I was ready to be done, or maybe jump to the divisive Thief 3, but the more I played, the more people tried to tempt me to try stuff in the FM or 'Fan mission' community. Thief has a series falls in the same place as Doom, with a little bit of Bethesda Game energy. These are games that are kept alive by their communities. The history of these games is inseparable from the history of the people who keep them alive, not only with new content, but even working at all. Like Doom, the Thief...

At the end of my Perfect Dark revisit, I mused about the difference between US/European and Japanese game design in regards to realism in the 80s and 90s. To summarize, the trend I noticed is that Western games often tried to simulate reality. Fall damage, ledge grabbing, a particular fondness for momentum, and the much hated limited ammo. Strategy games tend to be military tactics simulators. You see the stealth game born in the wonderfully archaic Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple II...

I was, as is my normal way, not on the hype train for Silksong. I wasn't reading updates, I wasn't Silkposting. I wasn't desperately waiting for a release date. I had no emotional stakes in its existence.

I really liked Hollow Knight, but I didn't crave more of it. It genuinely helped remind me what the weird, vibey 'genre' we clumsily call Metroidvanias are actually about. They aren't about color coded doorway and breaking blocks, but exploration. Yet the tools that could be used to create a sense of exploration became the genre in peoples minds. Hollow Knight forwent most of those tools, most of the "Quality of Life", and let players get lost. It rewarded them for getting lost, by making sure there was real, substantial content in every direction. You weren't left struggling to find the golden path, because there was, at least relative to the rest of the genre, little sequence to break.

Hollow Knight... woke me up, in a sense. The first hour or two of playing it, I assumed it wasn't actually that great. The map just seemed wrong... the flow seemed wrong... areas seemed too samey -- how am I going to avoid getting lost, if you're designing like this? Isn't your invisible hand supposed to be guiding me?

... And then I actually got lost.

I didn't particularly care for the art style(I don't get why THIS is the thing every HK inspired game chooses to copy) (Though I respected it). I didn't really dig the whole bug thing(I wasn't a bug mother yet, okay?). I didn't enjoy most of the bosses that people swore were really good. None of that mattered. Playing a game that rejected 10 years of indie metroidvania "common knowledge" revitalized my mind.

Silksong revitalized my heart.

For reasons I don't even entirely remember (just generally musing about old RTSs), I felt compelled to load up Warcraft 2 and just... click around. Then I thought "No, I should play Warcraft 1". In my mind, Warcraft 1 is exactly like Warcraft 2, just without all the ships and boats, but my mind likes to lie to me.

Instead it is some weird Game Gear ass looking game with even less options, road requirements for buildings, and... surprisingly a lot of neutral units(Oh Ogres?? I g...

I try not to argue exact language much. I try to keep my approach to language as a descriptivist. Language evolves in terrible and funny ways. Metroidvania is an awful term, but it's a term with history I will use long before I use the term Search Action(a genre name that has the same appeal as calling hotdogs Intestined Scraps). Sure, some phrases like Backtracking are too misguided for me to tolerate, but Quality-of-Life isn't like that. So called QoL changes can mean a lot of of...