2024 Looks Like a Golden Year for Metroidvanias, Even Without Silksong
Whether Team Cherry's anticipated sequel arrives or not, metroidvanias fans are thriving in 2024.
Posted 5 months ago
As a metroidvania fan, it can sometimes feel like a sadistic deity has consigned you to purgatory. After all, we’re still waiting for Silksong – the sequel to Team Cherry’s stupendous 2017 insectoid adventure, Hollow Knight – to escape from the developmental woods. A fitting place for a bug, but not great for fans still searching for even a sliver of info in each Nintendo Direct. Every time, they’re left wanting. But they really needn’t be. Because even if Silksong doesn’t arrive in 2024, the year is shaping up to be an unforgettable one for metroidvania maniacs.
The best so far: Pilfered princes and perplexing penguins
The year opened with a flourish. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came soaring onto our screens, cutting down the naysayers with precise platforming and devilish duels. The mysterious Mount Qaf – an ancient city interlaced with hidden passages and locked in a time trap – offered the ideal setting. Rife with mystery and monstrous foes, it was made all the more entrancing through the stellar accompanying soundtrack.
Protagonist Sargon’s time-warping powers and penchant for parries reached their apex in the phenomenal boss fights. Drawing from history, myths, and legends, these climactic clashes created cinematic and visual flair worthy of the best action animes, while always leaving you in control of the action.
So the first month of the year set a high bar, but metroidvanias have never been shy when it comes to taking a leap. Since then we’ve had the unconventional Ultros, a visually distinct game about growing alien plants and splatting bugs inside an interstellar uterus. Now there’s a sentence that could probably only be written about a video game.
More recently came Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Developer Surgent Studios’ debut release didn’t always hit the mark. But its grief-driven narrative and setting inspired by African cultures and mythology blended into an often beautiful mix. One only enhanced by composer Nainita Desai’s engrossing soundtrack.
And then there’s Animal Well. Created by solo developer Billy Basso, it took one look at Prince of Persia’s confident swagger and decided it could do better, even without including traditional combat. Enigmatic, esoteric, and entirely encouraging an inquisitive nature, Animal Well is a truly singular exploratory experience that’ll appeal to far more than just genre stalwarts. But you’re better off reading Chris’ expanded thoughts than any more effusive adjectives beginning with “e” that we can cram into this paragraph.
And there’s plenty more to come…
Has all of the above failed to dent your desire to leap about gobbling up progression powers? Then the bad news is that you might be suffering from acute metroidvania mania. Fortunately, the rest of 2024 has exactly the fix you need. We can’t guarantee that these metroivanias-to-come will shunt Animal Well from its lofty perch, but they’re certainly worthy of your exploration-craving attention.
Yar’s Rising is an unlikely revival of an ancient Atari 2600 classic. Created by developer WayForward, it features a cartoon cyberpunk hacker infiltrating a sinister corporation and possibly gaining some alien powers in the process. Check out our interview with the game’s director to learn more. It’s due to release in 2024.
Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus is a hand-drawn adventure inspired by Japanese folklore. It promises an emphasis on aerial combat, with the fox protagonist utilizing a shapeshifting staff for both traversal and combat. Release is marked as July 17.
Mandragora partners those common bedfellows of dark medieval fantasy and soulslike elements with metroidvania exploration and a rather entrancing 2.5D visual style. Its world of Faelduum is overrun with monsters, collapsing due to the slow corruption of Entropy – a connected reality you can enter by aid of an artifact called a Witch Lantern. No firm release date for this one just yet, sorry!
Finally, Earthblade isn’t going to sneak onto our screens before 2024 shuts its doors, but it’s a game all fans of the genre should be eager to pen into their calendars. It’s from Celeste developer Extremely OK Games, meaning it has some mighty platforming (and musical) boots to fill. Described as an explor-action game, it features a retro pixel-art aesthetic (naturally) and follows a celestial being who returns to an overgrown and often unfriendly Earth. Expect it in 2025.
If Silksong does burst free from its lengthy metamorphosis anytime soon, we’ll be eager to crack open its carapace. But only once we’re finished feasting on all the other excellent metroidvanias 2024 has prepared.