through them, you tackle them in fairly similar ways. You can always almost always get around enemies rather than kill them, with just a few exceptions like those bugs in Deepnest. Metroid pushes for a little more engagement.

Integrated into Samus Returns’ levels are constant traversal challenges, where the way around an obstruction isn’t obvious. It might be as simple as taking the spider ball across the ceiling because the floor crumbles. But these are the actions that make you feel like an explorer, a mountaineer. I wouldn’t go as far as to call them puzzles, more that the level design organically presents you with traversal questions. This crumbling world is designed around more than just combat.

Which of these style is superior I will leave open to your interpretation. I wouldn’t trade the parkour-esque freedom that Hollow Knight’s spacious levels afford for anything, but I have to admit I have quite a bit of respect for Samus Returns’ intricacies and inventiveness.

***

As well as putting the enemies right in your path, Metroid also teases you with optional power-ups constantly. They’re not so often in special rooms of their own but more in the same room that you’re in but a bit or of the way. Hollow Knights sometimes does this too, like this health upgrade near the entrance of Deepnest, just above the path, and it teases you with these trees that you don’t initially know what to do with. But with Metroid’s literally tighter spaces and more powerups in the vicinity, the levels do feel more packed. Even Deepnest, Hollow Knight’s most dense level, doesn’t match the feel of Metroid’s level design.

The one collectable that is hidden similarly to Metroid’s items are the Hollow Knight’s grubs, usually placed just out of reach or out of sight. On my first play, when I didn’t know what the grubs were or what you got for collecting them, finding them all was really compelling. But when you realise you mostly just get geo from the Grubfather for rescuing them, and geo isn’t that useful after a point, and the charm you get for rescuing them all isn’t powerful and doesn’t make the game more interesting to play (it’s just a Zelda reference), and when you do rescue them you get this sad story development that mocks you for even bothering, and when you consider there is no immediate reward for rescuing them, they are definitely a worse collectable than even the generic missile containers in Metroid. Hollow Knight’s item-game is in so many ways much better that Metroid’s, so it pains me a little too say it, but this is one way I would like Hollow Knight 2 to be more like Metroid. Make each grub, or whatever fills the same role as grubs in the sequel, actually mean something.

***

But this is where any favour for Metroid’s collectables ends, and where I can point out the obvious superiority of Hollow Knight in all other things related to exploration and upgrades.

The problem with Metroid is that you go to the effort to open a locked door, to rediscover a path you couldn’t progress on before, and what is your reward? “Meh, another missile tank.” At best, “Cool, a life tank”. At best.

In Hollow Knight, almost every life or mana upgrade is an event in itself. They are are way rarer, so much exciting to find, but each has a much larger challenge to get through to earn it. In Metroid at best it might be a simple puzzle, usually less than a screen in size, and often the very same rewards are just littered around to pick up. It cheapens the sense of discovery. Hollow Knight knows how to make each discovery feel like hitting gold. You find a secret tunnel, it leads to a unique enemy, which wins you a charm with a unique effect and it’s own animation. Like I’ve said, very generous game.

***

In both games, secrets are not hidden very strictly. Secrets in Hollow Knight are always signalled by noises or visual cues. In Samus Returns you have the Aon Pulse. I’m happy with both. Secrets without clues that can only be found accidentally or through tedious donkey work are no good. Secrets with clues are detective work. I mean, it’s not Sherlock, but it’s a little more satisfying, to me at least.Both games strike the right balance between hidden enough that you COULD not find them, but not SO hidden that you don’t, but not so NOT hidden that it isn’t exciting when you do.

World

We’ve talked about the controls, we’ve talked about the level design, let’s continue to zoom out and look at how things fit together as a whole.

Samus Returns is already at a disadvantage here, being based on the more primitive Metroid II instead of Super Metroid (ie. the game that is still held up as the pinnacle of the genre today). It really doesn’t have a very well interconnected world. It sticks to having separate levels that can only be progressed to at a specific point. It is simply one level after another. Each of these levels are large and require exploration and you’ll need to find power-ups in the level just to get to all the Metroids before you can proceed to the next level. In this way it is a bit like a series of 5 mini-metroidvanias, one after another. But on top of that, each level also contains doors that can open be opened with power-ups that you get from future levels. These don’t really add anything to the game, it’s a very lazy way to add non-linearity and exploration, in practice you simply warp back to a previous level to mop up some power-ups behind the previously closed doors, then get back to the main path. It would be most efficiently to leave this mop up until the end, when you already have all of the power-ups needed, but that also makes it a much larger and more tedious job if you want to get them all. The world is only “interconnected” by way of warp-stations.

Those locked doors you find as you explore each level feel artificial. Everything is just a door with a different shape.Some of them have contrived designs. Why did this door grow a face, and that face grow a wall in front of it? Just so you have a door that can be opened with your wave beam, the special effect of which is that it shoots through walls? Come on, Nintendo, you can do better than that.

These doors don’t inspire much curiosity, either. You’ll either go there because you need to an find Metroid or you’ll get the power up later and they’ll be optional power ups. That’s the downside of this game structure: when you’ve grasped that simple loop, the magic is lost. Shame on a Metroid game for making locked doors so boring.

The exception is the giant DNA locks between each area. These are great because you know you’re not circling around on yourself, accidentally finding a shortcut or alternate entry point rather than a new item or a new path forwards (that’s one of the downsides of an interconnected world, I guess). You know that this is the step forward into the unknown. They’re large and imposing and force you to move uncomfortably downwards to progress.

I don’t really have much more to say about Samus Returns’s world design. It might be a more interesting question to ask how Hollow Knight compares to Super Metroid. Both contain multiple entrances to each area, with different abilities needed to each entrance. Each of the areas leads to more than one of the other areas. You can get lost easily, and you can break sequence easily. Samus Returns isn’t like that.

It fair to ask though, as Samus Returns is a ground-up remake, why didn’t they choose a more open ended Super Metroid style? In fact, Metroid has been moving away from this style sequence-breakable worlds to something more linear since Metroid Fusion. Zero Mission did allow for sequence breaking, but even while designing in some freedom for you to defy the quest arrow it tried it’s hardest to hold your hand, to set out a “correct” route to follow,.

When you first play a metroidvania it’s all discovery, and it’s largely random exploration. You certainly get a feeling for the breadth and nature of the world ie. the paths not taken, but in a sense this first playthrough isn’t entirely different from a linear game where levels circle back on themselves. Only the 2nd time through does the full beauty of the interconnected design reveals itself.

I think by choosing more linear designs Nintendo is perhaps trying to exert control and maximise the fun the player has on their first playthrough. More set pieces, less getting lost, while still having the trappings of the interconnected world — the best of both worlds, but only superficially. This thinking isn’t meritless: most people will only play these games once anyway, so why not try and guide them to a route that is the most fun?

The key aim of world design is to make the exploration as interesting as possible. In Samus Returns you’re looking for Metroid and abilities to get to those Metroids to move forward. In Hollow Knight and Super, you don’t quite know what you’re looking for, and the range of things you could find while wondering is quite broad.

But you play these games differently when you know the map, on your second (or third) playthrough for example. You play more “strategically”, with more planning, more forethought. Which item should I get next? What’s the quickest route?

Part of the new challenge is remembering where power ups are and what areas are blocked off and why. In Hollow Knight, I remembered that the wall jump was enabled by the Mantis Claw, and the Mantis Claw, of course, would be in the Mantis Village. Most items have some logic to them like this. The double jump (Emperor Wing) being in the Ancient Basin is a bit of stretch of logic, but that’s an exception. You certainly don’t want the “keys” to be so nondescript it’s impossible to remember in what chest on what side of the world you find them in.

Similar to locations of power ups, the entrances to each area should also make sense and be memorable. The main entrance to Deepsnest from Fungal Wastes is memorable (all those dead Deepnest bugs pierced with Mantis spears), though I had real trouble remembering how to get into the Resting Grounds.

For this purpose, it’s nice that Hollow Knight has distinct levels that fit into the lore of the world, with different themes and moods and backstories. The theme of all of the Samus Returns levels is “crumbling”, and that gets old fast. When exceptions pop up like the laboratory they aren’t developed locations, just different backgrounds. It’s easy to see why Hollow Knight captured our imaginations.

Multiple ways to enter each level also important in a second playthrough because the player gets to consider pathing options and efficiency. In Hollow Knight, you can enter Crystal Peak either with the ground pound or the lantern, so do you focus on geo to get the lantern or on getting to the city of tears to get the ground pound. This is the sort of decision you wouldn’t really know about until you already know the world, but it’s one of the more interesting decisions you’ll make in these games and also almost unique to the genre.

Now, how do you get people to play the game a second time so that they appreciate your interconnected world on a deeper level? Hollow Knight encourages multiple runs with Steel Soul mode and speedrun achievements. I suspect this helped more people fall in love with it. Metroid knows it should try, but all it could come up with was tracking you time and completion percentage. Samus Returns has hard modes, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

If Metroid encouraged players to play multiple times and get the most out of the map, perhaps Nintendo would feel better about continuing to make the map design more complex rather than more linear.

Conclusion

Hollow Knight has been described as the evolution of the metroidvania, the true sequel to Super Metroid, and more. It is certainly a “true” metroidvania: there are multiple ways into each level, the order you tackle them in is not forced, and areas can be skipped entirely using advanced techniques. Then it tightened up combat and boss design to the point that it is as good an action game as the dedicated 2D side-scrollers like Mega Man, and just crammed tonnes and tonnes of satisfying and original content in both as part of the expected path and as secrets and hidden areas, all animated utterly delightfully.

I still think Metroid’s fundamentals are very powerful and the reason the series has stood the test of time. The “journey to the screwattack”, ie. your change in power from the beginning of the game to the end, is an unrivalled feeling. Metroid’s upgrades are iconic for a reason. It’s so good, the series hasn’t had to change much.

But perhaps now it should. I hope Mercury Steam get the chance they deserve to make another Metroid game, (a remake of Super or Fusion? Metroid 5 at last?). But they can’t afford to coast. They’d have to go much further than they did with Samus Returns to stay on top now.

Meanwhile, I think there is a lot Team Cherry can still learn from Metroid, and as they go into their second game I am eager to find out how they take things to the next level. Maybe some of the things I’ve explored here have also been discussed at Team Cherry HQ.