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GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

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Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

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Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

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Gained 10+ total review likes

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Played 250+ games

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Played 100+ games

Favorite Games

Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds
F-Zero GX
F-Zero GX
Deus Ex
Deus Ex
The Witness
The Witness
Celeste
Celeste

358

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

022

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Before Your Eyes
Before Your Eyes

Jan 25

Metroid Dread
Metroid Dread

Jan 10

No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky

Oct 28

Grindstone
Grindstone

Oct 23

The Last Guardian
The Last Guardian

Oct 06

Recently Reviewed See More

About a decade ago, I got Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for the PS3 to fill the hole in my heart that God of War left. It looked and played very good, but somehow I just never got into it. Turned out, if you wanna play God of War, you should play God of War. Still, Mercury Steam had quite some success with that franchise and evolved ever since from the guys who successfully pitched a Castlevania game to Konami to the team who successfully pitched Metroid to Nintendo to a point, where they might now be their go-to studio for future 2D Metroid iterations. Still, when Dread got announced, while appreciating how stylish it turned out, I was skeptical and it would take a whole year for me to finally throw that game into my shopping basket.
The whole aspect of "Dread" made me worried. I usually hate games that would put you into stressful situations with timers or something hunting you, so how should this really be for me?
I sorta hesitated to really get into the game too quick, I expected the EMMI sequences to be something I might just have to live with, if I wanna experience that main iteration of that franchise, for better or worse. At first I ran around, appreciated how amazing it looks and how great Samus felt to move and traverse through the world but there was always the fear of something ruining the game for me, maybe EMMI or maybe some boss-fight thats just so frustrating or some other stupid design decision. I just didn't really trust Mercury Steam to take a franchise over, that got so iconic, a whole video-game genre got named after it (+Castlevania of course).

And boy, was I wrong.

After the second EMMI encounter, I realized the biggest problem I had was just in my head. I somewhere read someone saying, he would just treat EMMI encounters as puzzles and suddenly, they all worked perfectly fine for me. I just took the time to eventually die over and over again, but due to Dreads design-choice to just create soft-savepoints ahead of these encounters (or bosses) , this never got annoying or problematic.

Then came my second worry, the bosses. And it turns out, of all Metroidvania games out there (and there are a LOT) Dread might be the one with the best bossfights. They all feel superhard and make you question if you ever gonna beat this or just stop right here for ever. But they are always so cleverly constructed, that it never feels like the game's fault when you bite the dust.You just weren't fast enough. You just didn't dodge in the right moment. You just didn't understand that creature's attack pattern yet. And It's always made so easy for you to get back into the action and try again, just one.more.time. And suddenly you did it and feel like you can master ANYTHING. Dread really manages to push your self-confidence into space after achieving to beat a boss or solve one of the dozens of hidden puzzles where you need to combine a set of skills to get an item.

Everything else might have been said over and over again. The world-areas are brilliant, the integration of elements like fire, water, ice felt fresh (although this somehow has been there since NES times, idk how they did it) although I wish the game had more of those physics-puzzles; for instance playing with water-levels felt clever but these puzzles came just very irregularly and were so rare that in stress-situations you wouldn't realize you had to think that way as its more unusual for this game. A bit more would have made it more natural.

Special kudos to the crazy variety in enemies, many might follow quite similar patterns, but it was always cool to see something new.

And now to the one bad part of the game: the soundtrack. There might be a clear reason why it is what it is: Metroid expects the player to switch from area to area, sometimes within minutes, traversing a lot of different environments all the time. Of course it would be too much to always go through 15secs of that amazingly composed track just to jump into the next one, the next one ..... and all of that in a game that took me 16+ hours to beat. So yes, it's not really a problem, but still, it's funny when people say they couldn't recall one single track of the entire soundtrack after playing this for dozens of hours. And even that very backgroundy ambient soundtrack could still have a better production quality to fit the excellent visual presentation (like Hollow Knight!).
When the credits rolled, I almost facepalmed over the 1990s MIDI doodledeedaa. I mean this had some sort of old school style, but also was such a forgettable melody, I couldn't even recall this now. Although the Metroid world would have had so many great tunes to give.

The worst part about this somehow was, that it also proved how little a bad soundtrack could really affect the actual game. I mean, sure, maybe it wasn't so bad after all, or at least good enough to carry the atmosphere. But despite my problems with the compositions (or the lack of em) I just had the best time with that game. I mean literally. It quickly turned out to become my favorite Metroid game and maybe favorite Metroidvania ever. There's just so much done right here, so many small things, so many right decisions. After Metroid Prime 3, I really got annoyed by the Metroid concept to be returning over and over and over again. Always single rooms with returning enemies in the same places. Funny thing, Dread also follows these paradigms and yet it never becomes tedious. I still hope they try out more new things with Prime 4, but for Mercury Steam I believe they found an amazing balance between very old-school concepts and very modern approaches toward them that they should immediately continue to implement and further evolve in many, many Metroid games to come. They initially went to Nintendo, pitching a Metroid Fusion Remaster. Well 2 months ago I would've been on the fence about that, today it'd be a Day1.

It is ridiculous how a game this calm, slow paced and silent can create such opposing contrasts in perception. Up from moments of awe, love and appreciation for the amazing design choices the studio made down to frustration hell like I've never experienced it before.

I can generally accept a game demanding me to be patient, especially when it comes to letting an AI driven NPC find its way through the world. But there are so many times when actions just don't work, are misinterpreted and in few cases even buggy to a point where I had to reload the save file, that it sometimes feels more like being a beta tester to go through all the hurdles so the edges can be smoothed out. But they aren't and its a constant try, try, fail, repeat to a point where I just have my smartphone ready to play something whenever Trico again decided to go into a completely opposite direction of where I need to go. I mean the latter would still be explainable that this game isn't as straight forward accessible as a Super Mario or even Soulslike game where every input matters. But so often it feels less like having to guide a pet or a child even and really just like failing at trying to make that NPC-AI progress through the game. Trico is such an amazing virtual creation of a believable lifeform, that it sometimes feels sort of on purpose, when he (or she?) wouldn't go where you want just to state the fact that this NPC isn't like others. In many cases this indeed creates some nice scenes where Trico actually behaves like its following its own agenda, a concept that Team Ico already mastered in their previous games. Like Agro, the horse in Shadow of the Colossus, already stood out of other horses or even mounts, as he wouldn't just steer with a 1:1 transation of your inputs, but often feel like he would really just carry you and agree to the direction you want him to go. Back then, this workd perfectly fine. Here it often just doesn't.

And still I can only subtract one star as the brave decision to create something so unique over such a long development time that must have been pretty nasty, looking at how often this felt like being in dev-limbo and got delayed, can only be praised with huge respect. I am sure it is way harder to create something outstanding today than it was 20 years ago, at least on an AAA level but that's exactly what Fumida Ueda managed to pull off here.

I played this game halfway through and at some point it got me so unnerved, I had to stop it for a while, not knowing if I'd ever pick it up again. But at some point when playing through the Horizon Zero Dawns and God of Wars of this world, you just want to experience something that stands out so I'm glad I just let go and stopped fighting against that natural gravitation that would drag me back into this great world and its great story.Once you stop caring too much whether you progress or not, it becomes less frustrating. I wouldn't say that this is the message I want a game to have, but at least in this case it definitely helps and rewards you with an amazing journey like nothing that came before or after it that will definitely find a more durable place inside any gamer's heart than the next Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty game.