Oh, My Doug! makes one man's anatomy the map you have to learn

The premise is a joke with a level design underneath it. Doug is middle-aged and unhealthy, and one day he decides to get in shape. The tiny inhabitants living inside him experience that decision as the end of the world. You are two of them, and the game is to explore, fight and shoot your way through the body of the man who is trying to get rid of you.

What makes it a Metroidvania rather than a themed shooter is that the regions are organs. Interconnected biomes built from bodily functions means the map arrives carrying its own rules: things flow one way, passages narrow, and the route between two places is already implied by what the body does with it. Most Metroidvanias have to invent a reason why the ice cavern sits next to the sewer. Anatomy hands over the adjacency for free, and the grotesque comedy on top of it.

You control two mismatched heroes at once — the store page calls it a single-payer co-op, which is roughly the level of humour throughout. Mechanically it means the toolkit is split in half. Each one carries abilities the other does not, exploration is the two sets used together, and the running gag is that their personalities combine far worse than their movesets do.

Then there is the arsenal, which is the part most likely to decide whether this holds up. Ride an Acme rocket. Throw a portable hole. Blast flames out of a squid. Every one of these runs on cartoon logic, and in a Metroidvania that is not only a gag — a portable hole is a door, and a rocket is a traversal upgrade wearing a punchline.

The world design of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes argues that cutting a planet into temple-sized regions makes exploration lighter to carry: you can hold one region in your head, finish it, and move on. A body is that structure by default. A mouth, a stomach, a bowel — each is a named container with an obvious edge, so a lost player still knows which one they are in. The warning in that same essay is what happens later, when the game stops respecting its own compartments and asks you to hold all of them at once.

The genius of Prey’s Gloo Cannon is about a weapon that quietly handles traversal, hazard control and improvisation as well as damage, and is remembered for exactly that. It is the bar a portable hole has to clear. If the outrageous weapons are only damage with a funnier animation, the arsenal is decoration; if each one opens a space that was closed a minute ago, the jokes are the progression system, and the game can afford to be generous with both.

Shovel Knight’s signature moves makes the case that one distinct verb can carry a whole platformer, and that changing the verb changes what the same room means. Two heroes held at the same time doubles that problem instead of halving it. Both movesets have to stay legible under pressure, and neither can be a strictly better version of the other, or the pair quietly collapses into one character with extra buttons.

Oh, My Doug! is by [Odd Men In Studios](https://oddmenin.com/), self-published, listed as Coming soon on Windows with no date announced yet. Action, Adventure and Indie, single-player, with full controller support, adjustable difficulty and camera comfort options.

The animation is the part that cannot be faked. A large cast of bizarre creatures drawn frame by frame is where the budget goes on a game like this, and it is also what buys the tone: hand-drawn to the standard of an afternoon cartoon is what lets a chat with a sperm cell or a night spent in a tooth cavity land as charm rather than as shock value. Razor-sharp controls under a loose cartoon look is a harder combination than it sounds, because the art keeps promising forgiveness the platforming has to deliver.

If the appeal is being inside a living thing and treating it as terrain, KAIJECT is the other one on this list — you land on a giant monster and drill your own route through its organs. Same idea approached from the opposite end: KAIJECT lets you cut the map you want, while Oh, My Doug! makes you learn the one the body already has.