Please Don't Call It A Metroidbrainia
I, like a lot of dorks with similar tastes, have been playing Blue Prince. It's a really well-designed mix of two types of games I love: Gone Home-style "walk around and find environmental clues" and deckbuilding. The cool conceit is that you're building a house, rather than a traditional deck of cards: every time you open a door, you're given a randomized pool of rooms to pick from, with the goal of finding the mysterious 46th room in a house you inherited from your uncle.
Blue Prince is fun, cool, and a clever mix of mechanics that I haven't seen before done well. I am maybe a little less blown away by it than others I've seen – some of the breathless comparisons to Outer Wilds, arguably one of the best games ever made, seem a bit excessive to me - but it's good. Anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I am here to talk about the word people have come up with to describe games like this: "metroidbrainia".
This appears to be a catch-all term for "thinky games": games that force you to keep a journal and notes and generally do a lot of thinking. These games have nothing in common with Metroid or Castlevania. I like a good pun as much as the next guy but man just call it a Myst-like or a journal game or literally anything else. You don't have to get so cute with it!
Member discussion