Forgot what made me think about this topic but I’ve been considering this for a week or two… Curious what you all think.
When I mean “hardest” “video game”, I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it’s a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so… Hence I was curious about your rationale.
I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn’t share that in the main post to bias results…
Metroid Dread still kinda … bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?
I won’t go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they’ve been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you’d either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.
I’m not sure if that’s 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there’s just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I’m specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn’t make me go, “Wow, I need to get there!” but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?
certified Dread disdainer
I agree & I’m old enough to have played all the Metroid games when they were released.
The biggest problem with Dread is there’s a million games that have released since the last 2D Metroid that have done so much more with the genre that the name isn’t pulling it’s weight like it once did, and they forgot to innovate.
They tried to recapture the “oh shit” feeling of encountering X from Fusion in Dread, but the quick-time instakill events just made it tedious and annoying.
The GBA/DS Castlevania games are all 8/10+ if you’re a fan of metroidvanias and a collection recently released on Steam/Switch. They all take the same formula and change things to make it feel familiar, but different, and give you plenty of things to go back for after you’re “done”.
Finishing Dread became a chore about 2/3 through, it just stops being fun.
I’m waiting incredibly impatiently for Hollow Knight: Silksong, as Hollow Knight is pretty much the game all Metroidvanias is compared to at this point and it is top notch.