La-Mulana 1 and 2. They have excellent music, and more importantly, the exploration is a lot more interesting than most metroidvania games. This is because these games are all about puzzles, which come in the form of riddles, lateral thinking, and so forth. You don’t complete any area in one go - rather, each place you can go has information about the other zones, so you criss-cross and cross-reference, completing them piecemeal. Plus, there is a great deal of cultural architecture for each area, making them very distinct. If you want an lengthy and difficult metroidvania that is all about the details, this fits the bill.

The original freeware version of La-Mulana is also worth playing, due to the audio and graphics resembling what could be on the MSX computer.

Image Image