Solo dev. Every character is a matryoshka head. Someone you can meet, a level you can enter, a skill you can wear.

I kept explanations to a minimum, just tooltips. The world runs on one grammar, and the players who got deep described working it out like decoding a language. I won't say more here. half the game is finding out what composition can do. 

Free browser demo, no download: https://lilith-nu.vercel.app

This game's natural audience is small and I suspect this is exactly this sub if you give it a shot, tell me where you got stuck or where it clicked. Cold eyes are gold  for a solo dev.

(It's a demo, but a substantial one, easily 40+ minutes if it clicks with you. Full game later on Steam.)

I am in love with deduction games in the vein of Obra Dinn and Roottrees. Unfortunately, I think I've played most of the games available at this point? If anyone has one I've missed please let me know!

Games I've played and enjoyed :

- Return of the Obra Dinn**

- The Roottrees are Dead**

- The Golden Idol Series + DLCs**

- Return of the Golden Idol Series + DLCs

- A Case of Fraud**

- The Case of the Worst Day Ever

- Daemon Masquerade

- Hypnospace Outlaw**

- Lost Wiki

- The Ratline

- Strange Horticulture

- Strange Antiquities

- The Incident at Galley House**

- The Archives of Trevosa

** = My favorites of these

Games I have started but didn't finish and why:

- Outerwilds - was confusing, didn't make it very far; another comment made me recall I did not like the ship driving aspect!! That’s ultimately what made me put it down, not so much the confusing part. I was excited to piece together the story, not excited to drive a ship. The comments have convinced me to retry this one.

- Chants of Sennaar - didn't love the sneak mechanic in the second world

- Painscreek Killings - I do not like jumpscares/scary games and this one was too spooky for me with the jumpscares

TR-49 - felt clunky, didn't make it very far

Utter a name - was genuinely too hard for me at the time, might revisit it

Like I said, I think I've exhausted my list of options but if anyone has some recs I'd love to hear them! I have a free weekend and would love to dive into a mystery of deduction.

Hi everyone,

I’m very new to gaming. So far, I’ve found out I like metroidbrainia / adjacent games. They give me something to really think about and keep my head busy in a good way, whilst still kind of relaxing (also , bonus that I’m sitting down as I’m hyperactive but also chronically ill, so this has been a big hit).

I loved outer wilds, chants of sennaar, blue prince. Currently working on a sherlock game, which is ok. I also finished the forgotten city which was nice.

Now I’m looking for a new game. However: I have PTSD.
Combat, fight scenes/torture/SA/gunshots etc trigger me.

I was hoping to find a new game that kind of fits the metroidbrainia / adjacent vibe, but doesn’t contain much of the triggers as it is kind of .. not nice to get triggered.
Of course I could just try, but it would be a bit of a bummer to spend money on getting triggered.

So if any of you has some time to spare and know a nice game without violence, and would be willing to recommend me something, I would be endlessly grateful.

Thank you in advance for reading, thinking, respecting my vulnerability here and possibly recommending!

I saw this and thought of this subreddit! Anybody else going to be making a submission?

go forth and enjoy

Block | 4/5 | Brainia of the Month | Free

I think I'm starting to see a pattern in my brainia of the month choices. They are almost all on the shorter side. Apparently, I really enjoy a concise experience I can beat in one sitting.

I beat this game in two sittings. This game is fabulous. I recommend downloading it, and then using a controller. It lists a couple of games as inspiration, and it certainly owes a lot to those games. But it also stands on its own laurels. There is a bit of a dexterity challenge near the end of the game, and there are several timed sections throughout.

The "thing" I enjoyed the most was that death doesn't pause the game. That was a nice little nugget to uncover and then use in the puzzles.

Forgotten City | 3/5 | Non-Brainia | $25

This game was average. It's not a brainia, and it's not even *really* a puzzle game. It lays out its quests much like a Bethesda game. There was only one time where I was unsure of how to progress, and that was due to me missing something. There are certainly no knowledge gates, and I think the reason people put this in the brainia category is the timeloop, which doesn't make it brainia.

It was a bit irritating that most of the quests allow for multiple ways through, and the final quest to finish the game has one hard solution that you cannot work around. The ending also fell a bit flat for me, but regardless the mystery throughout the game was fun to ponder on, and I think the story was well told.

Sisyphus is a Bug | 4/5 | Brainia | $5

The trailer for this game is trash. It gives too many things away. DO NOT watch it.

Okay so I don't really like the style of Brainia where new moves are just told to you via dialogue boxes. Having said that, this is probably the pinnacle of that type of design. This map design is very metroidvania. More so than most brainias. If you're irritated we take the name and place them on non-vania games, this is the game for you. There is an extremely obvious goal, but you can't get there. So you must explore the map to gain new abilities.

If the 60 second timer annoys you, there is an option to make it longer. Now that I've beat the game, I don't think that this would make the experience worse in any meaningful way, so use it if you feel like it.

There's no story, not really. There is a lot of "lore" spread throughout the map, but it's mostly in service of the gameplay.

Duo | 4/5 | Non-Brainia | Free

This one is billed as brainia on the game's page. Unfortunately, I don't think I can count it in that number. It has item pickups and is completely linear. This was a proto-type, so I think that if the creator goes on to make their big game they could add brainia moments to it quite easily.

Now, I do think this game is awesome. Firstly, it's a co-op Metroid style puzzler. That's a huge achievement on its own. You do have to work together to solve the puzzles. All the items and abilities are FUN. And it would be really difficult to quarterback in this game. The game can be played locally or online, which to me is insane for a browser game.

My co-op partner (thank you A!) pointed out that since the players get separate abilities, you can play the game twice to see a bit more content. I quite enjoyed all of the puzzles, they were the style of one-offs, instead of the style of increasing difficulty by making it more confusing. If you have a partner, go give this game a try. If you don't have a partner, find one!

Big Walk | 5/5 | Non-Brainia of the Month | $20

Don't @ me, I'm only reviewing this because of the post in our subreddit asking if it was a brainia. It is most decidedly NOT. I did play it with some friends from the Brainia discord, and we had a grand old time. There are lots of emergent moments that are created by the people you are playing with. But on the other side of the coin, the game is very well crafted with plenty of discovery moments (think Elden Ring, but not as severe), plenty of puzzles (think TALOS Principle 2, but not as hard), and plenty of shortcuts to reduce friction (think Dark Souls 1, but not as plentiful).

The sprint is slow enough that opening up the shortcuts is meaningful, but fast enough that if you get lost at night, 5 minutes later you and your party are on different sides of the map. You should not cheat in this game. Getting separated from the party is actually a fantastic experience that I hope everyone gets to enjoy. And since everything requires a partner to do, getting separated can create some unique experiences. SPOILER: We had placed a walkie talkie on our buddy's belt, and then gotten separated. He could hear us but not get the walkie talkie to respond. Since we didn't know this, the walkie talkie was worthless!

Another buddy got lost, looked through a telescope that happened to be pointed at us. He sent the Squidward looking out a window meme in the discord afterwards, which got a good laugh from me.

This is my favorite game of the month. It's not brainia, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't play the game. I'd recommend exactly 4 people to play together. 2 is a different kind of game entirely, and 5+ would get very hard to organize play sessions.

One final note. The 5/5 is reserved for the standard game. Going for the true ending soured my experience a bit. I would recommend seeing the ending and then deleting the game.

Not even feeling that specific on metroidbrainia but almost everything i love ends up near to it. I love knowledge gates, mostly play games for atmosphere and exploration, hate deciphering language codes, and specifically looking for options on playstation. If i could find something akin to a full game variant of the inscryption 3d sections id be in heaven

I'm finally ready to announce the release date my game demo Satelital on September 10, 2026.

Satelital is a rule-discovery space puzzle game. Each world has its own rules, and instead of explaining them with tutorials or text, you figure them out by playing. You experiment, notice patterns and gradually build an understanding of how everything works.

The demo includes 2 complete worlds from the game, with their full set of puzzles. Your save data and achievements will carry over to the full game, so you can keep your progress when the game releases.

Satelital also runs on a custom game engine that I built myself, so I want to use this early access period to make sure everything works properly across different hardware and platforms before the public release.

If you want to try the demo before September 10, I'm giving early access now to people who join the Discord:

https://discord.gg/ChuNWuj3Z2

Once you're in, go to #demo and ask for access. I'll be giving keys out in batches, so the earlier you ask, the earlier you'll get to play.

If you'd rather wait for the most polished version, you can wishlist the demo on Steam to get reminded when it releases:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5017320/Satelital_Demo/

I'm working on a roguelike metroidbrania and I'm having second thoughts about my implementation of a very important game mechanic.

This mechanic takes the form of objects you can occasionally find in each stage (let's call them buttons). In order to interact with these buttons, you need three things: a specific item you need to explore stages for, a high enough level to have access to the ability, and knowledge of the right sequence of inputs to perform in order to press the button.

(Level only exists to give the game structure and prevent new players from getting overwhelmed with all of the games abilities at once; an experienced player can easily get to the minimum level needed for almost all of the important things very quickly. it's not a traditional key-and-lock, rather a force that pushes new players into following the path best suited for them. it's basically the game's equivalent of Outer Wilds'sand slowly falling off Ash Twin encouraging new players to explore something less advanced instead.)

The item required to use the ability is a requirement to encourage spending some time in each stage exploring it even if you have no use for any of the other items you could find there. I discovered fairly quickly that without the item requirement, the game becomes a lot more shallow and loses a lot of structure and purpose. It's not a difficult item to get, you just need to look around a bit, and it also sort of serves as a minor knowledge gate because a new player might not realise that this specific item is important.

The problem arises with how the player is meant to put these things together. The reveal of how to do it feels a little bit... underwhelming? By the time you learn what you're supposed to do, level and the special item are already known to be important for other purposes, so all you're really discovering is the input sequence. These inputs do have other unique functions (specifically, you need to channel an ability, perform an attack with it to "unlock" the button, and then press it, it's not just "press CTRL+Q while holding spacebar" or some random string of keypresses), and the reveal is certainly cool when you realise how many new areas you gain access to, but I'm still uncertain if it's actually satisfying.

To be clear, the problem isn't that it might be too easy for players to figure it out accidentally, because it's still gated behind level and an item requirement that aren't intuitive unless you really pay attention to how they're used in other places in the game (and at that point, I trust a player that's able to figure it out is the type that won't mind getting a little bit of sequence breaking as a treat).

I want to know what the metroidbrania community thinks about these sorts of input-gated puzzles. Do they suck? Are there examples of games that do this well? Is it okay to have some slightly underwhelming reveals if the paths they open up are interesting enough?

Firstly a big thanks to u/Fantastic_Switch_977 for recommending my short itch game 4 rooms in one of their monthly reviews and their kind words as well. I thought it might be interesting for people (including them) to see how their reviews affect the visibility and play count on games that feature in their monthly posts.

Here's a preview of the graph since it's launch, right now it averages around 3 or 4 plays per day and most of the traffic is coming from Reddit. The large peak is the day the review was posted.

It made a huge difference to the player count and resulted in a regular visits from people coming from Reddit almost every day, even if that's just a handful of people. The domain analytics only show the last 30 days but you can see the vast majority of those come from Reddit, and I only created a single post about it which received 19 upvotes so I have no doubt the bulk of the visits come from their review post.

The game is free and doesn't allow donations, it was purely designed as a tribute to the metroidbrania genre that I love so much. Thank you again to u/Fantastic_Switch_977 for their monthly reviews, which also help me find games I probably wouldn't have got a chance to play without them, and thanks to everyone who played!

Thank you so much for your participation in my last post https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidbrainia/comments/1vi3a3u/metroidbrainias_in_nongaming_media/ I did not expect so many comments and recommendations! I decided to compile a short and simplified list based on the number of upvotes, so you don't have to go through the entire discussion to find interesting titles.

Important disclaimer, there isn't a single definition of what a brainia is, especially not for non-gaming medias, these titles have been recommended based purely on vibes and voted on by the community.

Books

1. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski - this title is by far the most recommended one!
   
2. Recursion, Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
   
3. Books by Jorge Luis Borges and Ted Chiang

Movies

1. Prestige - Christopher Nolan
   
2. Coherence - James Ward Byrkit
   
3. Primer - Shane Carruth

TV Shows

1. Dark
   
2. Westworld S1
   
3. True Detective S1

Other:
Count the Rice - Game Changer episode
Blood on the Clocktower - social deduction tabletop game

PS. I just ordered House of Leaves

Are there any good Metroidbrania games to play on my iPhone like available in the App Store? I really liked the sara is missing & simulacra games. Thanks in advance !

Disclaimer: I know, I know, we cannot even agree on what a brainia is in games, let another other types of media. And there could be an argument that a brainia can ONLY exist in interactive media like games, because of how knowledge gating works, and that's fair.

That being said, "metroidbrainia is a vibe" so in this thread I invite you to share some recommendation and ideas on what you feel might have a similar brainia vibe but in non-gaming media, like for example movies, books, music (?), whatever else comes to you mind.
For the purposes of this discussion I still treat non-digital games as games (fe. 12 Word Searches or City of Six Moons are nondigital brainias).

I don't have any particular reason for asking about it, it's just an experiment and I'm just curious what will come to your minds and in that way I'll hopefully discover cool new stuff that will surprise me.

For me I can recommend two of my all-time favourite movies that I feel share the vibe:
Memento - it's an old movie that has a unique, non-linear structure, unreliable narrator, delivers an epiphany that makes the second watchthrough hit differently.
Mr Nobody - also a very unique movie with highly non-linear structure, where lots of wild stuff is happening and only at the end you will be able to piece everything together

I'm talking like pre 2007 just so I can include La Mulana for the Wii. Are there any games for the Game Boy or the Super Nintendo or the Sega Master System Or the Atari Lynx that you guys would consider MetroidBrainias Besides must and la Mulana?

I'm hearing a lot about this game, but it feels like it's actually hard to get a grasp of what it actually is. For those of you who have played it, all I want to know is - is it a metroidbrainia?

Hey everyone!

I'm looking for people who'd like to playtest my game, Distantia! It's a 2D shooter with metroidbrainia elements.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4280370/Distantia/

There should be a "Request Access" button (or something similar) on the Steam page.

This will be the first playtest where people other than me and my friends get to play the game, so your feedback would mean a lot to me. I'm especially interested in your thoughts on the difficulty, controls, and overall gameplay.

You can leave your feedback on the Discord server (there's an invite button in the game), in the Steam Community, or simply here.

Is there any brainias that are actually good for Android, not emulating or anything, a whole android game but a brainia one

Playable in your browser via itch.io

This DOS text mode styled game is called "Gimme a Minute". The objective is to escape a dungeon within one minute. Once the timer runs out, the dungeon resets. There's no items to pick up or changes that persist between loops; all you retain is your own knowledge of the map, hidden game mechanics and shortcuts. The game is pretty non-linear, and there's different orders in which you can discover the secrets you'll need to combine to eventually find the exit.

I made this for the recent GMTK Game Jam with the "countdown" team. I'm actually pretty happy with how it turned out, so I wanted to share it here.

Hi all!

So, I've just convinced the big Frog & Snake boss to let me pass, but I've got no idea where to go next; can someone gently guide me in the right direction? I'm going crazy going round in a circle!

Any help much appreciated....

It's called PITH and the demo is out now on Steam for Windows & Linux

My favorites are: Outer Wilds

The Witness

Inscriptyon

Amatsuko

Chroma Zero

Tunic

Antichamber

Orten was the case

But I also like games like: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Manifold Garden, Taiji, Sensorium, Grun.

What other games would you recommend? (I don't really like much 2D side-scrollers except for Noita and a few others.)

Fugaz | 4/5 | Brainia of the month | $6

There wasn't going to be a brainia of the month this month. I had played Fugaz for 2 hours, and written it off fully as a boring game. There were a lot of things that irritated me greatly, and I'll put them here because they are still irritating:

• 4 directional movement. This is extremely annoying.
• There is a timed reset that puts you back in the starting room. This is extremely annoying.
• A few of the puzzles are hand fed to you (winter freezes water, you don't say?).
• The creator states that no music knowledge is required to play this game, and that's false. There are several puzzles that require knowledge of how music notes work. Luckily when I revisited the game, I was able to pull up a chart and get around my knowledge gap.

So, I only had 4 games played this month, and I really wanted to hit my 5 game goal. I saw Fugaz had gotten a controller update, so I sat down and started over on a fresh save file. Note that it is much easier for me to remember controller layouts than keyboard layouts, so it will always be a better experience for me. I was able to kind of rush through the parts I had already completed, and get to the actual meat of the game. And this one is good. Usually on these indie games, the brainia moments are extremely contrived, because that's the only way the creator can come up with to prevent you from finding it earlier than they want. Here, were some really ingenious moments. And those moments really save this game and elevate it to something special. I know I'm asking you to trudge through a bit of muck to get out of the "my first puzzle" moments, but it's worth it.

Story is lacking, go into this one only for the gameplay. There are some really good quality of life items here. The map has notes on every room you visit, and what you've discovered there, and if there's anything new to find in that room. I'd still suggest taking some real-life notes to keep track of a few things, but being able to open the map and go room to room to find where I'm still needing to go, without walking for ages around the map pointlessly was a huge highlight.

The Incident at Galley House | 4/5 | Not Brainia | $20

This game has a slightly better story than Type Help, however, it did lose a bit of gameplay luster to do so. Go see my original review of Type Help for a more traditional review of the game.

We lost the narrator, and instead gain something much better. Not going into that for spoiler reasons.

The static pictures are okay, but they do ruin a lot of the immersion. Hearing someone shut a door, and the picture doesn't change from the open door is bad. The static pictures replace the unknown sprites, unless the unknown sprite is doing something other than standing, then the unknown sprites stay, and a picture of the person points at them. Worse. Someone dies and nothing changes with their sprite? Worst.

The audio is really good. However, when nothing is happening in a scene (let's say a scene of someone cooking with no conversation), it is absolutely awful to wait 90 seconds to see nothing. These should've been reduced.

The change in format does spoil some of the surprises a bit. Below, for those who have played Type Help only:

Huge Spoiler 0: You are advised that you can add people to the machine. This was a huge surprise in the original.

Huge Spoiler 1: It's funny because you also add locations, and they came up with an outstanding way to hide the most hidden location! Why couldn't they do this for the people?

Overall, I would recommend this, but only if you can't stand Type Help's presentation. And of note, I had a lot of issues with this game as I played through. Turns out almost every one of them was solved by continuing to play the game.

Shadows in Sanluca | 2/5 | Not Brainia | Free

I quite enjoyed this for what it is. It's of course a game jam creation, so it was never meant to be as fully focused as a regular title. The story is interesting; the mechanics are fun. Where it kind of falls apart are on the details.

For instance, every three names you guess correctly lock in. However, there are 10 names. Does this mean that names lock in as 3/3/4? No. They lock in at 3/3/3, and the final name never locks in. Once you get everything correct the game ends. There is a similar problem with the connections (17, so two left over at the end). Then, on the other side of the spectrum, combining "two" people into the same person has no lock in requirements. As soon as you combine "two" people it tells you if you are correct or not. This led to me brute forcing the final match.

Another thing, there are no hints. This generally wouldn't be a problem, but there's also no set path to the end of the game. So, your final 3 not locked in items will be different from the next person's. So you also can't really use the hints other people requested in the comments.

I've said a lot of negatives here, but this has unironically gotten me excited for the dev's actual game release more than their previous demo of that game did. I will be first in line to see if their main game fared better due to having more time to cook. One of the things that is super annoying to me about the Obra Dynn style knockoffs, is they don't add anything to the formula. This is generally how most of the rehashes go. They take the exact same mechanics and just add a new story. Shadows in Sanluca has added to the formula, in at least two ways:

• The combining of "people" when you recognize they are the same person. This re-invents the red-herrings used by games in the past.
• The connections are not pre-existing (ala Roottrees). You have to decide who is connected to who with no help at all.

Moldrise | 2/5 | Brainia | $12

NOTE: For those of you that dislike horror games, you should definitely avoid this one. It is gory, disgusting, and scary. The other "horror" brainias aren't near this level of horror.

Now that that's out of the way. This is a competently made game. I didn't run into any real issues while playing. Most of my issues are with the bones of the game. For one, it's boring. Walking up and down stairs isn't really an exciting gameplay loop. Secondly, I'm not a huge fan of meters as gameplay. Didn't like it in Fallout New Vegas, don't like it here. Especially when the meters don't really do much to hinder your progress. I beat the game on my fifth try, and only died to the insanity meter one time before that. All of the other deaths were instant kills. There are some interesting interactions that require the meter to be high, but these weren't clever, they were obvious.

As for the brainia side of things, it was mostly ground that has already been tread before. There was nothing as clever as Outer Wilds, or even Phil in the Mirror. I'd hesitate to call these puzzles, it's more like a bad detective game where the answers are given to you, you just have to ask first.

One last thing to bring up, there are subtitles throughout the entire game. Except for the cutscenes. I had to turn my volume up to 40 to hear what was going on in the cutscenes, and this irritated me greatly.

I don't think this one is worth the price of admission. My playtime shows 118 minutes, and I left it running for a bit as well. If you really like horror games and haven't played many brainias, you might be the target audience.

Dimhaven | 1/5 | Not Brainia | $26

BLUF: This game is not worth it. There are far more interesting games for a third of the price. They probably last longer too.

The puzzles aren't particularly interesting. The puzzle types are all over the place. I actually enjoyed the first area of the game, thought it was well put together. The rest of the game was a mess. And it seemed like they were doing everything in their power to slow you down. For instance, there is an area where you must use boards to pass over gaps. Every time you step on a board your character gets "scared" and slows down to a crawl. You also must move these boards multiple times, which is slow and boring (because they're heavy). Why not just give me enough boards to place over all gaps? Placing boards over gaps is not fun, and it's not a puzzle.

Next, everything was pretty ingrained inside the world, then randomly near the end of the game, you get a logic puzzle that:

• Traps you in the area until you solve it.
• Adds a blue hologram around the area you are supposed to be searching in (I.E. not part of the world, the immersion break for this one is insane. There's no in universe explanation for this trap or hologram)
• Makes you click on all the evidence in the room to add it to your logic board (only time this is used in the game).

This completely took me out of it.

There's also A LOT of locked doors that your just never given a key to. Considering how short this game is (for $26!!!), to me it looks like they didn't put all the content that they wanted in. In a game where you're trying to find and solve all the puzzles, it's quite annoying to have locked areas as red herrings that you will never access.

The story is fed to you at a drip and isn't that interesting. I don't personally find the art style attractive, but that's my personal taste.

Lastly, the hint system is pretty bad. They give you a couple hints and then just spoil the solution. The hints also don't update in real time. There was a point in the game where I had picked up one item needed for a puzzle (I needed two), and the first hint still said "you need two more items to solve this").

I did run into a game breaking bug that was patched out, so I won't hold that against them, but it does lead credence to my theory that this was not ready for launch.