So with my Fmp being a Metroidvania I took a look at the '09 game Shadow Complex. With its high reviews [2] when it came out its been on my "to play list" for the past 11 years. So I FINALLY got to sit down and play it via PlayStation now. Thanks worldwide pandemic!
I did a deep dive into the first 15 mins so I could explore the design choices that felt good and bad when playing, so I can reflect on them while designing my own game. You can see a playthru that was posted to the Virtual Gaming Library - VGL here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CacdmLGLGSY
Before the game starts you are placed into combat that teaches you how to shoot. Before this ability is removed from you when you enter the main game. This is a major trope for the Metroidvania games, giving the player a taste of full power right at the start, and works well for these action-oriented Metroidvania games.
The "true" game then starts in earnest and the player takes control of a new character after a brief cutscene :
So this first area is made up of a few sections
The first section is the intro, it shows how to jump and climb on ledges , but also lets you know two major things
1. The fact you will HAVE to backtrack when you get new skills.
2. Badguys won't be able to see you right away and line of sight is a thing.
This minor bit of backtracking is really good to train the player into understanding what they need to do.
There are also some spoilers in this section. When you are given the flashlight right at the start of the game you are also given its help menu that lists all the different types of obstacles you will find in the game. So orange objects need guns to open and green needs grenades. Both these objects you gain in the first 15 mins of gameplay. However, it also tells you about purple needing foam and blue needing friction dampeners. The in-game character wouldn't know about these things and such the player should not be front-loaded with this information. It would be better if the text had question marks over locked information to let the player discover things alongside the game. This is a major mistake in my opinion as one of the key driving forces in a Metroidvania is exploration. The people who chose to play this style of game, and looks for a budget title would be those who have a high tendency to have explorers bartle taxonomy as laid out by Bartle in his 1996 paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit MUDs".
This section also changes the mood from lighthearted to suspenseful. We drop down into this gap and the game seamlessly spawns an in-game cutscene where the character cannot reach. The characters friend is held at gunpoint and is marched in from the right into door C.
All while this is happening the light at A blinks in a horror movie style and the happy and ambient sounds fade to silence. Solider B is left alone and looks around menacingly while a musical accompaniment of horror string are played know as a "trill" effect, this is really good for setting a tense tone [4]. Once the player is freed from the holding cell he can follow the guys in.
The next part is a set path, letting the player get used to the movement. There is one part where the player yells "hmmm whats that I should come back later" I'm not sure if this works on a few levels.
1. It breaks the tension of the moment, in the last scene it builds it up really well just to break it.
2. The character is doing the player's job spotting things in the environment and telling them to come back later. The game does this for a second time, at the end of the first boss fight, to a higher level. At that point the game pops up with a window telling the player they should go back and check for missing items and lists what items are missing this is a non-diegetic approach, is pretty bad and again, is removing the sense of discovery from the players.
3. The character is no longer looking to save his friend but treating the world as a level that needs to be played in.
Later on, after some vent crawling you end up seeing a flashback (noted by it being in black and white) about how he was trained for the military, this helps clear up some of that natty cognitive dissonance[3] my whole design identity seems to revolve around when the play picks up a gun and is able to use it well. The player is then prompted to open the map screen and is shown the fact there is a route planner, that is turned off by default in any mode apart from casual, the easiest difficulty setting, where it turns on well before this point in the game. This is really good for accessibility and even more so that it turns on in easy mode.
Lastly, I can talk about getting the grenades, I feel like this is handled poorly. The player collects them, uses one to let himself out the room he is in and is forced into the first boss fight of the game, where its only weakness is the grenades. I feel that the player should have been given more time to get used to the items first before this fight starts.
The fight too is lacklustre, the boss is a large tank and is in a room that is too small for it. There is a lack of tension in this fight and the player can easily run back to the room where he found the grenades and get more and get health too. It wastes the boss and sets a bad tone going forward.
There is a postmortem for this game that I have watched after doing my own analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnRT2R0yt6c
it's more of a designing for the marketplace style talk, but it is an interesting watch.
Shadow complex all in all is a fantastic game to learn from, even its failings are not major and from my reading, I can understand why I disagree with the few things they did. I can use this for my FMP largely.
[1] Shadow complex
[3] My cognitive dissonance blog
Virtual Gaming Library - VGL
"Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit MUDs", Richard Bartle (1996)
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