It's fascinating to me how much Metroid Dread's greatest strength and its most disappointing weakness are intertwined. I love Metroid Dread's approach to linearity. The journey from the game's start up through ZDR to Hanubia will for most people be a straight line of sorts, the game always funnelling you towards an intended route, but it rarely feels like a straight line. Terrain will be redefined either in smaller instances or via impressive set-pieces to guide you onwards, even smaller item pick-ups are sometimes placed with leading you in a specific direction post-upgrade in mind. This aspect isn't perfect, there are times where you push at the edges of your surroundings a bit too hard and discover how boxed in you actually are, or where the game is a bit too keen to withhold rewards for your attempted backtracking and exploring, but for the most part it's remarkable how much the game maintains a sense of forward momentum, a constant stream of progress and discovery, without feeling as linear as it truly is as it repeatedly twists in on and redefines itself. In this regard Metroid Dread's level design kind of rocks.
Metroid Dread's level design also just kind of sucks. I can't remember the last time I played a Metroidvania game that failed so badly at making me feel a physical attachment to the world I'm wandering through, each of the areas of the game feels somehow at once both divorced and homogenous. I couldn't tell you, even after having beaten the game and backtracked for most of the power-ups, how each of the areas actually relates to one another; each section feels less like a part of an interlinked, believable world and more just like its own little videogame level. This is exacerbated by the game's love of warp points that take you from one arbitrary part of one zone to some far-flung corner of another; these feel necessary to make the game's approach to linearity succeed like it does, but come with the cost of making the world of ZDR feel much more explicitly videogamey than previous Metroid titles, and never allowing for the physical reality of this world and how everything links up to imprint upon you. ZDR never comes even vaguely close to feeling like a real world.
And yet all at the same time, this world blurs together. Part of this comes back to the warp points excitedly plucking you out of one zone into another, mixed with the constant forward momentum, meaning that you're given little time to build up a defined relationship to many of these biomes. More problematic though are the EMMI sections. Much has been said about these parts of the game and how hard it is to reconcile how great many of the moments of horror and tension found here are with how much these sections lean on a frustrating trial-and-error approach. My quibbles lie more just with the aesthetic though. Every EMMI section looks pretty much the same, and every biome tries to naturally loop you in and out of their respect EMMI zone a handful of times through patterns of tension and then relief naturally building towards their exciting climaxes when you're finally able to deal with that EMMI once and for all. It's a great gameplay pattern, but when mixed with the sterile aesthetic of these EMMI zones it's hard for ZDR to not just visually homogenise in your memory as a result, a blur of inhospitable, bizarrely zig-zaggy, blank white hallways.
Despite all of this, I still had a good time with Metroid Dread. The world left little impression on me, and the story is a mess, but as a rollercoaster ride of sorts Dread hits a lot of beats very well. Samus has never controlled quite this fluidly before, which isn't to say that Dread controls better than previous iterations (Super Metroid's movement is uniquely suited to that game's world design and atmosphere in a way that would make trying to put Dread's movement in that game feel misguided and crude at best), but it certainly is nice how easy it is to just drop into the game, how smoothly movement flows and how well the myriad abilities get to seamlessly function in tandem with one another. Even parts of the movement design that it feels like I should dislike just work; Metroid never needed a parry mechanic, but this one feels incredibly satisfying to land, suits the game's more action-orientated tone, and even the quick-time events that take advantage of it are used tastefully. There's a fair amount wrong with Metroid Dread, but ultimately a lot of it is also just really good fun and you can do a lot worse than that.
Metroid Dread's level design also just kind of sucks. I can't remember the last time I played a Metroidvania game that failed so badly at making me feel a physical attachment to the world I'm wandering through, each of the areas of the game feels somehow at once both divorced and homogenous. I couldn't tell you, even after having beaten the game and backtracked for most of the power-ups, how each of the areas actually relates to one another; each section feels less like a part of an interlinked, believable world and more just like its own little videogame level. This is exacerbated by the game's love of warp points that take you from one arbitrary part of one zone to some far-flung corner of another; these feel necessary to make the game's approach to linearity succeed like it does, but come with the cost of making the world of ZDR feel much more explicitly videogamey than previous Metroid titles, and never allowing for the physical reality of this world and how everything links up to imprint upon you. ZDR never comes even vaguely close to feeling like a real world.
And yet all at the same time, this world blurs together. Part of this comes back to the warp points excitedly plucking you out of one zone into another, mixed with the constant forward momentum, meaning that you're given little time to build up a defined relationship to many of these biomes. More problematic though are the EMMI sections. Much has been said about these parts of the game and how hard it is to reconcile how great many of the moments of horror and tension found here are with how much these sections lean on a frustrating trial-and-error approach. My quibbles lie more just with the aesthetic though. Every EMMI section looks pretty much the same, and every biome tries to naturally loop you in and out of their respect EMMI zone a handful of times through patterns of tension and then relief naturally building towards their exciting climaxes when you're finally able to deal with that EMMI once and for all. It's a great gameplay pattern, but when mixed with the sterile aesthetic of these EMMI zones it's hard for ZDR to not just visually homogenise in your memory as a result, a blur of inhospitable, bizarrely zig-zaggy, blank white hallways.
Despite all of this, I still had a good time with Metroid Dread. The world left little impression on me, and the story is a mess, but as a rollercoaster ride of sorts Dread hits a lot of beats very well. Samus has never controlled quite this fluidly before, which isn't to say that Dread controls better than previous iterations (Super Metroid's movement is uniquely suited to that game's world design and atmosphere in a way that would make trying to put Dread's movement in that game feel misguided and crude at best), but it certainly is nice how easy it is to just drop into the game, how smoothly movement flows and how well the myriad abilities get to seamlessly function in tandem with one another. Even parts of the movement design that it feels like I should dislike just work; Metroid never needed a parry mechanic, but this one feels incredibly satisfying to land, suits the game's more action-orientated tone, and even the quick-time events that take advantage of it are used tastefully. There's a fair amount wrong with Metroid Dread, but ultimately a lot of it is also just really good fun and you can do a lot worse than that.