PREVIOUSLY ON METROID: Samus Aran, bonded with Metroid DNA in order to save her life from the X, a world-eating parasite she unwittingly allowed to flourish by genociding the Metroids of SR388, becomes a new type of life-form, a hybrid of Humanity, Chozo, Metroid and X with no name other than "Samus Aran", and destroys a plot by The Federation to manufacture copies of the most dangerous predators in the galaxy: first Metroids, then Samus Aran.

So, how does Metroid: Dread progress this story, after nearly two decades between installments? What are the big ideas and concepts that Sakamoto claimed simply could not have been accomplished until the power of the Nintendo Switch arrived? And how will Dread re-restablish Metroid's position as the queen of this genre in a world full of games like Hollow Knight?

The answer to all of these questions is more or less a shrug. Metroid Dread is a fine game, one that is extremely engaging and compelling in the moment to moment, with smooth movement, pitch-perfect feedback, and some wonderfully exhilarating moments, but it isn't so much an evolution of the Metroid framework as it is a Greatest Hits collection of some of the series most compelling ideas, but if there's anything on here that was simply impossible to create on, say, the Wii U I can't find it, and the story mostly serves to repeat Fusion's ideas far less subtly and far less competently, a narrative that fails to convince me that Nintendo has any ideas of how to follow on from the knockout ideas presented in Fusion and, to a lesser extent, Dread.

The most baffling thing about this game is The Twist. Namely, that it's presented as one at all. Why is Samus "being a Metroid" (great writing on that one by the way, gang. What, was "no samus, you are the metroids AND THEN SAMUS WAS A METROID" too good for you?) supposed to be a shock? We knew this. We knew this from the start of Fusion. Its implications were fully crystallized when you escaped the secret lab near the end of that game through a shaft full of Metroids who regarded you as one of their own. Don't get me wrong, I like this story idea and I liked it when it was in Fusion, but it's bizarre to reach the reveal the story has been building towards and have it be something I fundamentally already know, like if Return of the Jedi decided to reveal that Darth Vader was Luke's father...again.

Speaking of which, Raven Beak is a cartoonishly uninteresting antagonist, but the scene where Samus does embrace the Metroid part of her to destroy the origin of the Chozo part of her is a genuinely sick as hell beat that would have really hit if this game was about the Chozo or bothered to interrogate them in any way, but instead Raven Beak is just an Evil Guy who Must Be Stopped, functionally interchangeable with the faceless arm of the Federation Military that served as Fusion's unseen true antagonist. And it ultimately just leads into another sequence referencing a past Metroid game.

There's cool stuff here, but it's all stuff I liked better when it was in the other games, routinely done better in those games. I'm very surprised that this game has received little to none of Fusion's criticism of extended dialogue sequences because they feel much more frictional here, particularly a 5-minute long exposition dump around the midpoint where some guy just drones the entire plot at you, rather than having it unfold and develop over the course of the game. The twist regarding who's on the intercom is basically the same as the twist with the computer in Fusion except less interesting, the X being released from containment lacks the weight of the same beat from Fusion...Dread feels like a holding pattern, Metroid spinning its wheels as it aimlessly wanders in search of a direction.

Speaking of aimlessness, one of the feelings that really struck me playing Dread was how aimless progression in it feeling despite being extremely linear in practice. I won't go over again how purposeful and effective Fusion's linearity was narratively, but I will mention that despite the linearity, Fusion was still able to establish the station as a meaningfully interconnected and intersecting space in a way that Dread is painfully unable to. There's no sense of cohesion or distinctiveness to the myriad environs of ZDR, they all look so similar (barring the forest level) and you zip and back forth between them with such reckless abandon that I never got any sense of them as meaningful distinct spaces, never mind a full cohesive world that I could understand in my head. When I got to the end of the game and could start the scavenger hunt, I didn't. How could I? I remembered rooms with stuff that I could explore and collect now, but I had no idea where it all actually was because I had no sense of what ZDR actually looked like. It's clear that this kind of progression is just MercurySteam's style: it's present in both the absolutely abysmal Mirror of Fate and the mediocre Samus Returns, and I just don't like it. Even if it's just a Generic Desert Level, a Generic Fire Level, I want my environments in a Metroidvania to feel meaningfully distinct, rather than an identikit techbase smear.

What makes this especially egregious is the EMMI areas, which are literally identical visually no matter what area of the game you're in. I have no idea why this decision was made: there are already so many indicators of when an EMMI is nearby, why do we need to make the environment conform to them as well? I never felt hunted by the EMMI, never (ahem) dreaded them, because very quickly I understood them to be essentially a minigame, divorced from the wider gameplay and narrative experience.

It's a fun minigame, at least. Chases are genuinely exhilirating and tense thanks to how genuinely difficult it is to nail the precise timing for the QTE, thought the incredibly generous checkpointing does rob them of their bite eventually. Narratively they're a total dud and they don't really work within the macrostructure of the game, but they are at least quite a bit of fun in isolation.

That's kinda Dread in a nutshell, honestly. I've been very negative thus far but it's still getting three stars for a reason, and that reason is that moment to moment this is just an incredibly playable game, and I mean that as a compliment. Samus controls great, the stiffness that made free-aiming and counters awkward fits in Samus Returns have been smoothed over to create an experience that excels in forward momentum, constantly moving and shooting and sliding in a way that tickles my neurons in the way that pulling off a string of Prince of Persia platforming does, a natural flow of movement and combat that just feels great in the moment. I may strongly dislike the way MercurySteam constructs their worlds, but by this point their designers have become incredibly adept at individual encounters and rooms. A particular highlight is just how puzzle-y much of the item collection is: requiring genuinely tricky and thoughtful application of your moves above and beyond any other game in the series bar sequence-breaks in Super Metroid. Dread has the absolute least "shoot every wall to try to find the one box that has an item" of any Metroid game, and this, along with the routinely excellent bosses (obscene reuse of the X-infected Chozo Warrior in the final stretch aside, I swear you fight this guy like four times in the space of an hour) mean that this game has some of the best individual bits in the entire series, even if it never coheres into a knockout whole.

Which makes me wonder if this game would not have been better off if it wasn't a Metroid game. Would this combat and movement have been more fun in a more linear game, where the environments could be sculpted to provide constant specific challenges perfectly attuned to the moveset you have right now? Would this game be able to be bolder with its storytelling if it wasn't tied to this specific franchise? I don't know. What I do know is that Metroid Dread, as it is now, does not feel like a franchise comeback as much as it does an overly cautious, conservative game that ultimately functions as an argument for the series' irrelevance, its inability to move forward and compete with its contemporaries. Neither MercurySteam nor Sakamoto seem to have any ideas on how to move this series forward, and given MercurySteam's well-documented unethical working practices I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of them being given yet another turn at the bat. Even Samus' Metroid Metamorphosis, the most evocative, exciting, and cool thing in the game, even if it is largely an element from Fusion's story writ louder, is walked back at the end with another recycled plot point from Fusion, the X reuniting with Samus. The game ends on business-as-usual, Samus blowing up a planet and flying away in her Iconic Purple Gravity suit, an echo of past glories growing more and more faded and distant as the years go on.

She doesn't even save anyone this time.