Maptroid is a simple game following a pretty unique concept: What if you turned a Metroidvania's map into the game itself. Thus instead of traversing an open world, this game has you move as an icon on a large map screen. This in turn makes Maptroid a pretty funny game.

It's a pretty minimalistic execution, the map is connected squares that are only colored differently based on items being required to enter them. The "regions" kind of feel thrown randomly around the map and are never actually fully connected like you might see in a real metroidvania, so it does fail to feel like a coherent world. There are actually power ups you can find in the map, such as a grappling hook that allows you to move upwards, or a shovel that lets you dig downwards; these items really help the game to actually feel like you obtained movement upgrades like you would in other metroidvanias. There's also a storyline as well somewhat, which you can read by finding scraps of paper around the world, but unfortunately the font was not really readable for me for unknown reasons. Finally, I'd also like to give a bonus thumbs up for the game including an image of a "real screen" in the top right where a map normally would be, thus playing the main joke in reverse.

Overall, I think it's a pretty funny experience worth checking it. At most it would take you like fifteen minutes so there's really nothing to lose in exploring this silly concept.