Incidentally, playing Wuppo made me realise how few metroidvanias actually use systems like a day night cycle, world events on fixed timers like trains, global states that tick up over time (like city debt)

I have been mulling over using a compute shader or similar to run live systems across a smaller interconnected world like this - I think the trick is to really let the player engage you need to make digestible repeatable chunks, so they can't mess up 10+ hours of gameplay accidentally.

Idea: Demonic possession that evolves like a virus starts melting your face off, but after a few generations is treatable with mild symptoms. Most people have a possession or two but with one hail mary a day they are safe. Some have an occasional relapse and crawl up the walls.

Further, I could easily imagine a metroidvania style game where you use weapons and other tools to progress but only get so many uses between checkpoints

This strikes me as a great idea for a puzzle style game - much like what neon white does with its gun cards per level

I wouldn't be surprised if content updates did this anyway - playing Hollow Knight at launch was quite different before Godmaster, Lifeblood, Grimm Troupe, Hidden Dreams. It made those early sections much more "full" - so I wouldn't be surprised if this time some room was left for them to occupy.

The rough parts feed into each other, with a few tweaks to healing or access to toolkit would hugely lessen the struggle. A lazy thing would be to make healing half as effective and costly, so you could do it twice as often. A finer touch would be having different moves show up earlier.

I suspect that a big balance patch is going to hit at some point. I respect exploring different design spaces, but a lot of people are going to bounce right off. For reference, only 18% of players on Steam beat the Radiance - I think anyone that didn't is going to struggle with Silksong.

I mean, I hope the fungus stays cool - but this guy was getting into all the medical equipment, so it may be a problematic hobby after all.