“You’ll never convince me that these games form a coherent genre”
“At best, most of those are what I’d call “thinky games” – a broad aggregation of deduction, knowledge, and puzzle games”
“the term was originally coined to mean “games with open-ended exploration” – similar to a metroidvania1 – but using knowledge gating instead of traditional ability gating”
“In a “true” metroidbrania, what you know is the only real form of progression; a player who already knows all the secrets can start a fresh save and immediately go through the motions of beating the game, skipping over most of the game”
“‘Metroidbrania’ is thus dead on arrival; it can never usefully describe a game beyond a vague sense that it involves knowledge, puzzles, or deduction”
“I’m also setting puzzle games aside in this essay – that’s a whole large set of games unto itself, and I also don’t want to distract with the question of how to best use that descriptor”
“A knowledge game is a game where the player’s knowledge is a central resource and progression mechanic”
“we have to separate knowledge as in explicitly-encoded information that the game contains, from insights that the player accrues by gradually experimenting with a system – otherwise, every classical puzzle game (eg, Portal, Stephen’s Sausage Roll) is now a knowledge game”
“Knowledge gating is the mechanic where some section of the game is accessible to any player who has the requisite knowledge”
“‘Search action’ is a calque of a Japanese term that refers to the same thing as ‘metroidvania’. It’s increasingly preferred by Western fans of the genre for its relative historical neutrality, especially as the genre expands more and more beyond its originators – there hasn’t been a new search action Castlevania in a long time now”
“By analogy, ‘learn action’ is a term I’m trying to stick as a narrowly-defined version of ‘metroidbrania’, with the benefit of not sounding terrible. This is a set of games that pretty much just includes knowledge games that are also open-level exploration games”
“A database thriller is a game where searching for information out of a database or archive is a central affordance”
“A deduction game is one on which:
• The player is asked to make inferences or determine some underlying truth from incomplete information or suggestive clues; • Progression is made through the player proving that their deductions are correct”
“A particular subset of deduction games, these are games that make use of the mechanic popularized by Return of the Obra Dinn: the game only confirms your conjectures once you get enough of them right at once”
“games with constructed languages that the player is expected to learn. I’d split these into two subsets: ones that are also deduction games, in which the player has to specifically prove language proficiency to progress (the most prominent example probably being Chants of Sennaar) and ones in which the language is more a part of the body of knowledge that the player acquires (as the cypher in Tunic)”