I first played Fallout: New Vegas when I was 12 and it immediately became one of my favorite games of all time. For years, I kept a couple save files to revisit at my whim, each time specializing into slightly different builds, keeping different companions by my side, and, of course, making different decisions. The years went by and, as always, I get the itch again.

That familiar, bubbly sensation of nostalgia takes hold as the dim piano music kicks in on the truly antiquated start-up menu, as the crunchy “selection confirmed” sound effects crackle. My main save isn’t too far in, and so the world is my oyster. I know immediately what I’d like to do. One of the all-time great video game companions, Lily Bowen, is in a settlement called Jacobstown, just on the other side of some mountains from the starting area, Goodsprings. Although I'm at such a low level that the missions may not be possible, why not give it a try? I started out wandering away from the game’s nice, golden path, on my way to Jacobstown. Very quickly, something dawned on me: I did not know where to go. It’s been a long time in the real world and my memory fails me. And in the game world, Jacobstown is not marked on my map. Fallout: New Vegas is set in the Mojave Desert, so looking for “mountains” does not narrow the search. I can’t recall which quest or NPCs might’ve led me there.

Time for ole reliable: I’ll just retrace my steps. Jacobstown has a very memorable walk-up. It’s a more alpine area, surrounded on all sides by trees, green and deciduous, compared to the sandy wash and red rocks that cover the rest of the Mojave. But how to actually get there, hm. It’s unfortunate I have to try and remember how 12-year-old me got there. Not necessarily because it was a long time ago, but because 12-year-old me played games very differently. She did not know the “rules” of games and how they tended to be designed. She didn’t have a strong grasp of what was and was not possible in a video game. She couldn’t clock the signifiers of certain game genres and intuit, immediately, what the game wanted you to do and where it wanted you to go.

Eventually, I give up and look for a guide. The first one that catches my eye is a perfect 13 years old, and contains ancient, esoteric knowledge: to get to Jacobstown, you follow the road. 12-year-old me picked a road and followed it until she got somewhere. Because of course she did. That’s what roads are for.

Sometimes, I worry that I don’t know how to play games like that anymore. I cannot experience the game as a world with its own internal logic. I cannot figure things out by myself and need the game to tell me. I’m like the top comment on that video, complaining that the settlement is out of the way and the map doesn’t help you, even though there’s a clearly marked road leading directly to the front entrance.

It’s refreshing, then, to be proven wrong. If you play a lot of games, experiencing titles like Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn is genuinely like playing a video game at all for the first time again. This feels largely due to the way these games challenge contemporary notions of “correct” game design, requiring anyone who does play a lot of current games to mentally reset themselves to progress. The first difficulty spike in Outer Wilds isn’t a frame-specific parry or a meticulously planned out encounter, but the player needing to realize that they can go anywhere, any time, and do anything with the handful of tools at their disposal. Return of the Obra Dinn roars to life with the first "beast attack," but where each player truly recognizes that the only serious limitation in the game is their own imagination and thoughtfulness will vary. (Mine, funnily enough, was in the same scene. I made an educated guess based on his tattoos and everything clicked. IYKYK.)

Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn aren’t particularly similar games outside of this one trait, which could generally be described as “requiring the player to use their brain and not caring if they fail to do so.” Return of the Obra Dinn is a pure puzzle game, detective style. The player character is an inspector for an insurance company, sent to perform an investigation of the Obra Dinn, a ship which sailed into port with no living souls on board. Outer Wilds, on the contrary, is in a genre not often talked about nowadays, one with a history as old as video games themselves. It’s called an “adventure game.”

An “adventure” is an exciting type of story undertaken by an “adventurer.” An adventurer is a type of protagonist most known for their bold and curious nature, sometimes veering into impulsive and intrusive territory. Ergo, the primary way an adventurer interacts with their story world is by exploring it. Caves, crypts, castles, Ages, alien planets, archives, space stations, robot cities, robot factories, and hidden photography studios are just a few of the places an adventurer might end up in. Adventurers often find themselves talking to other characters or reading to discover more information, should the opportunity arise. The adventure understands that knowledge — simply knowing things — is what will satisfy both the adventurer and the audience, and what will lead to both the end of this adventure and the beginning of a new one. This approach to storytelling tends to result in problems for the protagonist that cannot be solved through brute force alone. So, an adventurer is also a problem solver.

Outer Wilds is about as pure of an adventure game as you can get, with its “action” elements stemming primarily from its real-time gameplay in perilous environments. This puts it in a direct lineage with some of the most beloved games of all time, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Shadow of the Colossus, SOMA, Metroid, and Half-Life, to name a few.

It should also put it in a direct lineage with the Uncharted series as well as, say, Red Dead Redemption or Horizon Zero Dawn. But those titles (and many like them) lack that extra factor that Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn have... the one where you have to think. The current, “correctly” designed, blockbuster action-adventure game asks as much of the player as the Fast and the Furious films ask of a moviegoer, which is simply to react to stimulus. See fast car and smile. See enemy, shoot enemy. When Aloy finds herself in the vast and beautiful open world of Horizon Zero Dawn, the serenity is quickly undercut by the overpopulation of slick, sci-fi UI pips all over the screen. Run over to the stimulating icon and press [△] to gather the items, in order to later break up the monotony of see-enemy-kill-enemy with holding [✖] to craft some more arrows. The story is explained in plain language, as each character carefully takes their turn looking into the camera to deliver exposition, which usually results in another UI marker appearing in the overworld to prevent the player from getting lost for more than an instant. These games ask for nothing, and that’s fine. But it’s only because of their proliferation, and the forced distance between them and other adventure games, that the gaming public feels the need to set games like Outer Wilds apart from their genre fellows. “Metroidbrainia” is a term which can only emerge when gaming encourages ignorance.

Now, a “metroidbrainia”¹ (or “knowledge node puzzler” or “information game” or “discovery game,” each of those unfortunately less descriptive than the last), the people say, is a game in which progression is gated behind comprehension. Theoretically, in a metroidbrainia, the player can skip large portions of the game with sufficient knowledge of the game world. There are no hard requirements; no necessary items or keys which can only be gained through specific means. Just knowledge checks. If a player with endgame knowledge were to start from the beginning, it would be trivial for them to advance to the ending.

But what precisely distinguishes a metroidbrainia from any other adventure and/or puzzle game, as with any poor genre term, is not concrete or objective. Return of the Obra Dinn is often cited, but simply popping into the game and filling out the list of crewmates with the correct cause of death does not feel functionally different than loading up the point-and-click adventure game Machinarium and blazing through it, knowing the meanings of various symbols and solutions to every puzzle. A Monster’s Expedition is an open-ended sokoban (block pushing) puzzle game with a myriad of rules never directly explained to the player. Is that a metroidbrainia? Are the Siofra River in Elden Ring and accessing the Nightmare early via the Lesser Amygdala in Bloodborne examples of “metroidbrainia elements” in FromSoftware games? Such a hyper specific genre term, built on nothing but the sensation of discovery, just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, even in such a media environment as we find ourselves.

As I experienced myself, when the most popular games provide nothing but “theme park” gameplay, those that ask the player to read, pay attention, investigate, and speculate can indeed feel different. But it’s crucial we remember that they aren’t. “Metroidbrainia” does not describe something new and certainly not something unique. More than that, it attempts to place an SEO-friendly tag on the inscrutable sensation that arises from progressing in a game which actually challenges the player to problem solve without outright violence or strict rules.

In short: A genre term for having to think? Be so fucking serious.

¹It doesn’t have anything to do with the much older genre “metroidvania,” although its name was derived from it due to metroidvanias’ reputation of gating progression behind abilities which are gained through recursive exploration. Just in case you were curious.