There's a new seasonal structure creating an incentive to play regularly, so I imagine I'll be at this quite a bit more now.

Mindlessly chasing down these item markers on the map is really making it obvious how monotonous both the level design and the enemies are. This is a very tedious experience, which is why I'm only finishing off one area each day.

Grinding out the Festival of the Lost. I really need to stop procrastinating these things and killing myself to do them at the last minute.

Played through the Halloween event assignment. Took me a minute to remember how to play, but I had fun joining with groups.

I'm still working on item completion, one area at a time.

Some of the optional upgrades require using a technique that launches you a long distance using a power bomb while attached to a wall with the spider ball. The game does not teach or communicate to you anywhere that this is a thing that you can do, and there is no precedent for it in the series. This is crap.

A number of the convoluted puzzle rooms guarding collectibles can simply be skipped once you have the hatchling. This is crap.

The unlockable Chozo Memories are cool, but it would have been a lot cooler if their story was told within the game.

I just meant to try the game out briefly and get the Halloween event skin unlock, but I was blown away and wound up playing up to halfway through Chapter 3. I was already into the concept of turning Snake into a sort of persistent rhythmic puzzle crawl, but the execution is so good. Puzzles are clever, the continuously evolving music is excellent, and the way you progress through the temple/dungeon is very cool, with loops and new paths contingent upon increases in length and even later chapters passing back through earlier spaces from a different perspective. There's even a story being told here? I had no idea! This is ambitious, and it's solid; what's here so far is playable and strong despite being in Early Access. But I think I like it too much to play any more before it's done! I'll wait for this meal to reach its full length before I chow down.

Just working on getting that 100% item rate and unlocking the Chozo Memories gallery.

The difficulty curve seems almost inverted. During the first few areas, fights were difficult, and I regularly died due to how much health you can lose per hit. Now, in Area 5, I have the space jump, screw attack, plasma beam, and gravity suit, and I’m feeling practically invincible. Also, it seems like I have all of the upgrades save one, so what is going to fill the remainder of the game? Well, at least I’ll be able to collect items hidden along the way now rather than marking them for later!

There are these awesome giant slugs moving through the backgrounds of Area 6’s putrid graveyard, and I just know that I’ll never have anything to do with one beyond admiring it like a captive in a zoo. I’ve seen a lot of critters throughout the game, from big worms tunneling through rock to dragon-like creatures drinking and swimming in cave pools, and none of them ever shows up in the foreground as an enemy or interacts with the play space in any way. It’s a big missed opportunity.

Good discordant suspense music in Area 6, and I like that the mid-Area seal lowers the hazardous liquid on one side but raises it on the other, allowing access to half the region at a time. Actually, it’s even better than that; after completing the left side, you can only move to the right, but rather than just taking you to a new half of the level your path leads to the end point of the part you had already completed, forming a circle and leaving you wondering what has changed back on the left. This is a really unexpected structure! To rephrase: the liquid lowers on one side and rises on the other, so you move up and around and reenter the area from the end of your progress with it. Then there’s a new Metroid—your first omega, in fact. This area’s structure does a brilliant job of capitalizing on the game’s premise of hunting down metroids simply by taking advantage of the fact that they are living creatures and should be able to appear in places you’ve already investigated. When the state of the liquid changes, the game secretly placed a new Metroid in that room, and since the only place you can go is back through the loop from the other side you can’t miss it. And both seals only require a single metroid each, contributing to the symmetry. I honestly love it. I checked, and this is broadly based on the same part of Return of Samus, with two metroids in the same place but at different times, but it wasn't as pleasing because there was nothing to force your approach to one side of the loop; you just went back up because there was nowhere else to go. This is a real improvement and a very appealing bit of level design. Area 6: very nicely done!

And then to top it off Area 6 pits you against that mining robot at long last. I know that some people hate boss fights that involve a lot of dodging and waiting for a weak point to be exposed, but I thought it was all right. It took me 4 tries, and I was starting to get frustrated towards the end from having to sit through the early attacks again. That's definitely the danger of using this pattern-evasion style of boss; if it had gone on for many more attempts for me, I probably would have hated it. It helped a lot when I eventually realized I could use the Aeion slow-down ability to dodge an attack during the final phase that seemed impossible. And I was confused about how to hurt it at the very end, but I figured it out based on the importance of the morph ball throughout the fight (which is refreshing, by the way). So, yeah, I liked it.

Area 7 is fine. The computer displays and broken vats communicate the idea that this is where the Chozo engineered the metroids, and the music is an appropriately techno thing. More omega fights, which are fairly satisfying but could have used more variation since you're fighting three of them in a row. Otherwise an unremarkable area that’s a bit one-note but at least doesn’t drag on for too long.

Here is where I start getting properly angry at this remake. In Area 8, there is only one metroid left, and the game needs to create space for you to feel the weight of your nearly complete task. The area around the metroids’ lair should be devoid of life, implying that they have consumed every living thing in the vicinity. Samus should have a quiet, creepy, grim final approach to the queen. So why am I killing a bunch of these stupid bats and solving a dozen dumb missile tank puzzles? Stop trying so hard to give me gameplay content all the time and recognize that there are other modes of expression available to you!

The larval metroids are fine. The fight with the queen is fine, if a little stiff and mechanical, like the mining bot. The way you use the spider ball to hold your ground when she’s trying to push you into flames is cool. I feel like it was a bit anticlimactic, but partly that might be because I knew to try going inside her with the morph ball (and that was well done)… and partly it might be because she’s not the game’s true climax. Because there’s more. Which is terrible.

After finding the hatchling, instead of a peaceful, contemplative climb out of the bowels of SR388, there are—somehow!—yet more enemies to kill. More missile tanks to collect. And then, when we get up to the surface, we have another track ripped from Super Metroid: the desolate Crateria theme.

Then: Ridley. Of course, Ridley. Can’t have a single game in the series exist without Ridley, can we? The fight is a little repetitious. Anyway, who cares; it shouldn’t exist. Again, I understand the ambition. It’s even a fun idea to do this, to have Ridley show up at the very end to try to take the hatchling from Samus. But it’s a childish goal. It’s utterly destructive to what the original game accomplished, which was remarkable in foregoing a timed escape sequence or another boss fight—or any more fights at all—and instead just giving you peace. This is far, far less under the guise of more.

The fact that Samus Returns expects you to take the hatchling on a joy ride to every Area to clear crystals for you like a glorified power-up so you can find more damned missile tanks is just unforgivable. I knew this was coming; those crystals blocking so many of the collectibles along the way were exactly what I thought they were. I get the ambition here, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and this absolute excess of videogame—in place of what should be a gentle, uplifting epilogue that relents and puts an end to all the killing—is the epitome of missing the point. MercurySteam, for the most part, built a competent, enjoyable Metroid game—albeit one with some lazy, safe elements, a lack of atmosphere, and unresolved structural contradictions—but in the end they do not understand Metroid 2 at all. Samus Returns is a decent game but a poor remake. Someone reading this will object: "It's not meant to be a remake; it's a reimagining!" I don't care. It could have done its reimagined ending with so much more artistry, but instead it destroyed what Return of Samus accomplished 26 years earlier with far weaker technology. It's not just the ending, anyway; the whole thing is stuck in one mode, content to be blatantly gamey, from the obvious missile tank puzzles that are barely integrated into the world to the weaker environmental storytelling, missing well-calibrated tone, and hammy narrative beats in comparison to the original. It's the clichéd bombastic, flashy Hollywood remake that fails to comprehend the subtlety of its antecedent. It's entertaining enough, but it's shit art.

In addition to having a problem with the Norfair music, I'm noticing more and more that the superheated rooms seem incongruous with their surroundings. It feels like they are just there at random as an easy way to create a little more visual/thematic diversity. Certainly they aren't contributing anything just by being superheated; it's been a long time since I've found the Varia suit.

In Area 4, I'm still enjoying the gamma metroid encounters that require you to give chase. It would be frustrating if they all did it, but they don't; and they don't do it in the same way, either. Sometimes, instead of having to follow the metroid from room to room, you have to find a smaller chamber where it's hiding and drive it out into the arena to fight.

I don't think I've mentioned anywhere yet: several enemy types have simple reskins that are just a little bit tougher but pretty much behave the same. That's always disappointing to see in any game.

I have to say, for good or ill, this game feels quite long by typical Metroid standards. I seem to be about halfway through it, judging by the metroid counter, and at times the level design can be a slog. It's like the game doesn't have enough ideas to flesh out the space needed to house the number of metroids you have to hunt. It's a bit flabby. Throughout Area 3, very little that was memorable happened. Other than the particulars of the gamma metroid fights, I woke up a huge mining robot that walked away from me, and that was it; everything else was bread-and-butter exploration and puzzle solving, and the enemies, puzzle elements, and environments are beginning to blur together. I think that the game's ideas are being stretched thin by the inclusion of just about every upgrade that has ever existed in a Metroid game, as well as the new Aeion abilities, each of whose presence requires the inclusion of puzzles through which the player can exercise those tools. These are pumped into the world's layout and cause its size to balloon considerably in comparison to the original Metroid 2. They also transform the overall experience of the game, replacing the empty openness of the original with a lot of overtly gamey and artificial design as you're constantly working to find stuff.

I'm thoroughly over the Aeion Scan ability at this point. It does kind of suck the fun out of exploring after all (and thus diminish what makes Metroid Metroid), but at the same time the game is kind of designed around it because there is often nothing to draw your attention to blocks that can be destroyed, either for progress or for secrets. Bombing every surface at random while having to use the circle pad for movement would be excruciating, especially when every enemy in the game is so aggressive, but bombable blocks aren't hinted at well enough (or often at all) to be found without either that or the scan.

For my taste, far too many optional upgrades (missile tanks and the like) that you come upon require you to return with later abilities or weapons. These often seem totally arbitrary, sealed behind a super missile block or similar. It's just not fun to be teased by so many of these and to know that you'll have to come back later. Such obvious locks and keys aren't recontextualization; they're just future errands that I'll have to run. That's a shallow form of engagement compared to giving the player things to discover along the way that are actually accessible. More cleverness and less gatekeeping. I want to say that other Metroid games have done better—and how, exactly—but I'd need to replay them with that question in mind as it's been quite some time since my last one.

What makes it feel bad to know you'll have to come back later to collect things in Samus Returns is the linear structure of the game. You never organically pass back through a place you’ve already been; you would only ever return somewhere on purpose using the teleporter system specifically to run errands and collect items you couldn’t before when you first discovered them because you clearly needed the gravity suit or the grapple beam. It’s not like in Super when you’d run back across the map to look for a new direction to strike out in and notice an opportunity to put a new tool to use along the way. Once you’re in Area 4 of Samus Returns, you have no reason to ever go back to Area 3–except that you saw a missile tank there. That’s so… basic. I recognize that this is Metroid 2's structure and therefore what MercurySteam had to work within, but maybe they should have recognized that a thorough collectathon wasn't well suited to it and had the boldness to depart from that expectation and embrace the linearity inherited from Return of Samus. It's not like they didn't have a precedent for this, as in the excellent Fusion! Pretty much every Metroid game has its own character and has shown a willingness to rearrange the tropes of the series to create a different kind of experience. Samus Returns is trying to cram Super Metroid's content into a Metroid 2-sized box.

Also, many of these collectibles are guarded by unnatural puzzles that have been placed alongside the level architecture rather than built into it. Grabbing one doesn't feel at all like you've made a discovery within the environment; it's more like playing a separate mini-game where you go off into a room that only exists to put a bunch of artificial labyrinthine elements between you and the item, and when you're done you leave that diversion behind and get back on track. It's very gamey and inorganic.

And it's all a bit relentless, too. My first impressions of the game's environments were positive, but more and more I'm feeling like there's no atmosphere in them. Every square foot of this world is filled with aggressive enemies and silly item puzzles. It doesn't leave you with any room to breathe, to think about where you are and what you're doing. There are no quiet, creepy moments here, and that's a serious problem if it's to be held up against the evocative sci-fi horror of Super, Fusion, Zero Mission, and the very game this is based on, Return of Samus. It's just... such a videogame. It's like playing through a Metroid theme park that doesn't really try very hard to convince you that it's a real place. So, while I said above that the Samus Returns is feeling conceptually flabby, as if it doesn't have enough ideas to fill out its form, at the same time its monotonous bloat is all too tightly packed—overly constrained. That's sort of the same problem observed from opposite ends, really: an excessively uniform experience, devoid of both excitement and suspense; tension and release.

One exception is the fun mining robot chase sequence in Area 4. The game really needs more surprising events like this to shake things up and stop you from feeling like you know what to expect all the time. I also like that Area 4 features two hazardous liquid seals (and sets of metroids) rather than the expected one, altering the format a touch.

Just before the chase, Samus comes upon a Chozo item statue that's been destroyed, its head knocked off and sitting beneath the busted floor. I say "Samus comes upon" because the discovery is conveyed in a cutscene, you see; a cutscene that consists of her walking through a door, stopping, and seeing the statue, so it's very much something that she encountered rather than an experience that I got to have. In Return of Samus, there is a destroyed Chozo statue like this. It is positioned at the very end of the game and allows the player to regain the ice beam just before confronting newly hatched metroids, which must be fought with the iconic ice beam + missile combo, rather than just missiles like the more developed types you spend most of the game hunting. Because the statue offers the weapon that exploits metroids' weakness, it makes sense for it to be aggressively disfigured. And, because it appears at a moment of foreboding quiet, in a place devoid of wildlife, where the metroids' lurking presence can be felt through the absence of other creatures, when the player knows they are approaching the game's final battle, the broken statue serves as a chilling warning. Most importantly, the statue's condition has this power to convey terror because the player finds it and sees it for themselves. It's presented just the same way as every other rock and brick in the game's world with no particular fanfare highlighting it. Obviously Metroid 2 was released at a time before cutscenes were really a thing at all, so it would be silly to give it too much credit for making a choice here that probably wasn't a choice at all, but I think it's important to highlight how the cutscene in Samus Returns diminishes the impact of the broken statue presaging the mining robot chase. Because control is taken away and the camera takes on cinematic movements as soon as the player enters the room, you are primed to see something unusual, so the broken statue is not much of a shock. When a game calls attention to its special moments with excessive underscoring, they stand apart from the normal game experience rather than being felt within the context of play. They are separated from the world and the narrative and so lose the opportunity to enrich them.

In Samus Returns, you can always tell when you’re about to fight a metroid. The arenas are rooms that exist only for that purpose, so when your metroid proximity warning is going crazy and you see a wide open, empty room, you just know that one is about to show up. But, in Return of Samus, they could startle you anywhere! In the middle of a corridor, underwater—anywhere. It gave the empty shells that indicated one somewhere close by the power to create a lot of tension. And sometimes you would find the shell after encountering the metroid; the game openly toying with you.

Area 5 reuses the Brinstar Underground theme from Super Metroid, which is again lazy, but it doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Norfair theme because 1) it is changed enough to have a different feel and 2) it's the consistent music for the area, so it's not a sudden music cue that's triggered every time you enter a watery room like the Norfair theme is with lava rooms.

I'm definitely still enjoying Samus Returns, but I think by now the bloom is off; it's no longer enough that I'm getting my Metroid fix, so I'm having more critical thoughts. Doesn't mean I'm not having fun, though!

Just Job Job. It's always going to be Job Job. Seems like Blather 'Round has been replaced for us.

Taught Last Wish to a new clan member who, despite never raiding before, was great and picked up all of the jobs very quickly. We did Riven legit—even making it through two rounds of the six-eye interrupt in the central room during the successful attempt! And someone got One Thousand Voices!

I'm making my way through the old mines of Area 3 now. I fought a gamma metroid that fled multiple times through slimey little ports in the walls, and I had to pursue it to other arenas. I'm sure that the progression of the fight across that cluster of rooms is scripted—and maybe more instances of this will get frustrating later on—but I enjoyed feeling like a hunter pursuing her prey. The door to that branch of the area arbitrarily sealing until you finish the fight is a bit videogames, though.

As before, I am aware of how much I am simply enjoying playing a Metroid game. The intricate way in which you examine and make your way through the levels is rarely seen outside this series, even within the genre it spawned. I’m not just talking about secrets. Maybe to progress you need to go through a door, but it’s sealed, so you move a bit further up the vertical shaft and notice a crack in the wall that gives way when bombed. Now you squeeze through dark, narrow passages, probing for weak spots that let you press on, and suddenly the ground beneath you crumbles and sends you dropping down, down—and through the ceiling of the corridor on the other side of that door. You blast it from this side to get it open for later backtracking and carry on down the corridor.

What value did all of that provide, exactly? It wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t much of a puzzle, it wasn’t too hard to find, and it couldn’t have gotten you killed. It didn’t provide you with a power-up; it was just the way forward. So why not have the door just work in the first place instead of forcing the player through a twisty little maze? Flavor! A huge part of Metroid is the fantasy of hacking the architecture around you—only of course you aren’t truly breaking anything. It’s an illusory experience built through intentional, handcrafted level design and set pieces in which every individual tile in a game has the potential to be meaningful. The morph ball, traditionally the first item that Samus finds, is the perfect representational icon for the series since it facilitates this intimate interrogation of your surroundings. It's a form of engagement that I find beautiful.

(Incidentally, the Half-Life games, with their urban path puzzling and vent crawling, are the first to come to mind for me as doing something similar, at least sometimes. The post-breakout parts of Portal, too, maybe.)

But it's interesting that the player spends a lot of time in Metroid 2 (both the original and this remake) using the morph ball's spider ball upgrade to climb up high, featureless walls of spacious rooms lacking in accessible platforms to probe for unseen entrances to new areas. It's a complete inversion of that trademark narrow passage tinkering! Area 2 is the first part of the game that's vast enough to make me feel like I might lose track of all the possibilities I want to investigate; that’s an exciting feeling!

I recognize the broad strokes of these spaces from Return of Samus. MercurySteam has managed to stay true to those general locations while fleshing them out in terms of both design and theme.

As I play through this area, I’m still gawking at the 3D effect at times. Climbing up and around the dam wall is a treat. Also, as in Area 1, the game does an admirable job of blending the organic and artificial elements of its environment. The machinery, carved stone, and waterways of this area bleed into the natural cavern that contains them. A lot of these crumbled machines and caves are remarkably detailed. Every background seems bespoke; I see a lot of unique set pieces and never really feel like patterns are repeating. Also, I keep saying “backgrounds,” but the reality is that the background and the play space come together very nicely in a spectrum. It’s not as though the backdrop is a separate place operating as mere window dressing; it’s a part of where I am. A good example of this connectivity is a ruined floor I found with an opening to move downwards through. In the background, the side of a cave pool has collapsed, so water is streaming down that opening in the floor along with you. The continuity between the foreground and background creates context and place. The hole isn't just level design giving me a place to go; it's manifest geology and history.

I’m still coming across things that make me think, wow—what is that? For example, the game teases you with a view of the wave beam room from both above and below, and it’s a striking, bright room with a huge obelisk in the background and a rotating diamond machine atop it that looks more imposing than the other devices I’d seen throughout the dam. It didn't actually do anything, unfortunately, but it's still a cool room.

As I climbed back up the shaft outside the high jump boots room, columns in the background collapsed! More of that dynamism, please!

I’m not a fan of the Norfair theme from Super Metroid being reused for rooms that just happen to be hot. Beyond being lazy, it's a theme that's evocative of a specific region in an entirely different game, and so it robs the places where it's used in Samus Returns as well as the overall game of some of their own identity. I think it’s the first music choice that’s bothered me.

I wrote previously about there being too many kinds of creatures sucking on doors. They’re obviously just stand-ins for color-coded locks, and, while the idea of using an organism interfering with a door in place of just another boring lock is a good one, if you have too many varieties you're just recreating the problem. There are even places with two different ones right next to each other! That's so unnatural and contrived. But I have to admit that getting the wave beam and shooting (through an attached wall) the purple one was cool. It was an obstacle right in the middle of the area that I had needed to take the long way around. The game is very good at putting the very kind of hazard or road block you can overcome with a new toy in its immediate vicinity, teasing you with impossible things all around the upgrade and then giving you a burst of satisfaction and adventuring spirit as you get to put the tool to work right away.

When this isn't the case—when there aren't spots nearby that you've already seen where you can obviously use a new toy—Samus Returns sometimes (as with the Spring Ball) uses its one-way doors to trap you in an item room until you find a hidden alternate path out that requires you to put the ability you’ve just found to use. They’re basically tutorials, but of course they aren’t a chore like a hands-on tutorial is because they’re player-motivated. And they create pleasing level loops.

Also, at one point I needed to work my way around to the operating side of a one-way door and shoot it through a narrow slit in the rock before heading back to pass through it. It’s difficult to explain why, but that sort of setup tickles me. It’s like being my own partner in a puzzle platformer. You can just imagine another game where someone needs to open a door for you from the other side—but Samus gets it done herself.

Farming the Lake of Shadows GM Nightfall to try to get a great adept Palindrome. Not the best luck. The only good one I found is Overflow/Rampage with Appended Mag, Full Bore, and a Stability masterwork. I wish I had done this more over the last week because Lake of Shadows is so very short (our runs got down to 12 minutes!), but I was deterred by my lack of vault space.

As a staunch advocate for the original Metroid 2, I was expecting to hate MercurySteam's 2.5D remake—and maybe I still will!—but for now I am very pleasantly surprised. The melee counter, at least so far, exists less as a means to insert unwelcome stylistic flair and more as a logical solve for the discomfort of playing with the unwieldy analog mini-stick offered by the 3DS. Careful aiming feels like so much work that it's a relief to instead be able to anticipate the enemy's attack, time your counter, and auto-aim it to death. Similarly, the Aeion scan function, which is given to Samus before she even sees the game's first metroid, anticipates the player's desire to test every rock wall on the planet. It doesn't so much take the fun out of secret hunting as it provides a much less exhausting alternative method.

I have to explain: I've spent very little time ever actually playing 3DS games despite owning an XL for years. So from the very start I kept marveling at the 3D. The art slides accompanying the intro story are layered for the effect, and somehow they seem to have more detail than should be possible at the screen's resolution. When I actually started playing, I was surprised by how good the backgrounds look! I generally have a preference for pixel art over polygons, so I'm averse to 2.5D visuals because, broadly, they use polygons within a play perspective that is instead obviously well suited to sprites and tiles, in my opinion. I often feel that 2.5D games look cheaper and uglier than they would have with 2D pixel art. But Samus Returns is actually pulling it off! The diversity and layout of visual elements largely make environments feel believable and organic rather than stiff and plastic. I'm really taking my time as I play because I'm looking at both foreground and background and watching how rooms flow together to define the space. I enjoy the way caverns and ruins blend into each other, and it's remarkable to see how much an open or confined background develops the character of the area that you actually move through.

Some assorted observations:

It's a smart touch to have the Surface theme kick in only after Samus comes across the Aeion scan pulse. I appreciate the quiet of your first minutes on SR388, and when the music does pick up right after finding this exploration tool it's like kicking off the rust and stretching after a warm-up. Time to go to work.

In the temples of Area 1, the music does a good job of incorporating the tinkling little organic machine sounds from "Caverns 1" into a new ambient piece. It's not nearly as boldly willing to embrace uncomfortable silence as Return of Samus was (I suspect this will be my refrain for the remake overall), but that's okay; I am open to a different approach as long as the original isn't erased (the other half of my refrain).

There's this sexy lens flare when a charge beam shot fully powers up; that's a fun effect at the 3DS's low resolution.

I really like the click sound for when Samus unrolls from her morph ball form to a crouch. The ball's movement has a good sense of weight, too, and a heavy clang when it drops from a ledge and lands on a lower level. Doors also make a good sound when shot and activated, and I like how they light up—and how they struggle to, in the case of the charge beam doors.

Speaking of doors, I was excited the first time I opened one and it broke and stayed open. I love when familiar elements of a game world are subverted and made unique, like the save point in Super Metroid's Wrecked Ship that doesn't work because Phantoon is sucking up all the power or like the item-bearing Chozo statue buried under a collapsed wall in this game. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that this broken door is a 'type' rather than a unique event. It's just the other side of the doors that can't be opened; they can only be opened one way at first but then stay open. That's fine, but it's not as cool as the one-off I initially took it for.

Another thing about doors: I think I've come across three different kinds of organisms attached to them and preventing my access until I find various power-ups, and it seems a bit lazy to extract so many instances of progress gating from the same idea. It also damages the believability of the concept when you see so many different creatures sucking on doors. One is fine, but three wildly different species doing it just feels like Game Design™.

Right now, the only thing that's bothering me all that much is those Chozo seals draining the purple liquid after receiving enough metroid DNA. Why would anyone build a mechanism with such a bizarre requirement? Insert x many dead animals to redirect this poison river... It's utterly bizarre and draws attention to the 'gaminess' of the overall progression structure. I was perfectly fine with the original's earthquakes! There, the player understands the causal link between killing all of the metroids in an area and the liquid draining as a matter of programming, but the game left it canonically as coincidence—because establishing a connection between those two wildly unrelated things is bound to seem silly! But maybe this odd conceit in Samus Returns will be explained later as part of a warrior training ground or something.

I've only played through the Surface region and Area 1, but so far I'm having a great time and feeling optimistic about what lies ahead. The most vital points of comparison to the original will come towards the end, so, now that I can see that the foundation is solid, I can relax and just enjoy for quite a while. Above all else, it's just wonderful to be playing a Metroid game—and this does feel like a Metroid game. The world is mysterious and hostile, ability gates funnel you through neat loops of level design, and Samus is alone but confident and capable. It's more 'gamey' than the original, but that's okay. The elements I had been dreading—the 2.5D polygonal art, the melee counter, the scan pulse—are turning out to be well executed and appropriate for the platform. I feel like an idiot for waiting so long to play Samus Returns... but, on the other hand, I'm in for a glorious double feature with Metroid 5 already waiting in my Switch's cartridge slot.

I played through Expedition 3: Cartographers today. I continue to love the expeditions: bespoke adventures, checklists that guide you through various game systems within a preset location or journey, turning the infinite procedural generation of No Man's Sky into a more traditional, more designed game.

This one gave me something I've always wanted: more time stuck on a single world. Your busted ship has some custom systems, you see, and it takes a few fairly advanced components to repair them. So you start out basic, as usual, and you have to progress in tech without the use of a ship for quite a while. Eventually you repair the launch thrusters but still can't get off world; then you can break atmosphere but still have a while before you can warp out of the system.

I appreciate the greater granularity of the NMS experience when I'm truly marooned and it takes real effort and time to knock my ship back into shipshape. I had to set up a base with a mineral extractor at one point, and it's just so logical to me to require that kind of deep local engagement before giving the player the total freedom of flight. In the normal game, it was ages before I even tried exocraft, but here, just as one learns to walk before they can run, you explore the planet via minotaur and pilgrim before you get to launch your spaceship out into the galaxy. The expedition's scope spirals outward gradually as you take ever more ambitious steps, and that's so much more gratifying than being free to go anywhere in the universe twenty minutes after starting a new game, before you even understand what you can do or why.

Also, part of this expedition's structure makes it a bit like solving a puzzle: many tasks provide rewards for completion that are perfectly suited to working on another one, but they are not necessarily lined up in the ideal order, which means that the best approach is to consider your objectives against each other and devise your own course through them. It's very satisfying when your plan comes together as one milestone provides the right tool for the next job on your mental list.

As ever, my only complaint about the expeditions is that they aren't each permanently available to play. More often than not, there isn't one around that you can play at all. It's such a shame that the most concrete game design No Man's Sky has to offer is so transitory.

I was reluctant to buy this at full price, but my main Left 4 Dead squad did, so I felt I had to as well. I've heard some things that have put me off, and I can't verify them yet after such a short time, but I did enjoy myself for our first session, which was just an easy-difficulty run through the first finale (effectively 4 stages, I guess, for the first segment of Act 1).

My biggest impressions right now are how nice the guns feel, especially compared to the arcade-like weapons in L4D that don't even have ADS, and that I like the roguelike element of weapons, attachments, and cards that you find during a run coming together to form a build and a play style, as well as the increased incentive versus L4D that they provide to scavenging around even when well supplied and healthy.

Tried Jackbox 8 out with my friends for our regular multiplayer evening. Job Job emerged as the clear favorite with many funny results. And the type of creativity-under-pressure it requires doesn't cause as much stress for me as some other Jackbox games because the competitive part involves assembling a response from given words; the limitation and provision stop me from grasping at the open air as I would if I had to come up with something with total freedom.