"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"

Possessor(s) screenshots showing Luca in conversation and combat.

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.