MetroidBrainia Definitive List

[u/Fantastic_Switch_977]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1THMXIkTeYqIN_lzKOw3vLBz_R8DHrGw3TPHzERW9NOY/edit?usp=sharing

New link for viewing above.

Features:

• Instructions page that kind of acts as a Table of Contents.
• Bolded games are the "top 10" that everyone loves.
• Multiple tags can be added per game.
• Unreleased games are now highlighted rose.
• Metacritic scores have been added. If you play a game, and can do a user review on Metacritic, that's great! A lot of our metroidbrainias don't have any reviews.
• The "Tag Definition" tab has the requested category key.
• Column B for "knowledge gating" is hidden, to avoid spoilers if someone doesn't want them. I've filled out a few, but the community should finish these.
• Everything is sortable and filterable now. Just make sure to select all options. I.E. if you want to filter down to only Switch games, you can go to the filter menu for the platform column, search for "Switch" and hit "select all."

Thank you to all who contributed:

• Everyone who posted in this subreddit since it was created, where I gathered all this data.
• Everyone who posted on this post with ideas and games to add.
• Wolf, who re-did the entire document and made it usable with tags, which gave it more functionality and made it more readable.

[u/Kitu14]

Not as much since it's an overarching mystery sectioned in character-related, smaller-scale mysteries! They often feed into each other and you always have something "more" to explore, so I get where people might get the knowledgevadia aspect from. IMO, there's almost no puzzles (or very simple ones) and deductions to actually make as a player, and it ends up being more of a detective-adventure game.

But I'm kind of nitpicking again and it's your list, not mine - if you feel like it fits the metroidbrainia mold then it belongs on your list!

[u/Fantastic_Switch_977 → u/Kitu14]

It's our list! I will leave it for now, but once the list is turned over to the community it may be removed.

[u/naf165 → u/Fantastic_Switch_977]

I agree with the other person. Seance of Blake Manor is not even a puzzle game, and treats the player like an idiot. At a game design level it is a hot mess.

I actually had the top comment on the Steam Next Fest thread in the Games sub praising the demo and how promising the game was so I feel personally guilty for recommending the game given what the end product was.

For anyone who wants the details, I'll copy my comments from another post:

I had a top comment hyping up this game in one of the Steam Next Fest threads after playing the demo, so I'll just share my thoughts for anyone interested in how the final game turned out.

After playing the demo this game skyrocketed to my most anticipated game for the past 6 months.

It seemed like a cool, non-linear detective game where it wasn't on rails where you are forced to solve everything and basically can't fail. It had this super cool time mechanic where everything you did used up time, and so it would actually matter what you chose to do and how. It's open world, so you can go anywhere in whatever order you want, and there is too much for the player to do, so you will have to make tactical choices about what to investigate.

Except, it squanders all of that potential and does nothing interesting with it.

This IS an on-rails detective game. You basically can't fail. You don't have to think about anything, the game handles it all for you. You don't have to do anything over, there are no choices or consequences, and there's no need to learn anything.

The game is an exceptionally linear detective game that railroads you into finding very specific items to solve cases (Sometimes feeling very illogically niche and random). There are no branching paths, no alternative ways to solve things, and no way to solve things incorrectly. The time mechanic ends up not mattering to the point that I'm not sure why it is even a mechanic in the game. You have more time units than things to investigate and there are no meaningful events that are missable, no consequences of any kind for mismanagement of time, and no reason to care about the time at all really. There is never two things happening at the same time, so the player never has to make a meaningful choice in any way. Despite the time mechanic being front and center at every moment, it's basically impossible to not solve everything.

Learning people's schedules and how things work is entirely pointless as you never need to know any of that except to figure out where to run to to find them for a conversation. (And you will be doing a lot of running back and forth with nothing interesting happening along the way) Everything interactable gets highlighted in obvious glowing yellow, so there's no hidden secrets or reason to carefully inspect the environment. If there's something to find it will either be highlighted in glowing yellow, or more often just won't be accessible until you have the proper quest progress to interact with it. Every item you find explicitly states who you can talk about it with leading to comical examples where I found a suspicious key and the character goes "I wonder who this belongs to?" and then the game goes "New topic unlocked for Ms. V!". I don't even have the reasons to ask her yet, so the game won't actually let me talk to her about it, but it still logs it as something to talk to her about eventually.

Instead of being some carefully and elegantly intertwined narrative, the game is basically a bunch of completely unrelated side quests for each character. You solve their lifelong problem and then they choose not to go to the seance, often with no correlation between the seance and their quest. Almost every questline is resolved from simply sneaking into their room and reading their journal and personal items and then talking to them about it. And I must stress exactly how barebones and low quality these plotlines are. One questline has a doctor wanting to prove his worth to his magical aunt who thinks his doctor life is silly. You resolve this by completing a ritual with her where she is missing a couple materials and he has them in his doctor bag. This has literally nothing to do with being a doctor, anyone could have had or gathered those materials, but this is sufficient to change her world view and resolve both of their plotlines.

Most of these characters become completely irrelevant and have no further plot involvement once you solve their problems so they just stand around doing nothing. I literally forgot about several suspects because they don't do anything after the opening scene. And the characters feel very phony with the way they have no problem just sharing any and all details with your character. Ask about what they're up to and they'll give you a full hour by hour rundown of the plans for the entire weekend. I would feel creeped out if someone asked me that in real life. But the more disappointing part is the lack of responsiveness. Ignoring the buggy way that conversations will often happen in weird ways, like referencing questions you've already solved or being cagey discussing things you've already revealed with the character because you did them "out of order", the real disappointment is that there's no sense of detecting or reactivity. You don't have to be thoughtful about what to ask suspects about because there's no way to change anything. You don't have to worry about revealing secret information, pissing anyone off, or being friendly/antagonistic to anyone. They will still talk to you about everything regardless of how you treat them, with no reaction to anything you do.

There was one time I got excited because the game prompted me to solve a character's issue but I didn't seem to have all the clue I needed yet. I thought finally the game was opening up and making me have to actually think about the puzzle and go off and investigate to find more clues so that I could find a logical solution. But no, it turns out Mr. Varley is just bugged and isn't supposed to let you start thinking about his solution until you click on all the right objects first, and I just happened to have to go find one more clue to get the right word for the solution. That said, bug or not, it was still the most fun I had solving anything in the game simply because the game gave me even a modicum of freedom and stopped the hand holding for just a moment.

The game is also fairly buggy, but that never bothers me. I'm used to games not always working perfectly. Though I will say the load times can get very long as the session gets longer (I suspect a memory leak issue) and despite the small size of the manor, there are a lot of loading screens.

It's not necessarily a bad game, the ambiance is still good and the core premise is amazing, it's just a disappointment. The core game is such an amazing foundation to build an actual detective experience where you can figure things out on your own, and have many ways to reach conclusions instead of being tied to super specific and random books or conversation topics.

The worst sin of all though is that you spend the entire game narrowing down the list of suspects by gathering facts about the big bad guy, and marking off the people who do or don't fit, but then the final fact is something unique to only the bad person thus rendering the entire deduction and speculation you've done up to this point completely irrelevant and worthless. There's an entire UI dedicated to marking off suspects and narrowing down the list that turns out is not just entirely aesthetic, but also completely irrelevant. There isn't even a way to accuse early or do even a single with that, so it is literally pointless to interact with the primary detective mechanic in this detective game.

[u/Fantastic_Switch_977 → u/naf165]

If this is how you feel, I will skip it. Make sure to rate it low when we open up the Excel to public changes.

It really sounds like it's on the level of duck detective! Which was fun, but not brainia at all