Looking for metroidvania games akin to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; and La Mulana.

Recently I've played a number of MV games that are often recommended. But they felt rather monotous to me. If I had to answer why, then I'd say it's because they put too much emphasis on fighting but not enough on exploration and immersion.

Here is more or less what I mean:

1. Progression - Many of the games I've played, despite being tagged as "metroidvania", were rather linear in their nature. And by that I mean something like: Go trough path B -> gate locked -> Backtrack to path A -> unlock the gate with lever -> pass the gate -> Go trough path D -> gate locked -> Backtrack to path C -> etc.

It technically counts as retrocative level design, but not what I am looking for.

In contrast to that, each stage in La Mulana was very densly compact. Sometimes the key was in the view, gated by three separate jigsaw puzzles, two of which you could be solved on the spot. Or sometimes the final piece was on the other side of the map that had a shortcut hidden behind a laying corpse. The clues were all over the place, but always within the proximity of one another.

And no matter what, it never felt like you had to backtrck from point B, to point A, and back to point B, just to never see either of those ever again.

The map in La Mulana is a massive strutcture that is inter-connected from all sides and it feels like a "hub". Each room in it, always has it's own designated purpose. None of the temple's halls are just "a filler to pass by and forget about". They all are tiny pieaces to the grand design of the game's map as a whole.

On the other hand if a game like Moonscars, for example, was completely linear from start to finish, with no back-tracking, then the overall dynamic of the game would not change in any considerable way, because it puts too much focus on the combat itself and much less so on the exploration of map.

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2. Visual ques - In both SotN and La Mulana the map is separated by the rooms. And each room is part of a larger sector. Just the usual stuff.

However there is an extar emphasis to make every sector look visually distinct from one other.

Take the dracula castle in SotN for exaple:

I am making my way up the tower that ends in a flat celling and leads to balcony to the side.

That means I am on top of the castle.

I am going up the massive empty hall full of nothing but stairs facing leftside.

That means I am near the throne room in the middle of the castle

I am trespassing the corridors of a tight tunnel with a granite walls and stalactites hangging from the top. There is also a lake near-by.

That means I am inside an underground cave beneath the castle.

There is never any confussion where I am. I could close the game, open it a month later and I'd still know, more or less, where I currently am, without using any ouside hints. All thanks to the dev team making sure that each major location is visually distinct form and even has it's own music theme.

It made the game really easy to navigate trough even if it was structered like a maze.

It really shows all the effort and mind put into it.

However in most other MV games the visual differences in each location are very subtel, if any. And they usually share the same exact color sheme with eachother. Which, to me at least, makes the games harder to navigate trough.

When playing, playing Hollow Knight I couldn't tell where I am unless looking at the map. There were some backgoud details distinct for each location. But because all of them had same look, of a gloom forest, with color pallet consisting almost exclussively of black, blue and greyish-white; I wasn't able to tell apart which is what. It's the same thing with Ori, and many other games I've played.

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3. Content - When I beat SotN, I was already impressed with the game's atmosphere and the upside-down castle trick it pulled, when it seemed that that the game was already over. But what really amazed me was when I hoped on the internet after beating the game and learning of just how much hidden conten/inventory was there scattered trough out the game without me noticing. Every enemy had a small drop chance for a weapon with either unique attack pattern or a special effect. And there were hidden rooms everywhere. Sometimes you had to use lighting spell at the right spot to break the hole in the celling. Sometimes you had to launch yourself as werewolf to reach the other side of the tower at the right velocity. And sometimes you had to bouce of off the flying enemy to reach the small hole in the wall. But no matter what kind of unorthodox methods you had to use, it was worth it, because the treasure was either a unique weapon, spell or even bonus movement utility.

It was always something that could enrich your gameplay experiance in one way or another.

I started new playtrough shorlty after, just to be able to discover all the content I've previously missed

But in the recant MV games I've played, instead I'd get the rewards such as"+100 essence", or "+1 skill upgrade". It just didn't feel like it impacted the gameplay in the grand sheme of things. Findings like that make me disinterested in searching for hidden content honestly. Beating game's extra content, while knowing that the only thing it gives you is a grindable resouce, is pretty much a sunk cost fallacy to me.

I really want each tool/treasure/booty I discover to have both meaningful and pracatical application. I don't want to beat complex maze just to be rewarded with 100 empty ability points, out of the 1000 necessary to progess a generic skill tree.

So with all that said, could anyone help me find the games akin those two mentioned in the title?

(It honestly doesn't even have to be metroidvania as long as it follws the same principals of level design as those two games)