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.