The Greatest Videogame Genre You Didn't Know Existed 

Woah! What's this!? Oooh it's a spooky mural with the words "pay me ten dollars and I'll say your stupid name" written on it oooh what could it mean??? Maybe if you backtrack to my patreon page some new secrets will emerge oOoOoooOOoOOOOoOoo: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames You know what on second thoughts maybe there's some information humanity was never meant to discover: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

You and Mark from gmtk having the same brain is so funny to me. I dont think that this has been the first time that you've published something that's addressed or peripheral to something gmtk put out. Great minds think alike, it seems! Great vid, and i love that you always seem to find new ways of looking at gaming as a whole (like making new genres haha)

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1208">20:08</a> So the problem with this monologue is that what you're describing is *why* people call them metroidbrainias. Vania's and Brainias both being about discovery is why they have similar names to begin with, but you're wrong about knowledge being the same as upgrades. The big difference is whether you could hand the game to a friend and it would be the same as if you were still playing. If I hand super metroid to a friend, they would be able to double jump just fine without me telling them about it, but if I hand the witness to a friend, they may as well have just started the game. One involves direct upgrades to your character while the other upgrades YOU. The distinction is warranted. I think the best description to distinguish the two is: Metroidvania is "lock and key". Metroidbrainia is "That was a door!?"

I kept hoping you'd mention Myst. I think that game is historically pretty important to this genre because I think it was one of the first of its kind in creating this experience.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="940">15:40</a> Ah yes outer worlds, the great indie spaceship game

Morrowind quests gave you a vague description of the landmarks and expected you to remember it. It was brutal lol

I was going to put down Ainsel River as a moment when I felt lost in a game, but I thought of a better choice - Deepnest. I remember freaking out because I had no map, I didn't want to lose my money, I couldn't find the guy who sells maps, and the whole place is just so oppressive. I truly felt lost and hopeless in that place.

I think the boss in Tunic is exactly the point when you are supposed to figure out the leveling, since at that point you also receive manual page that has picture and name of that boss (Garden Knight) and next to it written in english: "You can do it! Try to be this strong: 3 Att, 3 Def" and another set of pictures of the level up items. ... At least that's how I found out.

There is one weakness that many discovery games have and, while not critical, is hard to avoid. When *information* is key, any discrepancy between the _player's_ knowledge and their _character's_ knowledge can seriously break immersion. This invariably happens when replaying a game, or if there's a die-learn-and-try-again game loop (which can only be partially fixed by a rebirth / time-travel lore in-game). That's why many discovery games have an undeveloped playable character without much in the term of back story, relationships, or personality. You simply can't make the player care about their character much when the main game mechanic (learning information) keeps reminding you of the huge gulf between player and character. Again, that doesn't mean such games terrible, but it does make a certain type of emotional engagement or story telling difficult for them to pull off.

I think I would call them Veil Games. That feeling when the veil of mystery is pulled off and you have that "Aha!" moment is the best bit of the game.

There is a very easy metric for a well-designed world. If you can play in a language you don't understand and still have a sense of orientation, then that's good. If you straight up are given instructions in your language and still get lost, then that's bad. The scale in-between is rather self-explanatory.

Metroidbrainia is the term commonly used because they are like metroidvania's, but most of the keys in vania's are items, while most of the brainia's keys are your knowledge. like the key and lock metaphor someone (I think gmtk? I'm not sure feel free to correct me and I'll edit) used to describe the design of Metroidvania's.

you see, I have a terrible sense of direction so I get lost in pretty much every game (tbh in IRL too). I remember going out from a cave, walking around a tree and going in the same cave again while my friend watching me rumbling "nope this isn't the right cave either" in Satisfactory. He started calling me Zoro after that.

Personally the most interesting part of "discovery games" is that while not being open world/sandbox games they're the ones that makes me feel the most like I'm the one with agency over the world while it not being true. But they do make me feel like I'm discovering an alien world with it's own weird rules and that I'm closer to an explorator trying to decypher an ancient laguage than a puzzle solving maniac

Great video!! These types of games have become my all time favorite genre, you've basically shown all of my favorite games in one video. I call them knowledge games or knowledge-based games because their main idea is discovering the "knowledge" to figure out the game! Thank you for introducing me to Lorelei, gonna try it next.

Obfuscation games? Meta puzzles? Exploratory logic games? Cryptic Adventure Game?

This is the 3rd vid I've seen on "metroidbrainias" and each one is a treat!

A game that truly captures the feeling of being lost, along with the panicked sense of desperation that comes with it is a kind of obscure survival/puzzle game called Miasmata. You are trapped on a tropical island, infected with a mystery disease, and being occasionally hunted by a predator. You have a compass and a map, but the game never marks your location. Your only way of navigating is orienting off of landmarks.

At the very outset, when you asked about being lost, I immediately thought of Miasmata. The only game that ever truly made me feel LOST. Then again, it's largely a game about cartography, so i suppose it makes sense

i love this channel so much

I like "Knowledge Based Games".

Lots of spoilers here considering the theme is discovering information

Oooo sounds like i have to check out Loreli now!

Incredible video, you've hit on one of my favourite elements of videogames in general and explained it better than I even knew it myself! For me, I think the love of mystery/exploration/discovery stems from secrets in videogames, i.e. I played Mario 64 DS as a kid and I've been HOOKED on finding mystery bullshit ever since. And as a related point, a big problem I have with many games is that so many things are missable, and I don't want to have to play the whole game a second or even third time just to see everything (and this is long story-based games I mean, not games with restart-mechanics baked in like Overboard! or roguelikes); however, in discovery games you basically always have the chance to go back and find things you missed, and sometimes it's even the point, and all without ruining the vibes with save-and-reload scumming! You mentioned metroidvanias as one example, and they are great for this, as you are of course supposed to find new abilities then go back to older areas to use them. Also, I think discovery games are at least cousins with puzzle games (in the same way that platformers might be considered cousins to metroidvanias) and likewise could be considered cousins with more linear exploration-based games too; NaissanceE gives me the same beautiful feeling as something where I can get "truly" lost, the same feeling as a game in this video, or as Hollow Knight (still designed but not linear) or even Minecraft (almost fully procedural), despite being essentially on-rails with just a few secrets to find (though as mentioned I love those too haha). I suppose the difference is that discovery games have "true" discovery while linear exploration/'walking sim' games have manufactured or designed discovery, though as pointed out in the video I suppose the distance between those is possibly smaller than it seems, at least in some ways

Heyy you guys talking about Animal Well?

-Light the BatFly-Signal! -You mean the slug-sy... -No! They have no idea how to get here. They do know how to nom nom.

Great video, I'll definitely try some of the games you suggested :D

See, every game can be about getting lost somewhere when you have no sense of direction!

I was like "isnthis a reupload ? I swear I've seen this already" but I think it's just that gmtk thought of it at the same time 😅

Honestly, it surprises me when you say you don't see many people talking about this "genre", because I feel like I've seen plenty of people making a video about it recently! (yes, mostly under the name "metroidbrainia", which I also think isn't a great way to name it) I think there's an interesting ongoing discussion about this subject, and it feels like a lot of people haven't really made up their minds about it yet. Personally, while I generally agree that most of the games mentioned there make me feel a certain way that I like, but they are all so different in the way they work that I'm not sure I would call that a "genre", maybe rather a "label" or a "tag" so to speak. And honestly, I think the main reason I like them is because I like thinking, reflexion, and that leads me to think that most of them are essentially modern puzzle games. The Witness is a puzzle game, with clearly defined puzzle sections, set within a small open world with mechanics that are taught non-verbally. Return of the Obra Dinn has similarly clearly-defined puzzles and win states, but its main thing is that anything can potentially be a puzzle element (helped by the fact that every element of the game is anchored in reality). I would also classify FEZ, TUNIC and Animal Well, as "puzzle games", or maybe rather "secret games", as they make obscure puzzles and mechanics their entire appeal. Generally they are the only ones to have secrets hidden absurdly deep under many layers of headscratching, puzzles which mainly exist for their own sake. I think an important element to add to the discussion here, is the nuance between discovery, wonder, and curiosity. While they often go hand in hand, it's one thing to focus on having the player discover new things, it's another to focus on making them wonder about those things, look forward to them, make them actively curious about them, to the point that given the tools, they would go ahead and seek them out for no other reason than to know. I would say that for most of these games, while wonder and curiosity was an element of my experience, most of the time the new discoveries felt simply like "the next thing". As in "oh we're doing this now". "Oh I guess those symbols did have a meaning afterall", etc. Because, well, these worlds are so obscure that I don't really know or understand any of what to expect! The exception to this is Outer Wilds, which puts a ton of focus on what comes *before* a discovery rather than after it (namely: curiosity). It's the only game in which I felt like I could confidently ask questions and know for a fact that not only would I get the answer at some point, I, myself, actually had the ability to direct my entire playthrough towards getting that answer. It's not just a question of "knowledge-based gates", what I'm getting at is that the game being anchored in an interconnected fictional reality, means that I had enough contextual clues about anything in order to make reasonable guesses at the answers and where to go and get them. In most other games, it feels like some random info is kinda just given to me after I did some random smart thing. (Not to put them down, I do love these kids of games dearly). Finally, I think I disagree when you say there isn't really any difference between "knowledge unlocks" and "regular unlocks". Granted, I think people focusing too much on said "knowledge unlocks", I think, made them see it more as a technicality, a mechanic, rather than how it affects the player experience. For example, if you get a code somewhere in the game, and input it somewhere else, that is technically a "knowledge-based unlock", but to a first time player it feels no different from a lock and a key, as you depict in your video. However, games such as Outer Wilds use vastly different types of knowledge that you can't replicate with standard unlocks, there is often not a single discrete piece of info that "unlocks" a certain place. For example, getting to the hanging city isn't super hard, but players often won't get there until they've got at least a basic idea of how the planet is laid out. A more late-game example of this is the Southern Observatory: despite being clearly signposted in several places, it has enough roadblocks and confusing elements that players will typically only get there once they've learnt what's inside and finally decide to actually go ahead and connect the dots. Very different from just getting a key to a locked door or just "going to the next area".

This was an important part of the gameplay of the old Thief games. they would give you incomplete maps that looked like they were drawn on paper by someone in the game universe to enhance immersion and the sense of being lost in the game world. "yellow paint" game design is basically a huge red flag, a warning that the devs don't really understand the value of good level design nor how to accomplish it.

One thing I love about Heaven's Vault that I have not seen anyone mention before is that if you figure out how the language works, the way the game's name is spelled actually gives you a minor spoiler for the ending.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="6">0:06</a> Tuesday. I find its pretty common in a lot of the games I play.

Can't wait to go play some discovery games I've never heard of, of which there were several in this video

Reminds me of this one game where you fall out of the sky, land on a dock next to a sunken ship, and get wordlessly abandoned and left to your own devices.

Last time I got lost was in thew Elden Ring DLC, right when I first wound up at the frenzied forest. I could not even fathom where the hell I was and it was awfully spooky

At work we like to call this type of games as "knowledge-vania"

for the Lorelei and the Laser Eyes section, personally any time i see a 4 digit number in a game i embody the fry suspicious.gif. also, in the description talos principle 2 came out 2023. tp1 was 2014.

I am playing kingdom Come Deliverance for the first time on Hardcore without knowing nor consulting anything. Admittedly, this is not the intended way... but I have no effing idea of what I am doing and I am enjoying the process.

My favourite game of all time was Fez until it was dethroned by Outer Wilds. My favourite from this year is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes followed by Animal Well and the Riven remake. Tunic, The Witness and Return of Obra Dinn are also among my favourites. The mysteries in these games are so alluring and addictive!

I really wish someone would make a regular RPG game with randomly generated languages, would also be good with multiplayer where you can visit each others towns and teach each other the language of the town or work together to decipher it. Then the better the resources for the game the more complicated the language.

I loved Immortality. Played it with a friend and some drinks. We were shocked, when we rewinded and the other woman popped up. It's on of the most intense moments in my recent memory.

The Ace Attorney games sometimes have a habit of leaving the player completely lost. Sometimes you need to go to specific locations in a specific order, after picking a specific dialogue, with a specific person, which is only available after examining a specific item. It’s very particular and sometimes takes the fun out of it as you eventually just trial and error through every single location exhausting all dialogue.

I watched SuperDude's video on Knowledge Based Games a long time and loved it and more recently saw Tim Sensei's videos on "Metroidbrainias". I really like Metroidbraina (not just for the pun) but because it really is a backtracking like in metroidvanias but the powerups are the accumulation of knowledge.

“He’s gonna mention Outer Wilds, he’s gonna mention Outer Wilds, he’s gonna mention Outer Wilds…” -me for the first 2/3rds

The last time I got lost and immersed was Hollow Knight. It really came at a time I needed it.

man i hate coming across videos like this because i dont recognize the games and dont want spoilers but ima leave a like and watch a bit

Mild spoilers Astro Bot So Astro Bot has a bunch of secret levels that you access from finding the portal in specific main levels in the game. One of my favuorite ones is in Djinny of the Lamp. First, you get on top of some pillars. There's a bunch of vases there that you break because of course you do, but what's this? The shards are stuck in mid-air and they're not vanishing. As you walk over to that spot, you notice the patterns in the rock below start glowing, then you notice more rock with that same pattern. So you hover over one of them and, what do you know, you're standing in mid-air. You follow these patterns to find the portal and go to the secret level. It's a pretty small thing, but it's a nice little discovery segment that a lot of people will remember.

I think most metroidvanias are too similar and formulaic that we could consider discovery a part of those games. Yeah you technically explore a map but I think that's very different from the mental "map" you make when playing Outer Wilds for example. The point of metroidbrainia as a term is that once you know something it is "unlocked", while in classic metroids type games, you deifnitely know when you need a double jump or a dash way before getting them, there's no discovery when you're just going through the motions, cf your point about Leap Year (though I definitely didn't get the days in the "correct" order in this game :D) I guess it's similar to Metroid Dread, which a bunch of people said "it's so great because you don't realise how much the game is guiding you". If you do actually notice when playing, it hurts the game a lot.

Metroidbrainia is such an AWFUL term that i love it and am going to use it for now on. Thanks Adam!

Been playing a lot or the game "Book pf Hours" recently. Thats a game loaded with indirect puzzlea and some odd and wonderful ways to tet lost. Even if the game looks simple from the outside

The biggest issue with this genre is how hard it is to make it seem like the player is making meaningful progress if the points of learning aren't immediately leading to in-world consequences. I.e. Outer Wilds is essentially one puzzle in terms of "progress". The Witness also really needs a "do not google answers or you could softlock your progress" warning.

If you miss these kinds of games, play like me. Button-mash through the tutorial and then wonder wtf you're supposed to do.

I'd say "knowlidge games" would also be good name.

When I dropped into Deepnest bypassing the Mantis Lords. That was terrifying. Not knowing how to get out. Not knowing when the next possibility to heal would come up. I was lost in the truest sense.

discovery games, that is a good name! much better than metroidbrainia. it clearly says what characterizes the genre

DAMs Discovery And Mystery games

Adventure games ,totally a genre! My favourite genre. It wasn't just point and click adventure games , the subgenres are varied as anything. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a prime example of the genre. It was when people started calling tomb raider and assassin's creed adventure games that things got muddled. Also nothing wrong with games not fitting in any of our neat little boxes. Every single game in your video, fucking fantastic and an experience worth having. But they are not alike in game play or spirit and won't fit in your box either!

Where the moon goes during the day - Albuquerque. Funny cause it's true.

Learning Tarkov maps makes your head spin for sure

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="5">0:05</a> in my case 2023 when i played tears of the kingdom for the first time (mostly) blind

Everyone who got past the tutorial of Warframe knows the feeling of truly being lost.

Check out Superdude's debut video called Knowledge Based Games (his third upload that triggered yt algorithm). I believe you are talking about the same concepts with slightly different viewpoints. He calls the discovery aspect KBU = knowledge based unlock. Regardless of being correct or not, I always liked a bit more specificity in regards to definitions: Puzzles have all information required to solve them whereas riddles don't. This obviously depends on the scale.

I might be one of the only “hardcore” gamers who didn’t like Tunic. I know it’s a well made game with a really rewarding gameplay loop but, honestly, I just got stuck too often. I don’t mind getting stuck a couple of times but that game was basically “Tunic: the game where you almost never know where to go”.

While I don't like "Metroidbrainia", I *do* like "Knowledgevania" as a term for most of them, since generally the work with a Lock and Key progression system, but in many cases the Key is just gaining new Knowledge.

What I don't like about these games is that I like having an objective, even if it's vague. Without it, I'll just make my own objective of playing another game. lol

Knowledge checkpoint games

Rain World is the perfect examle imo. But you mentioned that

Outerwild, Return of the Obra Dinn, & Chants of Sennaar for me 👌

Imagine a massive open world game where aimless discovery leads to emergent gameplay. I guess No Man's Sky comes somewhat close, though in rather limited form? I'm not too familiar with games that might have succeeded in this.

When was the last time? Well... last week. Was playing a game that gave zero direction for what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. The only limitation to that was where I could actually move to within the game, which I doubt any of these games in this 'genre' forgo _that_ limitation.

Interestingly, I generally love this genre, but hated the Outer Wilds, which is probably the most beloved example of it at the moment. Loved Lorelei, Heaven's Vault, Tunic, Her Story. And Chants of Sennaar is one of my most beloved games ever.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="395">6:35</a> jokes on you I'm into that shit

I get with the point of this video is, I really do, but I gotta tell you there’s nothing I hate worse than feeling like I have no idea what the video game wants me to do. So I guess there’s a good way to get a player lost and there is a bad way to do it.

can anyone rec more translation based discovery games? chants of senaar and heavens vault were both amazing and i need more

while there is definitely a connection between the traditional metroidvania and these discovery games, i disagree that they are psychologically the same. it's a very different experience when for example, in tunic you learn that you could use prayer the whole time than just picking up a grapple beam in super metroid. half the usage cases of the grapple beam were intuitive before receiving the item. you just need to find the key that lets you use them. getting the powerup is more of a "nice, the game has really opened up" than tunics "i could have been doing these the whole time" feeling. it's kind of the difference between finding the thing you've been looking for the whole time and suddenly having a part of the world click for you

metroidbrainia its actually a great name thou

I'm starting to think gmtk is sponsored by Her Story

Knowledge based games.

Every dragon quest game. Tells you almost nothing but npcs. Drives me insane sometimes

Im always lost in my dreams. Always tying to find someone or something, though mostly trying to get back home...

Ok but these are still very much puzzle games. These are puzzles. A good puzzle does require you to exploit your knowledge. Void Stranger is a Sokeban game, that is one of the classic styles of puzzle games. You described a lot of these things as having puzzles as well. Are Myst or Riven not puzzle games? They set up the genre in our modern sense. There’s just a lot of puzzle games that don’t have that extra “put it all together” level

Knowledge based games

To answer your initial question: Cybercon iii on the Amiga. I'd never been lost before and I haven't been lost since, not counting text adventures. Edit: OK, it's an interesting topic I hadn't realised I was interested in. I play Read Dead Redemption 2 without a map; I like the feeling of being lost and navigating only by the landscape. I think, for me, Ori and the Will of the Wisps would have been a better, but far less successful, game without an in-game map. Edit 2: No wait! WAIT! In Elite Dangerous I decided to bridge a gap across the galaxy. To do this I had to find a route through the sparse stars, not knowing if I could actually make it across the gap. Some gaps between individual systems were too big to jump, I had to land, scan for specific materials to synthesise, colloquially, 'jumponium', giving me a 50% larger jump. I had no idea if the system I planned to jump to had landable planets which had these specific resources. I fumbled my way through the dark for literally days, not knowing if I'd get stuck and have to turn back. Could I even GET back? It was such an extraordinary journey, ultimately successful, which couldn't be replicated in any other game. It could probably not be replicated in real life, short of sailing across oceans. I am a natural explorer and this video has ignited a passion to learn more about it in gaming specifically. Thanks, Adam. I'm walking the dog and had to sit on a bench just to write this. You won't be surprised to learn that we walk for hours.

Me and a group of friends have started calling these games by the very silly name: "FANFOs" for "Frick around and find out" (we did not use "frick")

I just started playing No Man's Sky, so basically all the time

(Yells at universe) OI! When is Heaven's Vault gonna go on sale? It's been on my wishlist for a thousand years now on PSN. I usually buy games on sale. It never goes on sale.

I saw no footage of "7 days to end with you" in this video, so here is my comment so you play it

Discovery Games sounds good.

i see void stranger and i click

i LIKE THESE METROIDBRAINIA GAMES!!!1!

I think you're gonna lose the genre name war to "metroidbrainia" lol

Would Portal count as a discovery game?

inscryption, spoilers for act 2 of inscryption btw, specifically the switch from act 1 to act 2, you're starting to get used to the roguelike and escape room system and then boom, out of nowhere there's 3 more deck mechanics, the game is a jrpg ctcg thing? There's scrybes, a whole story, the guy that had you trapped in the shack is younger and sounds a bit more sane, it's just a turning point that was so jarring that I just stopped playing the game for a good 3 months or so because I was so overwhelmed

First GMTK with mysterious games, now this? Spowoky game dev season is upon us

Oh yeah mystery/detective stuff, reminds me of myst. I'm glad some folks have found their niche and love it, but I cannot stand these types of games. I wouldn't call it the greatest videogame genre if my life depended on it. Solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles is great fun for their niche audience and maybe I can enjoy it once in a game, but I wouldn't say it has very broad appeal. For the same reason doing mathematics equations also has a limited amount of fun that can be explored. I don't mind some games using a few mechanics from them to spice up other genres but they just get in the way. Like a riddle you can't solve it only gets more annoying the more you encounter it. The only solution to getting better is just playing and interacting with the genre more, nothing wrong with that. But that very concept fills me with more dread than learning another language, in fact I find learning languages fun in some ways. I will never find puzzles fun. Hiding the solution when I have all the pieces for the puzzle available just feels like busywork to me, no matter how pretty the pieces or how well crafted the reasons are for it. Even worse is hiding some of the pieces in obscure and frankly illogical places.

Yeah, pretty sure the name "metroidbrainia" is set in stone now, sorry.

Metroidbrainia being a hated name is funny when Metroidvania is also a terrible name.

I absolutely hate being lost and not feeling like I'm making progress. That's why I couldn't beat Rain World and Hollow Knight, don't like metroidvanias at all I guess

Great vid, but i eas expecting you to bring up Dont Starve, it never explains anything to you at all, and its incredibly detailed.