It is, however, perfect background noise for when I'm playing on my Switch. I've been playing a lot of Hollow Knight recently - a sumptuous, confident, mechanistically elegant metroidvania set in a haunting underground insectoid world of dripping leaves and squelching moss-lined walls and noxious fungus patches and little hissing pools of fetid water.
... But what's a "metroidvania"? It's a genre of videogame that takes its name from two iconoclastic series of the 8- and 16-bit eras - Nintendo's Metroid games, and the Castlevania series by Konami.
Metroidvanias typically involve exploring a strange and hostile environment with a mixture of platforming and combat challenges. You enter a new area and it's a maze, rooms with lots of exits, and you want to make sense of the space, gain dominion over it, but it's too large. There's maybe a path to the left, a path to the right, some ledges you can climb with another path higher up, and a bizarre well in the corner in a structure like a dragon's neck. Which way should you go? You venture a little down one path, and it opens onto a new room, with yet more pathways off from it. Is this even the right way? You head back, try another path. It winds downwards, past enemies, and you have to leap across little platforms to avoid a fall to your death. You make it across, but then this way too branches into multiple rooms, all with their own exits. You go down one, down another, you're hopelessly turned around, lost, anxious. And you haven't forgotten that higher path in the first room. Should you have gone that way?
And these aren't welcoming passageways, either. They're creepy, slimy, littered with skeletons and strange alien symbols. The music is imposing. It's like you're descending into a creature's lair, into the underworld, down into the catacombs of your own subconscious mind. You hate it. You want to head back to the surface and to safety.
But you force yourself to press on. You pick a path at random, and push forwards, facing whatever is in your way. You leap chasms, fight nasty enemies, travel ever onwards. And gradually you make sense of the space. Most of the potential routes actually finish in dead ends, or in obstacles you cannot yet surmount - canyons too wide, ledges too high, lakes of lava or barriers of stone you are too weak to break - but that you will need to return to later.
So mostly you find yourself channelled in one direction, with perhaps optional side journeys with a risk-reward factor you have to weigh up, a little loop through a difficult section with extra health or ammo at the end, and a drop back onto the main path after that. And maybe the main path is like a larger version of this loop, with a fearsome boss at the end, and some new ability offered if (when) you defeat the boss - boots that let you climb up walls, say, and you use the boots to climb up out of the room in which the boss was housed, and you find yourself appearing back out of the dragon-neck well in that very first room, having completed a circuit, descended into the unknown, faced your fears, and returned with treasure.
And now those boots will let you access some of the routes that were previously inaccessible - and the whole loop begins again, and slowly you start to map out the world, bring order to chaos, defeat bosses, hoover up trinkets, and the strange becomes the familiar, and you make this inhospitable world your home.
And then you push far enough and you find a passageway that looks different from the others, with strange flora growing from it, and arcane etchings on the walls. You go through, and you're in a brand new zone, and the enemies are larger, you haven't fought them before, you don't know their attack patterns, and you don't recognise anything, and you're lost, and scared - and the whole process begins anew.
And on you go, deeper and deeper, or higher and higher, to the centre of the game's world, to the final boss, and to victory over whatever in the universe glances out at you from the dark and makes you want to hide under the covers.
And that's a metroidvania. A hybrid of platformer, exploration, role-playing and action-adventure game, traditionally in 2D, about navigating a complex maze and upgrading your abilities so you can push further into that maze.
I was meaning to talk about Hollow Knight, but as ever I've waffled too long in the preamble, so I'll have to do that tomorrow.
Early night now because working with Steve again in the morning.
Ta ra x
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