Metroid Dread: The Kotaku Review

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I admit I was skeptical. If a game is to truly evoke a sense of dread, as the Metroid Dreads title seems to promise, I think it must be thorny, aggressive, and hostile in ways I wasn’t convinced the Nintendo of 2021 could deliver. Guys, I was wrong to doubt: Metroid Dread is a game with conviction. He engages in his efforts to put you on the edge, to deny you a feeling of pure domination over your opponents and your environment, and for that I applaud him. However, it also lacks the immersive and atmospheric attraction of the most beloved Metroid games. The result is a slightly cold game that possesses raw technical skill that I admire intellectually, but not the Metroid magic it needed to win my heart.

At the beginning of Dread, the Galactic Federation sends intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran to the uncharted planet ZDR. The heavily armored EMMI androids that preceded her have gone silent, but the strange world may hold clues to the virulent parasite X. Being Samus immune, she is the natural choice for such a dangerous mission.

As I wrote after playing for about an hour, the start of Dreads is wonderfully unsettling. You find yourself promptly stuck in the cavernous bowels of ZDR, stripped of your powers after your ass is delivered to you by a mysterious Chozo warrior. As you communicate with your Adam ship’s computer, your mission is framed less like Tackling the Threat on ZDR as the tough bounty hunter you are and more Stay alive and get back to your ship so we can get out of here. It’s a narrative setup that sets the tone: you don’t have the upper hand here, not for nothing. Indeed, you are in danger.

This EMMI has seen better days.Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

That setup wouldn’t have much weight, however, if the gameplay didn’t support it. He does so, relentlessly and mercilessly like the EMMI themselves, who have been transformed by a corrupting force into Terminators who will stop at nothing to capture Samus. Scattered around ZDR, the seven robots each patrol their own area and, when Samus enters their territory, the tense game of cat and mouse begins. Your weapons are powerless to stop them. They hunt you down with speed, agility and cool precision, their movements both graceful and haunting. If caught, you have a chance to run a counter that stuns the robot and lets you escape, but it’s very difficult to get the timing right. You fail the counter and the game is over. Thankfully, when you get caught (and you will be, many times), the game shows some mercy and puts you right outside the EMMI zone door so you can give it another chance.

This could have been a recipe for boring, trial and error gameplay, but in Dread it never becomes. The EMMI feels lively enough and varied in its responses to your behavior that evading it is not just a simple game case of AI, and usually, when I was caught, I could see where I went wrong, how I would let myself get into it. cornered rather than using the environment and my powers as a temporary cloaking ability to my advantage. Because EMMIs are such formidable enemies, the doors in their zones have always filled me with a feeling of dr … let’s say apprehension … and sometimes I took a deep breath or two before venturing to face them.

Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

The games aren’t all running for your life, however. You are still Samus Aran, the greatest bounty hunter the galaxy has ever seen, and of course, you will eventually turn the tables on each EMMI.First, you must find and defeat a living computer (called the central unit) in each of the their areas. These giant eyeball brains are a beautiful piece of world building, clearly part of the same lineage that gave birth to the Mother Brain series villain, although the connection, refreshingly, is never explicitly spelled out.

By gathering the power of defeated central units, you temporarily gain an explosion so powerful that even the EMMI is vulnerable to it. Even then, however, defeating them remains a tense affair. You can only charge and fire these explosions when you are stationary, so you need to create space between you and your prey and fire at them as they approach you, praying that they have given you enough space to finish the job before they close the distance and finish you. Once again. I exhaled with relief every time I finally turned one off, knowing that I could now move around that area in relative safety.

It’s relative safety, however, as EMMI is hardly the only threat you face in Dread. Regular enemies patrolling caves and tunnels also leap forward. If you don’t keep an eye on your health, it’s easy to find yourself dying from an attack by a common worker. To keep your health high, you are incentivized to defeat enemies by landing melee counters just as they attack and then tear them apart, which causes them to give up much more health and missiles than they would otherwise. It’s clearly an effort to keep you more engaged in combat with normal enemies, but after years of playing games that pushed me to thwart enemy attacks just when I see a bright flash, I don’t find it very interesting anymore. On the contrary, it made it seem that dealing with these enemies was a mechanical and Pavlovian process: see flash, push the button, get a reward.

Yet the garments are truly engaging. You have to play carefully, learning their signals and avoiding their attacks, lest they do you a short job. Gone are the days when you could tank a boss with missile spam and some energy tanks, killing them faster than they could kill you. Here, each extra tank allows you to only take an extra hit or two before death. Dreadlock bosses are strict teachers – learn or die. This meant that when I learned how to attack a boss well enough to win, I often did it flawlessly, which was always a satisfying result after repeatedly being smashed.

However, the demanding demands of Dreads’ boss battles sometimes go too far. One particular endgame fight pits you up against a multiphase boss, and I finally mastered the first two phases well enough to complete them each time, but still struggled with the third. Every time I died, I had to spend minutes repeating the movements of the first two phases, just to have another chance to get the final bad form. After one of too many cycles, I was tempted to smash my awesome OLED switch into pieces.

Metroid Dread Quote on the back of the box

“Warning: the game title is well chosen.”

type of game

Metroidvania, emphasis on Metroid.

Liked

Samus’ agility, the game’s commitment to push yourself to the limit.

I did not like it

Sterile visual style, clumsy storytelling.

Developer

Nintendo, MercurySteam

Played

My file says about eight hours, but if you count all the times I’ve died, that’s a lot more.

In a way, being Samus Aran has never been better. He moves with remarkable speed and agility even by the standards of the series, possesses a new slide that feels like a natural part of his moveset, and gains all the traditional powers that make conquering the best Metroid games so satisfying. Upgrades like the gravity suit, which allows you to move through the water as if it were air, and the space jump, which allows you to jump not just two or three times but endlessly, are still so liberating that they almost seem to cheat. Yet despite offering all this proven satisfaction, Dread doesn’t rank as one of the most memorable games in the series.

This is because the best Metroid games earn a lasting place in our memory not only by virtue of the joys of being Samus and gradually becoming more powerful, but through excellence in atmosphere, music and an elegantly minimal approach to storytelling. The visuals of Dreads are by far the most advanced of any other game in the series, and there’s really something impressive about the way the camera sometimes swoops seamlessly to show how good Samus is up close. But there is also something a little sterile about the look of this game. The environments of the Super Metroids have a mood. Feel something in the dim blue illumination of the space station, the eerie stillness of the wrecked ship. Dreadlocks’ environments, for all their clean lines and sharp edges, never draw you in the way they do.

Likewise, dread music is missing something. He lingers in the background, commenting on the action but not calling attention to himself. I think 2D Metroid games require music that you remember as part of the experience; scattered melodies that capture Samus’ isolation and robust hymns that celebrate her fearless heroism.

Samus remains a fashion icon.Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

And then, there is the story. According to Nintendo, Dread marks the end of the story arc centered around the strange interconnected destinies of Samus Aran and the Metroids. I have been playing these games since the beginning of that saga, and I am disappointed with this conclusion. Without going into specific details, it offers a villain who feels left out of the court and offers a clunky dump of lore than a monologue in a series best served by mystery and narrative simplicity. Samus goes through a few changes towards the end of the game that seem exactly right, even inevitable, as the series whizzes towards its climax, but that evolution of Samus as a character deserved a more subtle and better story.

So here we are. Presumably, the saga is complete and I am left with mixed feelings. I am glad that Dread is really in favor, that he wants to make you feel hunted and disadvantaged and that he is willing to feel hostile to succeed. The result is the feeling that survival itself is a more significant reward than all the updates in the world, a feeling I rarely get anymore from games. But ZDR has never fascinated me like Metroid’s previous settings, and as a conclusion to the story arc, Dread seems to misunderstand what made the first few chapters resonate. Samus is wonderful, a survivor, an icon, and endures. But when I look back on my time with her over the past few decades, Dread will forever remain in the shadow of my favorite Metroid memories.

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