I played Steam's Top 10 Worst Reviewed Metroidvanias... it was painful.

today I found the top 10 worst metroidvanias on Steam according to user reviews and decided it would be fun to spend 30 minutes of my life playing each one in this video I'll be sharing my experiences with each of these games starting with the best of the worst Exodus coming in at number 10 with 52 positive reviews on Steam Exodus is the kind of game you'd see on a demo disc from the late 90s take one glance at never install and forget about forever but actually Exodus released in 2013 just one year before Hollow Knight's Kickstarter the trailer is 4 minutes and 16 seconds long I watched as much as I physically could opened it and started a new game and cried inside as the trailer played again without any option to skip this is the trailer that's four minutes long it's just threw the trailer into the game but I thought it's not so bad we'll only have to sit through it a single time then as soon as the intro ended the game crashed the time sitting through that trailer in this crash so I sat through the lore dump for a third time in the game finally loaded our character crash lands on an alien planet and is contacted by the Prime Minister who explains that the inhabitants of his City are trapped in a stasis pod to Shield themselves from a planetary environmental cataclysm which has doomed them all the prime minister doesn't seem too concerned about us even though we just crash-landed on a planet which evidently isn't the safest place to be he simply tells us to hurry up and save his City and so we set off to do just that Exodus doesn't have controller support even though it released in 2013 and the default movement controls use Zed qsd instead of wasd the movement in the game is slippery and your character has little range with their melee attack enemies don't perform attacks of their own they just run back and forth dealing contact damage if you accidentally touch them performing attacks consumes stamina which recovers slowly over time to recover stamina quickly you must Retreat and sit you have to stop what you're doing and sit to recover stamina to perform basic attacks oh you have to like sit here like a dumbass to recover your stamina at one point I saw a trail of collectible tokens leading off a cliff so I jumped off following the tokens as Gamers have been trained to do for centuries and I died from Fall damage when I respawned the game provided a tutorial stating I had to return to the location I died at to collect my tokens or I lose them for good so I ran back to where I fell and there was nothing there I ran to the cliff I fell from and there was also nothing there my hard-earned Exodus tokens are lost forever nowhere to be found one thing I loved about Exodus was it included title text for every room only they weren't the most creative the cavernous room was titled caves the meadow meadow the clearing clearing my favorite was throney tunnel not to be confused with thorny tunnel anyway I was was about to find one of the three keys to unlock the city that I was never told the name of yet was tasked with rescuing but when I attempted to continue to the Next Room the game crashed so I tried to load the save but the game crashed again in the following five minutes the game just repeatedly crashed and I was unable to continue to the next area and it dawned on me that Exodus was the highest reviewed game I was going to be playing today next is the ninth worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews curse of the sea rats curse of the sea rats is a self-proclaimed ratoid Vania with 48 positive reviews on Steam in terms of artwork animation and voice acting the production values are all there but does the game hold up no in the game you play as one of four prisoners aboard about heading to Great Britain where you're to be sentenced to death one would assume the prisoners of this boat might have a rocky relay relationship with their captors but when the boat is Shipwrecked by a witch who kidnaps the Admiral son and curses the seafarers to become Rats the Admiral turns to us the prisoners to save the day now personally if I were the Admiral of a ship and my son was kidnapped by a witch the last people I'd send to save him would be the prisoners I was taking to be executed and the game doesn't even justify it I also found it interesting just how unconcerned everyone was about being turned into Rats the only person who even mentioned it was the Admiral and even then it was only in passing other crewmates are more concerned about asking you to find some black pepper for their food or a poker card that they lost than the fact that they were turned into rats I set off and was promptly killed by a crab because the default amount of damage dealt by anything in the game is one third of your life even if it's contact damage and the only way to recover health is through consumables which are in short supply or just by dying like I did eventually I found the witch she summoned a boss who charged me knocking me back into the corner where I was immediately hit again and killed by contact damage my favorite thing but after returning I discovered the boss would periodically just fall over and let you wail on him so I just ran away until that happened eventually winning the fight curse of the sea rats wasn't broken like Exodus but that's the best thing I can say about it the game lacks anything that could ever evoke feelings of Joy or satisfaction but it's about to get worse because it's time to look at the eighth worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews Paradox Soul Paradox Soul actually looked interesting making me question why it only had 45 positive reviews on Steam it's a minimalist pixel art metroidvania set in a mysterious abandoned complex in Iceland 1987 filled with robots and the bodies of scientists we find a gun and are suddenly chased by a killer robot that comes to life I thought dang this is pretty neat I'm excited to see what this game has to offer but the plot twist is that I'd already experienced everything the game had to offer in the first two minutes and we still had 28 minutes left to go Paradox soul is the most repetitive video game I've ever played in it there are two types of enemies enemies who run at you which kill you instantly through contact damage and ranged enemies who stand in place and periodically fire bullets which kill you instantly to deal with ranged enemies you use the game's cover system while behind cover you have invincibility versus projectiles as long as you're not shooting so you wait for the enemy to stop shooting and then you shoot then you wait and then you shoot then you wait then you shoot until the enemies are dead or until you die of boredom I'm not sure if I've visited all the rooms in Paradox Seoul maybe I did they all looked the same because every room in Paradox soul is a hallway I would have liked at least to have been able to Traverse vertically between the hallways instead the game makes you use staircases to teleport to other hallways so your experience of moving horizontally through hallways is never at any point interrupted I'll credit them that at least they colored some of the hallways differently but even the music is made up of the same four to five second loops on repeat over and over foreign the first boss went as expected it floated above the room spawning insta-kill melee adds then fired a barrage of bullets from the side of the room and just alternated those attacks over and over Paradox soul is functional but there's just nothing enjoyable about it it's only an hour long but it's more like a 15 minute game stretched to an hour's length I did enjoy The Vibes and to be fair the game is priced appropriately at under five dollars but how about we get to the seventh worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews yamna The Legend of dongbeck yamna is actually a metrovania according to the devs so I can only assume it ended up at 43 positive reviews as a result of disappointed Metroid fans now to start off I don't particularly love when a game lore dumps you in the intro but if it does at least ensure the player has enough time to read the text before moving on the game's artwork inside is actually interesting but I was too busy desperately trying to read the subtitles before they disappeared to appreciate it at last the Jade Emperor and the allies of Hope the defeated were sealed or fled into the darkness and the world's once again knew peace uh got it we start off yumna in the midst of a raging Inferno the entire landscape engulfed with flames the protagonist remarks that they find the fires strange which might be the understatement of the year I proceeded ahead and met the game's first boss who stood it in place and asserted dominance after wailing on him for long enough the boss finally reacted with a giant yell and the screen went black when I woke up I was immediately sent to Lord yamna who immediately sent me on a quest to find a lost child to which I said okay as if I wasn't just knocked out by a giant demon and off I went in yamna landing gunshots causes so much screen Shake it's like an earthquake each time a bullet lands I picked up an ability called cat slash which I was excited to try but I couldn't ever figure out how to use it there's weird puzzles around the map that I didn't understand so I just hit every button prompt and apparently exceeded most of the enemies in the game are flying and don't have any Collision they fly through floors walls and ceilings to reach you performing an instant attack once in range if you thought Primal aspits or Crystal Hunters were bad you don't know bad flying enemies until you've played yamna it wasn't long before I reached the boss of the level its AI Loop was summoning a slime then walking back and forth across the room if you're in range while the boss walks it'll perform a single melee attack on you but the main issue was its Health you have to wail on the boss for minutes before it dies and there's no feedback based on how much damage you've dealt that same AI Loop of walking across the room and back just continues on forever my chat reminded me I was on hard mode so the devs just buffed the hell out of its HP to make it hard without even testing how long the fight would last I spent the rest of my time with the game trying to make a single jump and failing repeatedly dying four times in the process until chat told me maybe I should try jumping as the cat and I made the jump immediately by the way you can turn into a cat in yamna which is The Game's main redeeming quality but it's finally time to move on to the next game the sixth worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews dark matter when I opened the steam page for dark matter I was greeted by another PowerPoint trailer several minutes in length at this point I was already so exhausted playing these games I could hardly see straight let alone listen to another lore dump so I opened the Gameplay trailer instead where they boasted about the game's real-time lighting system its resource collecting and crafting system and its puzzles using interactable background objects now these systems might have been revolutionary for a Super Nintendo game but just like Exodus Dark Matter released in 2013 and even though these systems were basic back then they unfortunately still weren't executed effectively hence the game games 40 percent positive review score on Steam when I launched the game Dark Matter oddly enough opened up in between my two monitors opening up half on one Monitor and half on the other okay this is Jenkins already after troubleshooting I entered the game's tutorial and quickly learned that using background objects to solve puzzles really meant just clicking on every interactable object I could see to open the gate to the next area but thankfully you could reach those Gates faster because in Dark Matter your running jump gives you a speed boost like your Mario this was unironically the best part of the game Dark Matter plays like a point-and-click adventure game with none of the elements which make the genre enjoyable but all of the aimless Meandering and searching for things on screen to click dark matter is all hallways just like Paradox soul but replace the staircases which teleport you with ladders combat involves walking backwards while spamming left click on enemies your character doesn't have a Dodge so the only way to avoid damage is by Max ranging everything it doesn't help that enemies are bullet sponges sometimes requiring multiple reloads just to down a single basic enemy now you even though Dark Matter supports higher resolutions the UI doesn't scale with them as I played the game I was confused when sometimes the controls would just stop working but eventually I realized there was a stamina system in the game the bar representing your stamina is the tiny Square underneath your health the text in the game isn't really much better A lot of it is borderline unreadable just because of the size eventually I reached a point with a dead end so I turned around and backtracked through the entire map searching for new hallways to explore I returned as my 30 minutes with dark matter ended pondering what I could have possibly missed shooting at the floor and ceiling out of boredom when suddenly the door to the next area opened I don't know why did it open what was it that I missed I missed a tiny flare on the ground that I had to left click and shoot to open the gates I don't know why a flare opened it but I'm not about to waste another brain cell on dark matter because we're about to play the fifth worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews Humanity assets at first I had trouble getting Humanity asset to run I opened the game and received an error which said present fail title in the game crashed but even though Humanity asset received only 38 positive reviews on Steam I was excited to give it a shot after a bit of troubleshooting I started a new game and was greeted by this uh anyone else seen this frame rate now I like to think I have a powerful PC but it's evidently not powerful enough for Humanity asset so I had to play the game with a bit of slowdown and input delay but that's not going to stop me from enjoying it Humanity asset starts off on a spaceship at least I think it's a spaceship It's tricky to piece together much about the setting because all NPC dialogue is random one-liners they spit out as you walk past them I was able to figure out there was some kind of War taking place so I left the spaceship and began killing everything in sight combat and Humanity asset is simple hold forward and click on enemies until they die dodging is not a feature in the humanity asset because dodging projectiles is for wusses if Humanity asks that you take every damage that gets directed to you and it doesn't even matter because your health regenerates instantly metroidvanias typically leave Collectibles and unlockable abilities at the end of branching paths Humanity asset has numerous optional Pathways Each of which contain nothing at the end of them the game is just full of dead ends but you don't really need upgrades anyway because you start off the game Invincible there are guns you can pick up throughout the map but they weren't much different and require you to drop the gun you have currently equipped eventually I reached a mini boss which I killed by spamming left click and it dropped a weapon that was too heavy for me to use so I left it behind and backtracked to find another path all the enemies in previous rooms respawned so I had to clear them a second time I eventually found a new doorway above the mini boss and noticed a spot that I could slide into and roll through thinking the game was inviting me to enter but after I did I was sent off a cliff back into the room with the mini boss it took three minutes of walking to get back to the point I was at it was then that I realized I'd been listening to the same in-game music on repeat for 20 minutes straight the music is the best part of the game I don't even know if the music has changed this whole time it was awesome I can't wait to finish the game on my own time hopefully it doesn't melt my steam deck next up we have the fourth worst metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews nihil search at first I wasn't sure what to think about Nile search the developer States it's a pixel windscreen 2D action adventure game the art style wasn't my favorite in the game each area has its own color but the gimmick isn't executed quite as well as in Greece the trailer however had some banging orchestral epic music which I enjoyed even if the developer definitely didn't make it either way I was excited that the game at least wasn't a slideshow even if it only had 36 positive reviews on Steam so I opened it in my antivirus had something to say about that suspicious file detected wait a minute but it was a false alarm arm I think continuing on and praying the game didn't turn my computer into a Bitcoin mining operation I clicked star game our protagonist awakens saying only I'll find it promise you and we set off not knowing exactly what our protagonist intends to find inspecting in-game objects oddly provides commentary from a character named dad I wasn't sure if Dad was a figment of my imagination until I noticed the smiley face appearing when he spoke Dad wasn't the most eloquent speaker but I loved dad as a companion he was my friend and I was going to protect him really want to drink a latte although I can't drink at all hahaha Nile search begins on a street of vacant empty buildings there's a lot of walking so I'm glad that I found I could eat myself across the screen so quickly the camera couldn't keep up just by hitting the Dodge button eventually I entered a building containing in multiple rooms I could actually explore and the game began in Nile search anytime you land a strike on an enemy it causes an explosion of fireworks I eventually encountered a mini boss I had to hit repeatedly and I couldn't even see what was happening luckily the enemy barely moved I would have liked to have been able to heal after too but the only way to heal in Nile search is by dying I found a new area called residential area but died without finding a save point I entered building complex and died there too navigating the map of Nile search could have been more enjoyable with a healing ability but Nile search does have a pogo at least and you can even Pogo spikes but you only gain a few pixels of height with each Pogo so it's not easy to use I was proud after I managed to perform a pogo skip but then immediately died again and my time with Nile search ended which brings us to our top three worst metroidvanias on Steam according to user reviews starting with the third worst inescapable inescapable was in a way a breath of fresh air after some of the games I just played not because it's good inescapable was just so lacking in ambition that it couldn't fail it's the kind of game I'd imagine an AI might make if you asked it to make a metroidvania it takes all the boxes of a metroidvania but misses the point in practice inescapable is less like Metroid and more like chips challenge but if you took out the puzzles inescapable has 36 positive reviews on Steam it's the third lowest rated metroidvania ever according to user reviews inescapable begins with a crash landing on an alien planet but the gameplay is like if someone followed a game maker tutorial to create unlockable Gates and then spent months designing assets and building a world around that mechanic alone my biggest problem with the game is false advertising it's true that if you get soft locks behind the gate as I once did it's inescapable but this is hardly a metroidvania this is gate simulator 2013. inescapable is completely linear and has no music for the most part all you do is enter a room find the gate then run around like a dumbass until you find the key to the gates you then continue forward until you find the next gate I encountered one puzzle playing the game there's a pressure plate on the floor which opened a Gates containing an enemy holding a key to the room's gate beside the pressure plate is a gate opened by a switch behind which is a Wandering husk you have to open the gate to allow the wandering husk out then close the gate so it's trapped and forced to walk on the pressure plate repeatedly which opens the gate to fight the enemy and collect the key to the room's final gate after opening it you proceed through a linear sequence of rooms to discover a key to another gate but that's enough talk about Gates it's time to move on to the second worst reviewed metroidvania on Steam red goddess inner world if you took a bowl of dough and left it in the oven until it turned into a chunk of volcanic rock you would have a better argument selling your charcoal as bread than yanim Studio has selling red goddess in our world as a finished game red goddess inner world is a Kickstarter game which also receives support from an independent investor Yannick Puig was the game director and writer for red goddess even though he had no credentials as either he was an animator and the anim Studio was an animation studio yet they marketed their game on their Kickstarter as the most ambitious 2D platformer of all time they aimed to release on six different platforms with talent trees a bastion-esque narrator the polarity switching mechanics of Outland the character swapping mechanics of Trine the ability to enter and solve puzzles within the minds of your enemies Ronald jenkees writing the soundtrack a hostile world that dynamically changes to slow your progress and a delicately woven narrative about a young girl exploring her family trauma but red goddess in her world received just 35 positive reviews on Steam as you play Red goddess a narrator endlessly talks over the gameplay without pause describing every event every scene in front of you and how your character feels at every moment the narrator speaks so much the voice lines actually interrupt each other the narrator cannot keep up with the pace of the game it was a reflection of Hess once again that voice that turned from the dance the audio wasn't even balanced meaning the narrator was sometimes inaudible due to the volume of the music which was actually preferable red goddess's writing is plagued by a self-defeating heavy-handedness there is no subtlety here throughout the game a blue figure in our protagonist's likeness appears and provides helpful advice the first thing this figure tells you is that the narrator shouldn't be trusted even the steam store Page describes the narrator as an enemy the result is that the players just ignore everything the narrator has to say all one hundred thousand of his voice lines and if we're supposed to ignore the narrator what's the point of it what's the point of telling the player the narrator is evil outright instead of allowing the player to figure it out for themselves the gameplay wasn't any better my experience playing red goddess was just opening the map to follow a marker to the next objective and the combat was just matching the attack button I had a lot of miscellaneous issues with the game though like the Super Mario 64 font the subtitles being off-center the map menu playing music which overlaps with the game's music instead of muting it they're just overlapping interesting and the map randomly opening when I changed screens it felt like I had the map open half the time I was playing the game but one of the worst problems was the constant use of these circular load Zone structures which broke the pacing of the game it forces you to sit inside and wait while the game loads why use these throughout the world instead of using regular screen transitions yanim Studio intended to bring this game from pre-alpha when the kickstarter released to finished within just 10 months on the kickstarter Yannick Puig called his team a game Studio even though they'd never developed a game before if a teacher decides his sixth grade computer class should become a sweatshop developing The Next Star Citizen that doesn't make his class A game studio until they've actually worked on a game I could make an entire video about what a mess red goddess was but forget about that let's talk about the lowest rated metroidvania on Steam according to user reviews mice Topia mystopia only has 14 reviews a whopping 11 of which are negative which puts it at 22 positive reviews but while other games in my opinion deserved their ratings mystopia actually wasn't that bad I wouldn't give it a positive review but I think mystopia deserves better than 22 percent it's cute it's simple it doesn't have a narrator babbling in your ear the entire time maybe I'm just coping from the trauma of playing these games for seven hours straight but mystopia might be the best game in the entire top 10. mystopia has a nice aesthetic and I don't just mean compared to the other games I play today it's genuinely pretty good the Town you start in has beautiful pixel art especially the sprawling multi-layered background which really gives the illusion of depth the game make good use of colors in the caves there's the brown Cavern walls green Vines red mushrooms yellow lanterns and pink crystals and it all works together well there are some small touches too that give the game a bit more life like the game's particle effects and how the lanterns sway as you bump into them in terms of gameplay mice Topia is straightforward all the mice in town were taken into the caves and we have to save them as you find mice in the caves they teleport off into town and offer you an item or ability next time you visit combat in mice Topia however isn't great it has the combination of a very short-ranged melee attack against enemies whose number one threat is contact damage which is something we've seen a lot of today it doesn't help that your HP is limited to three and your only options to restore it are to die which we've also seen a lot of or to collect Hearts by breaking pots and repeatedly re-entering the screen to farm them but the core problem of mice Topia is much like Paradox Soul it's just too repetitive there's a real lack of incentive to actually defeat enemies so you quickly realize that avoiding combat is the way to go the level design is honestly also just boring there's not enough space for movement this is a limitation in the game design since all enemies are essentially Goombas feeling contact damage and the level design has to use corridors funneling you into them for them to ever be a threat although artistically the levels look nice there's almost no variety the map is enormous but it's pretty much the exact same rooms over and over that said after the exhausting grind of all the previous games I'd played mice Topia was a breath of fresh air it's just a simple game about exploring some caves and I like that and that's it I survived the 10 game seven hour Gauntlet of steam's worst metroidvanias according to user reviews in conclusion I want to say that it's okay for bad games to exist even unfinished ones but some of these games tiptoed the line where I'd say maybe they don't belong on a digital Marketplace for sale steam user reviews aren't a perfect metric to determine a game's quality but from what we've seen today I'd say it's mostly a pretty good one but maybe we have some viewers today that will one day become Humanity asset Fanatics maybe I'm a Humanity asset fanatic maybe Humanity asset will be the game that dethrones Hollow Knight as the new definitive metroidvania experience either way I hope you enjoyed the video and that you have a wonderful day peace [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: fireb0rn

Views: 969,785

Keywords: hollow knight, silksong, silk song, hk, ss, metroidvania, metroid, vania, castlevania, metroid vania, 2d, platformer, platforming, platform, action, adventure, exploration, explore, exploring, traversal, indie, independent, steam, dumpster diving, dumpster, diving, worst, lowest, poor, awful, terrible, bad, review, reviews, user, score, metascore, negative, mostly negative, exodus, curse of the sea rats, paradox soul, yeomna, dark matter, humanity asset, nihilsearch, inescapable, red goddess, inner world, micetopia

Id: QSInPRQXSBU

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023