Few genres have benefited as much from the retro-game explosion as the Metroidvania. Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, Ori and the Blind Forest, and my personal favorite, Blasphemous, all take the basic Metroidvania format and did something innovative and unique with it. Cathedral, recently ported to the Nintendo Switch after a successful release on Steam, tries to join the Metroidvania revival, with mixed results.
Many centuries ago…
Popularized by, well, Super Metroid and Castlevania, the Metroidvania is defined by its combination of platforming, exploration, and combat. Typically, you have a large map that you fill out by exploring the area. As you explore, you encounter obstacles that cannot be overcome until you unlock something new. This may be a weapon, a movement ability — something to let you move past it. The key is, as you unlock those abilities, you remember: Wait, maybe with this, I can…. It prompts you to backtrack and try new solutions to old puzzles. Story is often minimal, environmental. There is not much dialogue in Hollow Knight, for example, but the setting it creates — of a ruined insect kingdom — is evocative and memorable. It tells a story about a collapse.
Cathedral‘s story is slim, even by those generous standards. It gives you a brief crawl about the world’s history — spirit mages, demons — but otherwise, you are a wordless knight who has little interest in what is happening beyond escape. Except, well… you escape a few minutes in? And then you want to get back into the Cathedral? There’s something about Ardur, a malevolent god locket in the castle. But, well, he’s locked in there. No need to kill him, in my opinion.
It isn’t helped along by the world, which is largely a de rigeur fantasy setting. Morbid: The Seven Acolytes had plenty of design issues, but it paired it with a unique, memorable setting. Cathedral doesn’t. You explore a mysterious forest, a Necromancer’s den, a graveyard, a sewer. These are all areas, and enemies, that I’ve fought a thousand times before. There are a couple interesting areas, like the ‘Bone Church’, but most hew towards the basic. It’s hard to get excited about exploring areas that seem familiar before you even set foot in them.
… before the monsters came…
Combat in Cathedral is pretty basic. Hit enemies with your sword. Block them with your shield. Shoot them with an arrow. Or, in a suspiciously Shovel Knight-esque animation, bounce on them pogo-stick style with your sword. The combat feels pretty smooth overall, though enemies hit hard, you have low health, and healing is rare. But there’s a weird problem I noticed a few hours into the game.
Enemies just… walk into you.
Many enemies don’t really appear to have an attack animation as such. They just… walk into you. This makes your shield functionally useless in most fights. It also makes some enemies deeply irritating. Because you aren’t blocking or parrying, the only thing you can do to stop an enemy from walking into you is turn around and walk away from them. But of course, you can’t fight when you do that. And if they’re the same speed as you, you never actually gain any distance. You can solve this by pogo-sticking the enemies, but flying foes will fly upwards (trying to walk into you again), which can push you into the ceiling and force you to take damage.
Also: Enemies respawn as soon as you leave a room. Many games have enemies respawn upon death, or when you rest at a save point. This lets you clear out areas so that you can explore more easily. Backtracking isn’t so bad when you are running through an area you’ve cleared out already. But here, if you leave a room and then realize you went in the wrong direction, well, I hope you want to have every enemy on the area on your tail again.
… our world lived in prosperity…
Speaking of… we need to talk about backtracking.
Backtracking is a vital part of the Metroidvania. The genre demands that you revisit old areas with new abilities and experience them in different contexts. Part of what helps mitigate the potential frustration of backtracking is a robust map system. Cathedral does not have that. I would go so far as to say that Cathedral has a pretty bad map.
Let’s say you are exploring the graveyard. You come across a gate. The switch to open it is just out of reach. Clearly, this is an area to which you will return later, when you have acquired a new movement ability. But your map doesn’t reflect that. Instead of showing that there was an impassable obstacle here or showing that you were only able to access a small section of the larger area, the entire box fills in. Now you know that you’ve been here, but not why you stopped here. Return to the game a day later and you’ll likely have forgotten why you went there, causing you to replay large swaths of the game over and over trying to figure out where you’ve been.
Elden Pixels did include the ability to mark your map, which is helpful — but you can only mark a room, not a specific point in it, and you only have one marker. There’s no way to differentiate between, for instance, things that need a new movement ability vs things that need to be approached from another direction.
And it doesn’t help that the game is obsessed with secrets. In Super Metroid, there were parts of certain walls that could be blown up to unlock hidden extra upgrades. The developers clearly liked that idea, because there are a ton of unmarked destructable walls and blocks. Most of those hide skippable power-ups or money (which you rapidly run out of things to spend on). Some hide vital power-ups to your armor. And some, you need to find to progress. Eventually, you learn to just smack everything with your sword, which… isn’t the most engaging gameplay in the world.
… with vast resources of spirit magic.
And yet, I’ll be honest: I came very close to 100%ing this game. Because for all the flaws of the game, moving through its world feels good. I liked finding some of those secrets. One itch that few modern games scratch is exploration. Because AAA games are expensive as hell, they want you to see everything they made. I like it when games have things that are off the beaten path. Cathedral does that, and does it well. There’s a genuine thrill of discovery when you find a hidden area or crack a secret puzzle.
And the movement abilities are excellent, though a bit too slow to arrive. Initially, I was worried that they would be too basic. The basics are there — double jump, dash — but they’re paired with telepathy, a ‘bone wand’, and a magnet. While the game does hard-lock some areas behind movement abilities or gates, others are locked around puzzles you need to find the tools to solve. You need the magnet, for example, to get into certain areas by using it to manipulate metal blocks in certain patterns. Because of this, the game has room for puzzle bosses, too! One late-game boss forced me to use the magnet and bone wand far more than the sword, and it was my favorite boss in the game.
Speaking of the bosses: They are hard. The final boss, Ardur, is absolutely unforgiving, a three-phase fight that ended up being more tedious than rewarding. There’s a fine balance for a tough boss fight, and it will differ from person to person. Cathedral‘s, particularly Ardur, falls on the wrong side of that balance for me. That said, most of the bosses are challenging in an engaging way. There are a few that are more like puzzle-platforming challenges than traditional bosses, for instance, and the ones you had to fight typically had a more manageable amount of health. The game tests your skill, but for the most part it doesn’t demand perfection.
The prophecy speaks of a second war.
Look, I love Metroidvanias. It might be my favorite genre. And there’s enough Cathedral gets right, particularly in the smooth gameplay and mostly solid platforming, that I enjoyed my time with it. But this is a game for hardcore genre fans looking for a fix between big releases. I wouldn’t recommend it to the average person on the street. The difficulty level is high. The frustration level is even higher.
It’s clear that Cathedral wanted to be big. Its map is expansive, and includes optional side quests and multiple villages. Every major dungeon includes another major sub-area. Each of those has a boss, most of which are quite difficult and time consuming. This is a gigantic game. If you’re a completionist, you may well end up putting 25-30 hours into this. And I’ll be honest: I could stand for it to be a bit shorter. Give me more fast travel options late in the game. Be more generous with save point locations and portals.
Cathedral is, in the end, a flawed game that is almost great. It comes close. Hell, at times, it really was captivating to play. But in a game this size, small annoyances can add up to a lot, and they definitely overwhelmed me at times. The Switch port works beautifully, with no real performance issues. If this kind of game is in your wheelhouse, there’s plenty to love here. But you’ll have to dig for it.
