Demon's Crest and other unwelcoming video game worlds

[Felix]

I’ve always loved how massively lush it is – like, it’s really the logical endpoint of Capcom production values of that era, encompassing everything from the Mickey Mouse games to the prior stuff in the Ghosts and Goblins series, and it really feels like a contemporary of Super Metroid, but no one ever wants to talk about it, preferring the Gameboy ones, I assume because almost everything else on the SNES that took its worldbuilding and its spritework this seriously was a lot more inviting; those design trends almost always went hand in hand.

I think you’re correct to identify Breath of the Wild as a (long-delayed) antidote to this design crutch that persisted for so long, but I agree that it makes the typical Metroidvania/Zelda design seem much more boring by comparison. I was thinking the other day that I’ve really never once gotten into an Igavania which stands in opposition to a lot of people here, and that’s mostly because none of them were ever as lush or as multiplicitous as Super Metroid, and without that, the idea that you’ll, like, play through a world making note of platforms that you can’t yet high-jump to in the service of later complentionism is generally a downgrade on the design of CV1 or Rondo or Demon’s Crest.

the only real exception to this imo is La-Mulana, again because it’s just that preposterously layered and obtuse. There’s really something to be said for that here! Definitely play it if you haven’t, and the sequel should be out in a couple months.

[anothersphere]

I rented Demon’s Crest around the same time as Actraiser II, both impressed and intimidated the hell out of me. Haven’t played either in like 20+ years and this prompts me to move them way up in queue. Can’t cite any write ups or videos but get the feeling Actraiser II’s probably been examined with a fine tooth comb. It’s gorgeous.

I think Nintendo Power’s good old layouts showed off a cool, what seemed to me then post Ghouls N Ghosts / Mega Man X style. The GB Firebrand adventures haven’t ever really done anything for me.

[BustedAstromech]

playing games like this really makes me marvel at the fact that in the olden days people could release games fully knowing that almost no one who bought it would be able to finish it

We do have different expectations now that saves are universal and score banished, but we still only see 20-30% of players reaching the end of the main campaign.

feels like it is content to remain unexplored, without any real momentum to push you to see every corner of it.

This is a real tricky aspect to get right in these games that prioritize the aesthetic of exploration. As you note, random generation doesn’t feel quite satisfying because we experience the real world as a mixture of organic happenstance and strongly directed human creation, even if we are unaware of its purpose or context.

In a game, everything is constructed with great expense and so it is very hard to justify it supporting a world outside the player’s goals.

Some studios have approached this through breadth. Morrowind and Daggerfall, and Breath of the Wild are at a scale that it is unreasonable to expect thorough exploration. Wherever you go, well, there you are, and there’s something new over that next hill. Unfortunately their core RPG progression systems are still pushing you to feed on everything in the world, so there’s this tension between wanting to touch everything and the angst of knowing you’re just spreading time at any activity.

Shadow of the Colossus gets very close by removing those progression elements and carefully romanticizing the terrain. It’s clear that this land was built for a series of interesting shots but in deliberately not using it for functional game terms they cause the player to view it as existing for its own sake. It doesn’t feel purposeless because there is that light hand of a designer shaping the world, expressed through curated pathways, sprinkled ruins, and quiet ponds. I was never happier than when I was exploring an underground temple devoid of any context or reason – that I was sequence breaking and later returned for a proper colossus fight there only weakened my experience.

There are other approaches to meaningful exploration. Through abstraction, Proteus works as a memory trap; its shifting compositions of color and trees and flowers and musical effects trigger waves of memories of places and views I’ve seen but never painted. It’s not a world in its own right but a link back to very personal spaces.

Echo builds and suggests and infinity of gilded halls – Versailles across an entire planet, in context of a humanity stretching across an infinite universe. They constrain the player’s path like most linear levels but suggest that even if you could explore you would have nowhere to discover. It explores that edge of pointless randomly-generated noise and angst over a near-infinite universe of gorgeous but empty planets and stars and what infinite life could justify.

[Victor]

even completely enraptured by its look and feel I have started and abandoned it like ten times

An imaginary high-budget late-'96 32bit straight-metroidvania sequel featuring Arthur/Firebrand swap mechanics and fully linked Makaimura/demon realm geography would have probably been the best video game.

[loki]

i’m not totally sure it’s what this thread is about, but the tower of barbs in let it die is an incredibly hostile environment. everything is dirty and dark, it’s full of people who are very enthusiastic about violently murdering you, and at the start at least, all you can do to protect yourself is take dirty old raincoats and hammers from corpses.
you’re encouraged to explore, to find better items and such, but at the same time, even a powerful character can be suddenly killed by a hater.

[Hojulas]

As far as I can tell, there’s only one NPC in Demon’s Crest that doesn’t either try to kill you or offer you some kind of service in exchange for money. It’s this chilled out green demon who leans on a fountain in the only city in the game. (The only other things you can do in the city are break windows and buy items). No matter how many times you see him, he says “I haven’t seen you around here before.” Then he asks if you are a stranger. If you say that you are, he explains that the red demon Firebrand, who nearly burned the demon realm to the ground and killed everyone, has escaped, and tells you to be careful. You are the red demon Firebrand.

He says different stuff if you’re in a different form, in some cases giving hints as to what you can do, like he mentions seeing Arma smashing stuff with a dash when you walk by in the Earth Demon mode. And when you equip the most powerful one that basically combines most of the specialty shots and some of the other abilities (Legendary Demon?), that’s when he recognizes you and freaks out.

[u_u]

Oh that’s right! I forgot about that part. You’re right, he does say different stuff. I didn’t ever try it in the Legendary form, that’s pretty cool.

[DJ]

Deadly Towers is borderline-incomprehensible but worth attempting just for its bizarrely but endlessly interestingly hostile setting.

You’re literally attempting to SUMMON SATAN HIMSELF in a giant demonic ritual involving 8 huge demon-infested belltowers so you can kick his ass with your sword. The working title was “Hell’s Bells”, but Nintendo in the 80s wasn’t gonna let that fly.

Nonetheless, it’s worth checking out.

Just, uh. Don’t expect to make any actual headway without a guide. And even then it’s kind of a dice toss.

This is a game that has invisible portals scattered about the overworld map at random that (as far as I can tell?) teleport you to a parallel dimension (it even says as much in the game when it happens) where you can wander FUCKING MASSIVE grids of repeating rooms in a gigantic maze that you have to wander around in until you find the exit.

These are also the only places to actually purchase upgrades, so you have to get lost in them a few times if you want to get anywhere without cheating.

I strongly recommend cheating.

[Closed]

I know it’s probably a bit trite to talk about the Souls series in a thread about unwelcoming game worlds, but I think Fromsoft manages to do a lot of clever stuff that invokes the “icebergvania” feel without actually burying an entire iceberg. The biggest example is probably the broken archstone in DeS, where you have a whole world that you’re told exists but never actually allowed to visit. There’s also the pendant in DS, an item that is mysterious because it doesn’t do anything.

Other stuff like the Great Hollow / Ash Lake in DS, Untended Graves in DS3, and the Old Workshop in BB are all fairly small and/or mostly reused assets, but the way that they’re hidden in such inconspicuous and unassuming locations means that if/when a player does find them (or hears about them from someone who did), it feels like a a real revelation and suddenly all kind of secrets could be buried anywhere.

There usually aren’t really though! They’re mostly just one-off examples in their games! Once you let a player break their expectations once, it’s easy to get them to feel like the game is always hiding something from them. I think this is really cool!

I know I’m not the first person to talk about this. Is there already some kind of phrase for this kind of unintuitive game design? Like, hiding secrets where almost no one would bother to look but also creating these anti-secrets that seem like they must be hiding something, and how this kind of weird off-balance (ie unwelcoming) design creates a false sense of hidden depth?

[OneSecondBefore]

Super Mario Bros. 2 USA has those red chemical beakers that you can throw anywhere in the level to open a door to another dimension called Subspace. If you open that door in certain totally arbitrary locations, you find hidden items in Subspace. In practice, there’s not really anything interesting in Subspace, but when I was a kid I felt like there was boundless mystery wrapped up in it. Like @Closed’s Dark Souls examples, it suggests something like an Icebergvania without actually needing to deliver.

[Father.Torque]

I still feel like, if you keep driving, you can eventually get there…

[BustedAstromech]

Deadly Towers is sure an interesting game. I wish it looked as interesting as Faxanadu for the world it’s stitching.

[schroeder]

I’ll put in my regular plug for Kid Chameleon: I’ve seen the map of the game and still don’t understand how its world is put together. I mean, look at this shit:

The game seems to be put together with the understanding that the real prize for finding a hidden place is the hidden place, even if it’s a nightmare zone that ends your run. The overall deadliness of the game, and lack of saves, means that exploring is hard, slow, and dangerous, so whenever you survive to a new thing it’s an event (one that can’t necessarily be replicated, because of the weirdness of the level progression).
Most of those secret exits to those places – which are very often invisible – aren’t shortcuts. They take you to Elsewhere, which is actually like 50 different places (described on the fan wiki as ranging “between ‘bonus stage’ and ‘f*cking hell’”) existing outside the sequence of regular levels, and then you’re back on the main track, or maybe a different track, or sometimes right back where you started. The teleporters don’t care. They’re just there, utterly indifferent to you trying to finish the game.

[problyfine]

That sounds a bit like what I vaguely remember of playing NES Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when I was a kid.

[Rudie]

I feel this dread in most indie games where I don’t know the boundaries and I don’t know how much there is to find if anything. It’s why I play so few. It’s not like I am upset I will never see everything it’s not knowing the bounds of anything. Playing a game over and over should lead naturally to revealing it’s secrets. It is why i am attracted to shooters.

There is a mostly knowable value: survive, kill the boss.
A learnable value: how to score, how to kill efficently
An unknown value: secret paths, score bonuses, bosses

With a lot of indie games I am unsure if I am seeing what they wanted me to see. I get upset and I don’t like it. I mean this can work in a fashion with like LSD. A game I have never played very much of but the seemingly random whispy nature of just looking at strange stuff till I get bored seems to be the experience and the goal.

And yet even then am I performing correctly. I guess that is the word I have been searching for here. Performance. Like encountering a too hard RPG battle far from a save point wondering if it is unwinnable and plot driven. Am I meant to lose? I am suddenly shouting outside the designer’s house and they aren’t even home. I don’t know what to do outside of… just stop playing and play an competitive game. At least the stakes and rules are clear.

[Father.Torque]

I think that is pretty well described, the thing is I only like the mystery thing and the performance thing annoys me

[Closed]

That’s really interesting! I feel pretty much exactly the opposite way! To me, it feels like games are only alive while there’s still those gaps in understanding (whether those are mechanical or narrative or just geographical). Once I start to really know the boundaries, everything starts to shrink smaller and a lot of times it feels like I’m strangling that life out of the world. I actually always strive to play games the wrong way if I can manage it.

I understand the desire to have everything that a game has to offer be seen, but I think it’s easy to conflate the desire to explore with the desire to consume. I think the belief that a player somehow needs and/or deserves to see everything in a game can honestly be a really toxic concept, both for games and the people who play them.

Like you indicated, I suspect a lot of this ties into performance anxiety. I think a lot of people have issues accepting ‘difficult’ media because they those gaps in understanding are interpreted as insults from the media or its creator for not ‘getting it’. I think understanding something is a way of consuming or claiming ownership of it, and that media that defies a perfect explanation rejects that sort of ownership. This is a feeling that I like, but I understand that others might not enjoy it so much.

(I do want to add a little note here though and reiterate that I don’t have anything against people personally enjoying their media in whatever way they choose. I realize that some of this sounds a bit like a polemic against Welcoming Video Game Worlds, but uh… everyone should enjoy their media in whatever way makes them happiest, so long as they’re doing so in a healthy manner)

[schroeder]

Sometimes ‘getting’ a game means developing the muscle memory for difficult execution rather than divining the game’s/creator’s intent. I think it depends on your tolerance for personal imperfection versus ambiguity in rules. I’d rather have no idea if I’m doing it right than know that I’m doing it wrong, which is basically the mirror image of how @Rudie feels.

[VastleCania]

I’d rather have no idea if I’m doing it right than know that I’m doing it wrong

I was gonna write a whole post but that’s basically how I feel as well. I get super frustrated by games that have a “correct” playstyle that I don’t live up to.

(On the other hand, games that are very welcoming, like Stardew Valley, but have lots of things to do, give me a tremendous anxiety that I am playing them wrong, even though they’re pretty explicitly about freedom of choice and that no option is wrong. I think it reflects my real-life anxieties that I waste too much time on things I enjoy vs. building relationships, exploring the world, etc.)

All in all I just don’t enjoy getting better at games. I’m lazy like that!!!

[VastleCania]

Vangers is a very unwelcoming game that points towards depth that may or may not exist. I can’t tell because I can’t remember the five-thousand made up words and the multiple factions and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing. I mean, it basically seems like a top down driving game where you do fetch quests but there’s this whole thing about competing hives and alternate dimensions and weird currencies and and and

It’s also ugly as sin.

It’s amazing.