My first few hours with Dread had the slightest twinge of disappointment to them. Mechanically, this is almost certainly the best 2D Metroid game. Samus is a joy to control, with a perfect blend of agility and weight, and movement options like the dash and grapple that build and stack on each other wonderfully. Combined with all the little animation details and comfortable controls, the simple act of moving has never been better. The combat is also probably the series best, since even if the counter mechanic reduces many individual enemies into simple parry fodder, and the bosses all feel just a little too slow for how spry and agile you now are, there’s lots of fun and fairly difficult boss fights that balance the badass interactive cinematic moments with actual 2D fast paced combat well (this is also arguably the only 2D Metroid with a good final boss. And it’s a great final boss.) The aesthetics, particularly in music, have a few missteps, but the amount of background details in the fauna of the world and their reaction to you was consistently dazzling to look at, and some of its sparser foreground lit tunnels and caves look almost painterly.

But I don’t like the Metroid games because they’ve had great combat, or even exploration. I like them because their ability to convey an empty, alien, and hostile mood is unparalleled, and the ability to (in the few of them that have ventured to do it) tell more traditional and involved stories that tie in perfectly to their mechanical and structural decisions. Dread grasps the former right away. The initial jolt of panic the first couple EMMIs induce is perfection, and the knowledge of their impending presence because of specially marked barriers is a perfect cause of momentary panic. Hell, even when the EMMIs fail to really keep up with your own advancement and very quickly become rather trivial, it feels like the game showing off its understanding of Metroid’s repeated story as ultimately one of gaining control over your surroundings from within, of using the hostile world’s own weapons and history against it. Even the little details of environmental storytelling, like empty and mechanical EMMI zones being reclaimed by the natural life or the forest zones slowly thinning out, hit beautifully. Where it seemingly falters, though, is in the overt narrative.

The set up is sound. Instead of a deep venture into the world to then escape it, as usual, the intent is escape from the outset. The idea of helplessness is underscored to a near comical degree from the very beginning, including from a suspiciously out of character speech from ADAM. But as Dread dumps more and more lore drops about past warring tribes and pulls the Chozo from the dead yet again, it’s a bit hard not to feel like the writing here has lost the theme in favor of pure plot. The idea of ending conflicts long past and Samus saying goodbye to her entire history once and for all is an admirable one, but one begins to get the sense that there was a little more lore dumping happening to let any of it sit. The Fusion-esque structure of getting instruction from ADAM begins to feel purposelessly rehashed, a needless attempt at harkening back to the much more narratively cohesive game’s story of breaking free from control.

And as it turns out, that’s exactly what it is. Moments before the game’s final boss, Samus pops the false shadow of ADAM like a balloon, to reveal the game’s overarching villain behind it. The hollow recreation of Fusion clicks into place. In Dread, the classic Samus self-actualization formula of the series is in and of itself the villain’s scheme, a controlled illusion of power and freedom to extract Samus at her most powerful and seemingly free in an underestimation of her will and ability. Moments before its ending, Dread’s story comes alive as not just a story of gaining the strength to grasp one’s own autonomy, but also one of the many obfuscating layers and levels in which the resistance to self-realization manifests.

TL;DR
Fusion is The Matrix. Dread is Matrix Reloaded.