"Most of the games that are Metroidvanias are just Metroid games": The director of this Smash Bros-infused Metroidvania hates the word because "it's a silly term and Japan did it better"

Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash, and now Hyper Light Breaker studio Heart Machine is rapidly collecting every camera perspective for action games. Its next game, Possessor(s), covers 2D sidescrollers - a meaningful distinction from Hyper Light Drifter's more 2.5D look. "Next is a 3/4 RTS," jokes director Alx Preston at a GDC 2025 interview.

To my delight, Possessor(s) is also a Metroidvania, but it's also not a Metroidvania, Preston says, because Metroidvania isn't a great term. I kind of agree; it's one of those insular chimera so common to games where, if you don't know the source material, the genre label tells you very little. Sometimes you just have to accept whatever verbiage is common. Preston prefers a descriptive variant more common in Japan: search action.

"I'm trying to push the narrative of search action because I hate the word Metroidvania, because it's just a bad sounding word," Preston says. "And most of the games that are Metroidvanias are just Metroid games without even the Vania part of it. It's a silly term and Japan did it better."

What makes a Metroidvania - sorry, habit, a search action game - what it is? "You gotta have an Alucard, apparently, and a Dracula," Preston quips. Possessor(s) writer Laura Michet adds that "you gotta have a hot anime vampire" and "you have to be able to turn into a ball."

"Yeah, we actually aren't finished because we fucked up our ball tech, so we're working on it still," Preston jokes.

But seriously: "Some form of nonlinear level design is required for games like that, or at least interconnectivity between worlds, and some amount of backtracking should be expected for games like that," Preston begins. "I think there has to be a somewhat heavy reliance on a map to be able to see which things you did do or didn't do in the game, and again that reliance on trigger points to open up new spaces because I didn't have X item. You can gate it in different ways, but there has to be gating that you can come back to.

"It's no different here. Story or not, those are kind of the core mechanics that are true to the genre. Heck, you could make a Metroidvania without any platforming at all. It doesn't necessarily even need to be a platformer as long as you have those map structures and item reliances. That's kind of the formula. That non-linearity is what makes the genre so compelling to so many people for so long.

"Super missiles, that's the short answer."

Possessor(s) is quite big on its story - more so now than earlier in development. The decimated mega-city around Luca, a young girl now half-possessed by a demon named Rehm, has evolved considerably, and is home to quite a few characters. It's a bit of a pivot for Heart Machine, whose narratives have felt more ethereal and hands-off in the past. The presentation here is visual novel-esque and more player-facing.

"Much more, certainly more than Solar Ash," says narrative director Tyler Hutchison. "I really wanted to seize the opportunity to have lots of present conversations in this game, and as many characters as we could fit. Compared to Solar Ash, that world was meant to feel desolate and barren and robbed of place. It's great to be able to come in and try to really flesh out making things feel, even though this world has been destroyed, make it feel like there's still some people still clinging."

Possessor(s) is also more than just a platformer; it's a platform fighter, channeling Super Smash Bros. combat for a curious mix of juggling, bouncing, and physics interactions. There's no wave dashing, and directional inputs are "a bit unique" compared to Masahiro Sakurai's fighting powerhouse, but Preston says "it's not like we're asking you to do unseen mechanics that don't make sense with the perspective."

"There's a lot of Metroidvanias out there, a lot of search action games, and either you get shooting or you get some pretty basic melee combat," he reasons. "Slash, slash, slash. Hollow Knight introduced pogoing into the genre. Cool. There's that bird game, [Crowsworn], that looks pretty cool and has more DMC-style and shoot-'em-up stuff. I wanted to take the path on the mechanical side to say, I love Smash Bros. So do a lot of people. What can we learn from that and take from that to infuse into our mechanics to, again, further differentiate the combat? Because we really like doing combat stuff. We don't just want to do the standard slash, slash, slash."

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