QuoteCircle of the Moon opens with your character walking really slow. On your way to the item that lets you run, you pass a lot of places that are slightly out of reach, or blocked by something you can't interact with yet.
QuoteInitially, you're dropped into a fairly linear area with some side rooms, some of which you can't progress in without further upgrades. After the first boss, the game opens up massively, and you can discover many new areas, but also many places you can't reach.
This is a pretty common pattern in Metroidvanias... I guess I'll call it UNREACHABLE PLACES for now.
I think it is there to create a feeling of an 'open world', but if that's the case why are they unreachable? These unreachable places serve many purposes... We will need many more patterns than just one.
The funny thing is we're starting from a solution, and need to reverse engineer the problem it is solving.
SOLUTION: The player discovers obstacles which cannot be overcome yet.
SEEMINGLY BRANCHING PATHS
PROBLEM: Exploring a vast world is fun. But (for some reason) if you can go anywhere you want, [it's bad.] (maybe you can lose a sense of purpose too easily?)
SOLUTION: On a screen we can have multiple paths (why have multiple paths? for now let's defer their value to another pattern) where, upon close inspection, only one of them is actually traversable.
(Hmm.)
This definitely opens up new pattern space... what is the value of branching paths? I think these need higher-order patterns in order to understand them, since a branching path is really a relationship between larger pieces of the game.