Metroid vs Brania, or the Treachery of Genre

It’s been interesting observing the (light) discourse surrounding Blue Prince online. On release, you had people immediately calling it a masterpiece, up there with the likes of Outer Wilds or Obra Dinn in terms of the way the game unfolds and reveals itself to the player. In response to that first contingent, another group wrote about how they felt misled, struggling with the basic gameplay and wondering just where the “masterpiece” elements were located. The former group came back, saying something that’s a mix of “Just keep going” or “You need to look closer” or “Have you tried doing RNG manipulation?”, the latter group responded with something like “I don’t want to” and “I am?” and “How?, and so the whole thing spiralled.

I don’t think either group here is wrong nor at fault, and time already is healing this divide. For context, I’m really enjoying the game, though I think in major part because I am playing it with my partner. On my initial solo run, I did about 4 runs in under an hour and just barely got to rank 5 with very little to show for it. Meanwhile, my partner and I have been playing for nearly 8 hours and only done 5 runs, but multiple got up to essentially the backwall of the house, with many big reveals and unlocks happening along the way. There’s a few reasons for the differential: For one, I genuinely think the game works better as a couch co-op game, where you have two brains who can notice, note and converse on different elements. It also helps that my partner is just very good at puzzle games! Yet, I also think that I have a skillset that helps push us forward, one that is more agile and loose. And I think our differences can be summed up by the notion of “Metroid vs Brania”

Except we’re not going to use the terms “Metroid” and “Brainia” or just anything related to “Metroidbrania” cause that would be insufferable. To be fair to everyone else, I also remember describing the Outer Wilds as a “Metroidvania for your brain” to friends in 2019, but even I knew that was a nightmare descriptor. “Metroidbrainia”, just as an actual term, might as well be a universal game concept. “Via play, I learned some things that allows me to progress through the game quicker / in new ways” applies just as much to learning a boss pattern in Dark Souls as it does understanding quantum objects in Outer Wilds, or just learning what the buttons are on a controller.

For the purposes of this blog I’m swapping out “Metroidbrainia” and with “Tactile Mystery Games”, or TMGs, with Tactile and Mystery being both linked and separate terms. "Tactile" alone refers to the concept of how “Low-order” play operates in these games, with them often focusing on a refined set of compelling, kinetic actions that directly interface with major game systems. "Mystery" is more straightforward in it's reference to "high-order" play, indicating that there are one or more mysteries to solve, which by being solved, complete the game (i.e this “Mystery-oriented Structure” must take precedence over any form of level-based or narrative structure). “Tactile Mystery”, in unison, refers to the idea that these are games where low-order manipulation of the mechanical systems alongside advancements in high-order knowledge gathering or strategy provide mixed low and high order rewards. Indeed, one might say that low-order and high-order play get slightly blurred in TMGs, given the way the genre privileges high-order goals. Games I would consider TMGs under this defintion are Blue Prince, Outer Wilds, Paradise Killer, Immortality or even Gnosia.

Having laid out this theory, can you see where an issue might creep into the genre? What if the player experiences friction with how the low-order and high-order play relate to one another? Well, a great example of this friction is, perhaps ironically, Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is, from the perspective of high-order play, a game of many mysteries: Unexplored, dangerous planets, a long lost civilization of scientists, missing astronauts, the explosion of the sun, a timeloop, etc. This all intrigues and excites the player from the perspective of high-order play. However, Outer Wilds is also, from the perspective of low-level play, a 3D platformer with semi-accurate orbital physics. And not an easy one!

I know this because I’ve helped multiple people “Get into” Outer Wilds; All of those people were compelled by the premise of Outer Wilds, and all ran into the same basic issue: Both the spaceship and player character are hard to control, and as such death came easy and confusion / frustration came with it. This is somewhat intentional, I would even call it core to the game’s themes and gameplay. Yet, it did stop these people from advancing on their own without guidance and support. What's notable is that TMGs make this kind of low-order gameplay frustration much harder to parse than normal. For one, just lookoing up a guide is inherently disencouraged (What if the player accidentally encountered information they didn't yet have?), so most have to struggle on their own. When these players did have a guide in me, what they would often ask is if a particular element of the game was a “mystery” or not. I.e:

Was a given scenario hard because:

a) the thing they were trying to do was impossible,

b) the thing they were trying to do was possible but they could / were required to find more information before continuing, or

c) the thing they were trying to do was possible and there was no more information to find, they just needed to pull it off.

Truly, I found it was generally a 33:33:33 split between these options. Of course, this subsided over time as players got to grips with the controls and began to grok the nature of the gameworld. But it’s worth noting that these issues in part stem from the fact that TMGs almost require that just the basic operations of play, the things that link low and high order play, be semi-obscured. That these games' fundamental appeal lies somewhat in their systemic mysteries is relatively obvious. That players can easily be left adrift by this same requirement is a much harder notion to swallow.

From a bird’s eye view, I believe this is essentially what’s happening with Blue Prince discourse. Players who have been praising the game have been focusing on the high-level play, the long term strategies and opportunities, and the various reveals and surprises that came about while playing. New players, then encountering the reality of low-level play, get confused. Is the high-level play everyone is praising just placing down room tiles effectively, or doing some math on a dart board? Consider aswell how this contrasts to something like Outer Wilds: When you hear Outer Wilds is a grand puzzle game, and then the game starts with 3D platforming mechanics, it's fairly easy to go "ah, the puzzles must be located elsewhere". When you hear the Blue Prince is a grand puzzle game, and then the game starts with a puzzle game, it's not unreasonable to go "Is this the whole puzzle?". Indeed, there are many low level puzzles to solve in Blue Prince, including even how one walks from room to room. Without clear signalling (at least at first), combined with some bad RNG or failed strategies, players run the risk of not only thinking the low-level play they are engaging with is the high-level play, but that their access to that high-level play is handicapped by the luck of the draw.

Both Outer Wilds and Blue Prince attempt to prime the player to first come to grips with low-level play, before increasingly pointing the player towards high-level play, including even just spelling out reveals in text as a reward for good low-level play. Outer Wilds is flashier about these reveals, more kinetic, and I think also more willing to hold a low-level players hand to guide them to the finish line. Having not yet finished the Blue Prince, I can definitely say some of the puzzles are really quite fiendish, requiring multiple (not-unreasonable, just notable) logical deductions to put the pieces together. I can see how this threatens to result in players who, while still successful at the low-level play, struggle to find access to the high-level play: To a certain degree, they have to climb that ladder on their own.

What do we do with all this… I don’t know! I mean at the very least I just want to kill Metroidbrania. If you don’t like Tactile Mystery Games, I would love to hear an alternative! I do think what’s also worth noting is that while many games, in terms of high-level play, are Tactile Mystery games, the way the low-level play takes shape can be really varied and might be worth recognizing as a genre of it’s own: Outer Wilds is a 3D platformer, Blue Prince is a deck-based resource management puzzle game, Gnosia is a Visual Novel, Paradise Killer is a 3D Platformer + Visual Novel, Immortality is a DVD chapters menu. While it may seem weird, even obtuse, to classify a game as being a part of multiple simultaneous genres (and I do think the Tactile Mystery game is the part to focus on), I think this is a genre where the relationship between those constituent parts is very unique and important, with the interplay between the two levels being paramount to the enjoyment of the whole. People bouncing off of "3D Platformer" or "Deck-builder" are not unreasonable, especially when nothing makes clear that's the primary genre of game they are going to be interacting with!

To jump back to the title of this post, where my partner excels at the high-order play required by Blue Prince, I excel at the low-order play. I love to place rooms and walk around and just try new shit, whereas my partner considers all the options while taking careful notes about every step we take. I think it's fair to say that had I continued my own, solo playthough, I would have done dozens more runs in a short amount of time, maybe even solving some other low-order mysteries, but would have completely missed out on some of the more high-level mysteries and likely fallen off the game as a result. Meanwhile, my partner might have still solved a number of the grand mysteries, but just as much may have been caught up in decision paralysis regarding the countless low-order decisions a player needs to make every few steps. I think this speaks to why I probably prefer Outer Wilds (highly kinetic, very low-order play friendly) while Blue Prince is much more her speed (no major dexterity skill checks required, all focused on very high-level goals). All said, it's worth considering when designing a TMG the different types of players who find themselves drawn to the genre, and how the kinds of help they need differ greatly from player to player.

I would also just note that this genre generally has a problem with the classic notion of “Developer intentionality”, magnified by the “secret” natures of the game that make parsing this, or even just googling it, very hard. Marketing or conversations about TMGs often has to hinge on pointing to secret, compelling things without any ability to show them, which in turn can lead to all kinds of mis-messaging. I’ve seen so many posts of people going “Wow, I can’t believe the puzzles in Blue Prince are so basic“ only for multiple people to have to jump in and go “No I promise you the REAL puzzles are weird I swear”. If the separating line between your low-level and high-level play isn’t clear, nor the ways in which the two are linked, players will just be left not knowing which game they are playing. How do you solve that without also taking away from the mystique of a unexplained mystery box? I truly don’t know, and it may not be worth it. But then I guess you do need to be prepared to be the subject of some confused bickering on Bluesky.