cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
One thing I’ll say is that Chants of Sennaar is, to my knowledge, usually compared to metroidvanias, part of a subgenre sometimes called “metroidbrainia”, also known as knowledge-gated/rule-discovery puzzle games. Though it’s a bit debatable in terms of how much of it is gated by knowledge, and how much is built to be mechanical progression, but the general idea holds.
I’m also not sure if you can really bruteforce your way through it, but it’s been a while since I’ve played it.
You can’t totally brute force it, but you can brute force certain words IIRC.
But yeah, it’s basically a Metroidvania where combat is replaced by puzzles, but that’s my point. Souls-like is just a trendy new way to say Metroidvania. I literally can’t think of a functional difference between them. Every Metroidvania I think could just as well call itself a Souls-like, and vice versa, and nothing would change. I remember DS1 being called a Metroidvania originally.
The difference is almost purely aesthetic. Like I said earlier, possibly the only real distinguishing factor is RPG mechanics, but there are examples of games using either genre description with and without that, so I don’t think it’s required.