trashtabby
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This review contains spoilers
I’ve got a reputation among friends as The World’s Only Cal Kestis liker. My impression of Jedi: Fallen Order is that it’s an enormously POPULAR game, given that it fulfilled everyone’s wishes for a story-driven single-player AAA Star Wars game about lightsabers where you actually tangibly swing one around, something that is not actually uncommon at all but I guess five years feels like a long time for a franchise that gets a new thing every six months. But despite being a AAA game that everyone played I never got the sense that Fallen Order was an especially beloved game; people have big quibbles with its sort of chunky approximation of souls combat, its admirable commitment to No Fast Travel and Not Even That Many Shortcuts, making you walk back and forth across levels at length (which has a side effect of making traversal powers and equipment feel REALLY game changing every time but I digress), and also smaller quibbles that add to the pile like, why are you killing so many ANIMALS in that game?? It’s weird how many like, alligators you’re just fuckin chopping up they’re just chilling! The biggest stickler for many people is of course Cal Kestis himself. Cal Lightsaber. Gotham’s The Joker. Star Wars Archie Riverdale. People HATE Cal. They hate how he talks. They hate that they feel his backstory is overused in extra-filmic Star Wars media. They hate his cool ponchos. They hate the way his character develops. They hate his name for some reason. They loudly hate how he looks which is rude considering he is just a face capture of his actor.
Not me though. I love Cal. Is he generic? Sure. Is his story predictable? Yes. That’s fine though dude. I’m playing a Star Wars game is it supposed to revolutionize storytelling? Was I expecting the 200 million dollar EA published Respawn game to shock and surprise me? I’m not watching frickin’ A Brighter Summer Day over here bro. Cal Kestis is a lil frickin’ cutie. Love me some Cal Kestis, he’s my guy. And I think the first game set the stage to take him and his winning supporting cast in all kinds of directions, it really could have been anything.
I find myself a little bit surprised at the direction that Survivor takes itself. If Fallen Order is a game that is, rotely and blandly, about learning to live trauma, Survivor is a game that is about this same group of people but especially Cal asking themselves what it looks like to live, period, and that’s a much headier question that the game admirably doesn’t pretend there are easy answers to. If the first game ends on something of a note of “well our quest was a bit of a bust but we’ve learned valuable spiritual lessons and come out the stronger for it, Cal has faced his fear and he’s finally found something to fight for and people to fight with,” then Survivor reexamines what it means that the thing he found to fight for was that he deeply internalized the last thing his master saying to him, when he was fourteen years old and fleeing for his life, being “hold the line.”
So a few years after the first game this expresses itself as Cal working for Saw Guerrera, a Star Wars character famous for being a guy who the narratives of Star Wars always say “whoa look out that’s the guy who’s a rebel but he’s Too Extreme and Goes To Far” but actually any time he’s onscreen he’s just being cool and morally correct about literally everything he ever does. So Cal’s working for him for seemingly years now, apart from his old crew which has broken up, and he’s taken on the responsibility of the Jedi Order which to him, a guy who was beginning to come of age at the philosophical nadir of the Jedi as a political organization and during a war in which the Jedi were moved from being The Cops to being The Army, means he has a moral responsibility to use all of his unique and considerable power to fight the empire in a militarized way every single day with no breaks, because every second of his downtime is a second that other people who need help that only he can give aren’t getting it. It’s a very single-minded way to approach the problem of how he can help people against the Empire and he is in fact so fucking weird about this that the only other Jedi he knows, Cere, has stopped hanging out with him over it and they’re not on speaking terms.
The central idea of the game being how to best live under the Empire and how best to fight them is like, shockingly well-woven between every main character. As one might guess, the main plot of the game, about some loser from the disastrously awful High Republic media line is brought out of cryogenic stasis and reveals that there’s a super secret planet that is effectively impossible for the Empire to know about or travel to, and everybody is like oh sick we could go live in peace there! But this guy, Dagan Gera, is like no no you see actually I’m like an evil weirdo 200 year old Jedi and I’m the bad guy now okay see ya later. And so the game becomes a series of quests to find bits and bops of various doohickeys to help Cal beat Dagan to the Ultimate Doohickey that unlocks the Special Planet or whatever it doesn’t REALLY matter, the important thing is that it’s an excuse to have Cal parade around the galaxy and reunite with his shipmates from the first game so they can all hash out their shit and explain the themes of the game to him.
Greez, the original pilot of the ship you fly around in, has settled on a remote frontier world called Koboh, and opened a little bar in a small town menaced by the raiders that Dagan commands. Greez was never fit to fight the empire, he was always just a guy, and a pretty frazzled one, and it makes sense for him to get out of dodge. This is cool. This is okay! He’s had a room in the basement set up for Cal for five years but Cal is so petulantly angry at him and so wrapped up in his own sense of mission that he hasn’t visited once. Merrin, who joined the crew after living most of her life alone among the ghosts of her people’s dead, left the crew, and the Fight, to find her identity. She’s toured the galaxy, and importantly she has helped people out, and decided that the place most appropriate for her most of the time is with Cere, who has joined a group of Jedi cultists who specifically aim to collect and preserve Jedi knowledge and relics from across the galaxy in secret, while also harboring and shuttling people who need protection from the Empire – an elaboration upon the group’s mission from the first game. Cal sees this as quitting, as walking away, and he can’t understand that it’s a different and important part of a fight against an enemy that is all-powerful, monolithic, and who wins by eliminating culture more than by killing people.
It’s cool that this game takes place after such a long timeskip because it’s clear that all of the fights you see have been had many times and really after like the first one with Greez all of the emotions in these arguments are very cooled. Cal is genuinely trying to let go of the betrayal he feels, he’s just not ready to understand what people are telling him, and they aren’t even trying to fight, they only want him to see a broader vision of what life is allowed to be, even in a world where justice legitimately does need to happen via violence.
The game is mature enough to understand that Cal is wrong but it’s also mature enough to know that the answer isn’t “Cal should lay down his lightsaber and embrace a retirement from his fight.” It’s ultimately temperance that everyone comes to understand is necessary for him. Cere knows that her path isn’t Cal’s path and she doesn’t try to convince him, ever, to join her. Merrin knows that she can do more with a group or a partner than she’s done on her own, but also that her newfound wisdom is a valuable asset to her. And Cal is shown multiple examples of the kinds of things that single-minded obsession with noble goals can do to someone in his position via the game’s villains.
Dagan Gera is of course a Jedi, but he is obsessed with his utopian vision of a future for the order that he controls via his discovery of the special planet and his guidance of new Jedi there, and when things start to go wrong he thinks he can pull it out of the fire himself. He truly believes that only he can make things go the way they’re supposed to, and a combination of betrayal by his closest ally and then finding the state of the galaxy when he is resurrected 200 years later to find a tyrannical empire in charge, having decimated the Jedi Order, he thinks his feelings of superiority have been justified, and that now it’s only he who stop this Empire, and he immediately starts doing awful shit in the name of fighting them. And there is of course the true villain of the game, Bode, who is present for most of the time as Cal’s newest and most stalwart ally, just a guy with a daughter he needs to protect, a dead wife he wants to avenge, and a thirst for stormtrooper blood that will never be quenched, but who is also generally very friendly and a quiet emotional rock for Cal at all times. He is, of course, a spy, but an unwilling one, with his daughters safety guaranteed only so long as he operates for the Imperial Security Bureau. Bode’s villain reveal is extremely predictable but the nuances of it may be less so. He is, like Cal, a Jedi survivor, but one who has obviously strayed a little (but importantly ONLY a little) further from his old ideals than Cal has. Protecting his daughter is now the only thing Bode REALLY cares about and he uses that as a shield for the thousands of people he gives up to the empire, but he also, genuinely, didn’t want to do it – it’s suggested that he’s fully prepared to turn tail and run with his kid to the secret planet with our heroes until they start talking about using it as a rebel safe harbor, and he’s just too scared and too selfish to let that kind of risk in. This single-mindedness mirrors Cal’s; it’s the only thing he really talks about, and he behaves increasingly extremely in the service of it. He and Cal both tap fully into what Jedi would call the Dark Side of the force by the end of the game to serve their desperate needs to protect what little family they have left, but Cal listens to his when they has him to be true to himself as he uses this power, and Bode is too scared to do anything but lash out at his daughter. Ultimately both men are desperate to feel a sense of control over the things that are important to them in a world where, fundamentally, they can’t control anything, and a big part of the game is about learning to accept that this isn’t possible. Bode can’t, and he dies.
Cal does, though. His last words, and the last moments of the game before the credits, spoken to a departed friend, are that he knows what he has to do, but he’s scared. This feels on the surface like a walking back of previous game, which was very much about Cal overcoming fear that he had lived with for the years since the Empire’s rise to power and the events of the game. But the fear Cal feels at the end of Survivor is wisdom. It’s the fear of vulnerability, of really letting people in again, of being himself, of letting go of a philosophy that was poisonous in its day and that can’t serve him in the present. Cal thought at the beginning of the game that everyone wanted him to stop fighting, but what they actually wanted was for him to fight and be a person, and that’s so much harder. It’s a much more uncertain place to leave things than the previous game left us with, and indeed if you boot up the post-game there’s now a Star Destroyer hanging in the sky over Koboh – the Empire comes for everyone eventually. But it’s a confident ending, and it feels right. Cal doesn’t have answers, and he doesn’t even really have peace with himself, but he’s opened himself up in a healthier way than he was able to in the beginning, and in a situation like the one these characters find themselves, I don’t think that’s nothing.
It’s somewhat unfortunate that due to the nature of how AAA games are produced, the tv show Andor was conceived, produced, and aired entirely during the dev cycle for Survivor, because these two works do take place in generally the same setting within Star Wars and cover an overlapping set of themes. Through that lens Survivor does feel a little bit like We Have Andor At Home but I think it’s served well by its very zoomed-in focus on Cal’s approach to the question of How To Live And Perform Rebellion vs Andor’s wider-lens, and, in the words of a dear friend of mine, there are MUCH worse things to be in this world than Andor At Home. So I’m left impressed and surprised by Survivor. I do think the game is improved over its predecessor in every single way even if I’m not talking about the play of the game, but like as much as I’m The World’s Only Cal Kestis Fan, that was notable largely because Fallen Order’s writing is so aggressively forgettable, which itself is a staggering improvement over all other writing from Respawn as a studio. I hope that now there will be more of us. I hope that now I will be Only One Of Many Cal Kestis Fans. I imagine it helps that he’s way hotter in this one. I put the windswept hair on him with a short beard. It was the right thing to do.
Not me though. I love Cal. Is he generic? Sure. Is his story predictable? Yes. That’s fine though dude. I’m playing a Star Wars game is it supposed to revolutionize storytelling? Was I expecting the 200 million dollar EA published Respawn game to shock and surprise me? I’m not watching frickin’ A Brighter Summer Day over here bro. Cal Kestis is a lil frickin’ cutie. Love me some Cal Kestis, he’s my guy. And I think the first game set the stage to take him and his winning supporting cast in all kinds of directions, it really could have been anything.
I find myself a little bit surprised at the direction that Survivor takes itself. If Fallen Order is a game that is, rotely and blandly, about learning to live trauma, Survivor is a game that is about this same group of people but especially Cal asking themselves what it looks like to live, period, and that’s a much headier question that the game admirably doesn’t pretend there are easy answers to. If the first game ends on something of a note of “well our quest was a bit of a bust but we’ve learned valuable spiritual lessons and come out the stronger for it, Cal has faced his fear and he’s finally found something to fight for and people to fight with,” then Survivor reexamines what it means that the thing he found to fight for was that he deeply internalized the last thing his master saying to him, when he was fourteen years old and fleeing for his life, being “hold the line.”
So a few years after the first game this expresses itself as Cal working for Saw Guerrera, a Star Wars character famous for being a guy who the narratives of Star Wars always say “whoa look out that’s the guy who’s a rebel but he’s Too Extreme and Goes To Far” but actually any time he’s onscreen he’s just being cool and morally correct about literally everything he ever does. So Cal’s working for him for seemingly years now, apart from his old crew which has broken up, and he’s taken on the responsibility of the Jedi Order which to him, a guy who was beginning to come of age at the philosophical nadir of the Jedi as a political organization and during a war in which the Jedi were moved from being The Cops to being The Army, means he has a moral responsibility to use all of his unique and considerable power to fight the empire in a militarized way every single day with no breaks, because every second of his downtime is a second that other people who need help that only he can give aren’t getting it. It’s a very single-minded way to approach the problem of how he can help people against the Empire and he is in fact so fucking weird about this that the only other Jedi he knows, Cere, has stopped hanging out with him over it and they’re not on speaking terms.
The central idea of the game being how to best live under the Empire and how best to fight them is like, shockingly well-woven between every main character. As one might guess, the main plot of the game, about some loser from the disastrously awful High Republic media line is brought out of cryogenic stasis and reveals that there’s a super secret planet that is effectively impossible for the Empire to know about or travel to, and everybody is like oh sick we could go live in peace there! But this guy, Dagan Gera, is like no no you see actually I’m like an evil weirdo 200 year old Jedi and I’m the bad guy now okay see ya later. And so the game becomes a series of quests to find bits and bops of various doohickeys to help Cal beat Dagan to the Ultimate Doohickey that unlocks the Special Planet or whatever it doesn’t REALLY matter, the important thing is that it’s an excuse to have Cal parade around the galaxy and reunite with his shipmates from the first game so they can all hash out their shit and explain the themes of the game to him.
Greez, the original pilot of the ship you fly around in, has settled on a remote frontier world called Koboh, and opened a little bar in a small town menaced by the raiders that Dagan commands. Greez was never fit to fight the empire, he was always just a guy, and a pretty frazzled one, and it makes sense for him to get out of dodge. This is cool. This is okay! He’s had a room in the basement set up for Cal for five years but Cal is so petulantly angry at him and so wrapped up in his own sense of mission that he hasn’t visited once. Merrin, who joined the crew after living most of her life alone among the ghosts of her people’s dead, left the crew, and the Fight, to find her identity. She’s toured the galaxy, and importantly she has helped people out, and decided that the place most appropriate for her most of the time is with Cere, who has joined a group of Jedi cultists who specifically aim to collect and preserve Jedi knowledge and relics from across the galaxy in secret, while also harboring and shuttling people who need protection from the Empire – an elaboration upon the group’s mission from the first game. Cal sees this as quitting, as walking away, and he can’t understand that it’s a different and important part of a fight against an enemy that is all-powerful, monolithic, and who wins by eliminating culture more than by killing people.
It’s cool that this game takes place after such a long timeskip because it’s clear that all of the fights you see have been had many times and really after like the first one with Greez all of the emotions in these arguments are very cooled. Cal is genuinely trying to let go of the betrayal he feels, he’s just not ready to understand what people are telling him, and they aren’t even trying to fight, they only want him to see a broader vision of what life is allowed to be, even in a world where justice legitimately does need to happen via violence.
The game is mature enough to understand that Cal is wrong but it’s also mature enough to know that the answer isn’t “Cal should lay down his lightsaber and embrace a retirement from his fight.” It’s ultimately temperance that everyone comes to understand is necessary for him. Cere knows that her path isn’t Cal’s path and she doesn’t try to convince him, ever, to join her. Merrin knows that she can do more with a group or a partner than she’s done on her own, but also that her newfound wisdom is a valuable asset to her. And Cal is shown multiple examples of the kinds of things that single-minded obsession with noble goals can do to someone in his position via the game’s villains.
Dagan Gera is of course a Jedi, but he is obsessed with his utopian vision of a future for the order that he controls via his discovery of the special planet and his guidance of new Jedi there, and when things start to go wrong he thinks he can pull it out of the fire himself. He truly believes that only he can make things go the way they’re supposed to, and a combination of betrayal by his closest ally and then finding the state of the galaxy when he is resurrected 200 years later to find a tyrannical empire in charge, having decimated the Jedi Order, he thinks his feelings of superiority have been justified, and that now it’s only he who stop this Empire, and he immediately starts doing awful shit in the name of fighting them. And there is of course the true villain of the game, Bode, who is present for most of the time as Cal’s newest and most stalwart ally, just a guy with a daughter he needs to protect, a dead wife he wants to avenge, and a thirst for stormtrooper blood that will never be quenched, but who is also generally very friendly and a quiet emotional rock for Cal at all times. He is, of course, a spy, but an unwilling one, with his daughters safety guaranteed only so long as he operates for the Imperial Security Bureau. Bode’s villain reveal is extremely predictable but the nuances of it may be less so. He is, like Cal, a Jedi survivor, but one who has obviously strayed a little (but importantly ONLY a little) further from his old ideals than Cal has. Protecting his daughter is now the only thing Bode REALLY cares about and he uses that as a shield for the thousands of people he gives up to the empire, but he also, genuinely, didn’t want to do it – it’s suggested that he’s fully prepared to turn tail and run with his kid to the secret planet with our heroes until they start talking about using it as a rebel safe harbor, and he’s just too scared and too selfish to let that kind of risk in. This single-mindedness mirrors Cal’s; it’s the only thing he really talks about, and he behaves increasingly extremely in the service of it. He and Cal both tap fully into what Jedi would call the Dark Side of the force by the end of the game to serve their desperate needs to protect what little family they have left, but Cal listens to his when they has him to be true to himself as he uses this power, and Bode is too scared to do anything but lash out at his daughter. Ultimately both men are desperate to feel a sense of control over the things that are important to them in a world where, fundamentally, they can’t control anything, and a big part of the game is about learning to accept that this isn’t possible. Bode can’t, and he dies.
Cal does, though. His last words, and the last moments of the game before the credits, spoken to a departed friend, are that he knows what he has to do, but he’s scared. This feels on the surface like a walking back of previous game, which was very much about Cal overcoming fear that he had lived with for the years since the Empire’s rise to power and the events of the game. But the fear Cal feels at the end of Survivor is wisdom. It’s the fear of vulnerability, of really letting people in again, of being himself, of letting go of a philosophy that was poisonous in its day and that can’t serve him in the present. Cal thought at the beginning of the game that everyone wanted him to stop fighting, but what they actually wanted was for him to fight and be a person, and that’s so much harder. It’s a much more uncertain place to leave things than the previous game left us with, and indeed if you boot up the post-game there’s now a Star Destroyer hanging in the sky over Koboh – the Empire comes for everyone eventually. But it’s a confident ending, and it feels right. Cal doesn’t have answers, and he doesn’t even really have peace with himself, but he’s opened himself up in a healthier way than he was able to in the beginning, and in a situation like the one these characters find themselves, I don’t think that’s nothing.
It’s somewhat unfortunate that due to the nature of how AAA games are produced, the tv show Andor was conceived, produced, and aired entirely during the dev cycle for Survivor, because these two works do take place in generally the same setting within Star Wars and cover an overlapping set of themes. Through that lens Survivor does feel a little bit like We Have Andor At Home but I think it’s served well by its very zoomed-in focus on Cal’s approach to the question of How To Live And Perform Rebellion vs Andor’s wider-lens, and, in the words of a dear friend of mine, there are MUCH worse things to be in this world than Andor At Home. So I’m left impressed and surprised by Survivor. I do think the game is improved over its predecessor in every single way even if I’m not talking about the play of the game, but like as much as I’m The World’s Only Cal Kestis Fan, that was notable largely because Fallen Order’s writing is so aggressively forgettable, which itself is a staggering improvement over all other writing from Respawn as a studio. I hope that now there will be more of us. I hope that now I will be Only One Of Many Cal Kestis Fans. I imagine it helps that he’s way hotter in this one. I put the windswept hair on him with a short beard. It was the right thing to do.
Metroid Dread
2021
Metroid, in its own way, has always been a series about transformation. Early on, this was only in the most abstract sense, as Samus accumulated power-ups and the morph ball. The second entry begins to make its themes of transformation more literal with the metamorphosis of the metroids. From Super Metroid, to Fusion, to now Dread, Samus’s suit is a protean machine that constantly changes shape, color, and function. The Prime sub-series, too, deals with transformation constantly. Even if you stripped these thematic trappings away, you would still be left with a game that is fundamentally about transformation. It’s a series in which Samus (and thus, the player) constantly change, their abilities constantly expanding and shifting in scope.
So perhaps it’s fitting that Metroid went through its own dramatic transformation over the years.
Metroid Dread was pretty universally considered vaporware until recently. All that was really publicly known about it was that it existed at one point. Now, we know a bit more: it was originally planned for the DS, but the team felt they couldn’t create the game with the technology at the time. And so, Metroid Dread lay in its tomb for nearly two decades, like a dormant torizo, until Mercury Steam, the team behind Samus Returns, came into the picture. That this game even came out is shocking. But here it is, somehow.
Here is my question: where is all the dread in Metroid Dread?
It can be easy to forget, now that we live during a golden age of Metroidvanias, that the Metroid series was pretty radical at the time of its inception. It was a strange hybrid of platformer and exploration that wasn’t really seen before. Super Metroid might seem trite or quaint now that it is recognized as a blueprint for the genre, but it was (and in many ways still is) deeply ambitious. Decades later, select elements of those games’ design were absorbed into the cultural landscape, improved upon, experimented with, and modified. Metroid Dread reflects these changes by adapting to them, but the result is something that feels fundamentally different from its origins.
That isn’t a criticism. If Metroid has taught us anything, it’s that sometimes change can be good. Dread is a slick, visually stunning package, informed by well over a decade of iteration and innovation, designed with precision and intention, never letting you lose forward momentum for a second. Dread is a sublime action game that represents a peak in the 2D series’ combat. It all feels dynamic and sharp in a way fighting as Samus has never felt like before. In the early days, though, Metroid wasn’t really ever a game about combat.
Metroid Dread is an action game. Early games were games with action in them. Maybe that seems like an awfully fine distinction, but it represents a long lasting shift in a design ethos. This isn’t new, either; the series has consistently drifted closer towards action. Prime also showed this change, as the third entry, Corruption, was a far more linear action title than the first venture into 3D. Zero Mission perhaps exemplifies this the most clearly, as a remake of the original NES title that was far more action heavy and far more directed. The NES game was awkward and janky. Even in the ever-venerated Super Metroid, Samus can feel unwieldy and floaty. This would typically be seen as bad, but it also lends itself to a feeling of spaciness, weirdness, and unwelcomeness that fit the games well.
With the release of Dread, we’ve seen more and more newcomers come to the series, and this is perhaps the perfect entry point for many players. (Speedruns of this game are going to be beautiful.) The game is loaded with affordances and quality-of-life improvements. The whole game is designed to be an almost frictionless exploration experience. While past entries’ attempts to become more approachable had previously been fraught, Dread feels elegant and beautiful in its execution. Zero Mission and particularly Fusion were controversial because their sense of direction felt like hand-holding. Exploration was explicitly guided, and it was overbearing. (Personally, I think this could have been fixed by just providing the option to ask for hints, rather than forcing them onto the player.) Dread has no need for wordy signage, as it’s designed to guide the player silently and subtly through its world, rarely needing to instruct. Following along the critical path is a blissful glide through ZDR. There’s always a ragged edge, another door to open, another room to explore. It’s deeply satisfying and engrossing. Many of Dread’s optional upgrades are also puzzle-like, requiring strategic movement and platforming. This is a far cry from the old days when secrets were often hidden in random blocks with what seemed to be no real care.
Early on, Metroid wasn’t really about a frictionless experience, though. It was often just about getting lost. The original Metroid is filled with friction, with labyrinthine and repetitive corridors and dead ends. Metroid 2, on the other hand, pivoted hard into linearity, while Super established a more concrete formula. In it’s finest moments, Metroid was often about exploring without direction, beating on with uncertainty as the intrepid bounty hunter Samus. They were scary, weird, often incoherent games. For many, this makes the games altogether unapproachable, but it also conjured an enchanting mysteriousness that still affects me to this day.
Of note is also the series' gradual emphasis on plot. This climaxed in the near-universally maligned Other M, but Metroid had been showing more of its story for years, with dialogue and lore. (Yes, I read the manga, too, don’t @ me.) Dread has a veritable plot, with plot twists and worldbuilding and an antagonist with motives. It’s apparently the end of the so-called Metroid arc, and how it goes about wrapping that up is interesting indeed. Meanwhile, Super Metroid was a masterpiece of wordless narrative, telling a story about very little, but filling it with contemplation and moodiness. (Prime did this well too, while also featuring robust lore in its scan logs.) It didn’t really have characters, and the writing essentially boiled down to an opening monologue. The rest was told by the shape of space and its inhabitants. They were tone pieces, at least for a moment, ever brief. The series has shied away from silent storytelling, despite always being capable of it when it wants to be, and supplements with big dialogue boxes.
The truth is there is very little dreadful in Metroid Dread. After all, it’s designed to be an empowering and engaging experience, not an off putting one. There is plenty to be seen that is horrific or intense, but there is not much dread, no oppressive weight hovering over your shoulders as you stride into the dark. Even the E.M.M.I, the poster child of Dread, which upon encountering can be heart-pumping and tense, do not feel dreadful. They can instant-kill you and are unkillable (at first), but this design choice means that the generous checkpoint system implemented here was more or less necessary. As a result, the E.M.M.I become more like puzzles, and less like looming threats they seem to be. All of the game’s challenges can be overcome. The game is designed for you to overcome it. Metroid Dread is actually quite welcoming, inviting players both new and old into ZDR to romp through its caverns.
This is, by all accounts, to be recognized as good design. All these affordances, from improved game feel to improved world design, are what is considered in most circles to be good design. And I agree. Metroid Dread is impeccably well made. It is the current apex in years of iteration. Cruising through an alien landscape as Samus Aran has never felt so good. But it’s important to recognize that all these improvements end up changing the character of the series significantly. It’s still Metroid, don’t get me wrong. Dread is bursting at the seams with series staples. But it has also taken on a very different tone. It has fundamentally different design goals. The series is allowed to change. It doesn’t need to be ambitious and weird anymore, and in many ways, it can't be. It’s allowed to just be a great game. And Metroid Dread is not only a great game, but also one of the best in the series. After years and years of waiting, Metroid Dread finally emerged from its cocoon, and while it is fundamentally different, it really is stunning.
But I can’t lie. A part of me longs for the mystery and unease of the past, a past that perhaps barely existed at all. When Metroid was an eerie tone piece haunted by uncertainty and melancholy. When it was a world filled with dread.
So perhaps it’s fitting that Metroid went through its own dramatic transformation over the years.
Metroid Dread was pretty universally considered vaporware until recently. All that was really publicly known about it was that it existed at one point. Now, we know a bit more: it was originally planned for the DS, but the team felt they couldn’t create the game with the technology at the time. And so, Metroid Dread lay in its tomb for nearly two decades, like a dormant torizo, until Mercury Steam, the team behind Samus Returns, came into the picture. That this game even came out is shocking. But here it is, somehow.
Here is my question: where is all the dread in Metroid Dread?
It can be easy to forget, now that we live during a golden age of Metroidvanias, that the Metroid series was pretty radical at the time of its inception. It was a strange hybrid of platformer and exploration that wasn’t really seen before. Super Metroid might seem trite or quaint now that it is recognized as a blueprint for the genre, but it was (and in many ways still is) deeply ambitious. Decades later, select elements of those games’ design were absorbed into the cultural landscape, improved upon, experimented with, and modified. Metroid Dread reflects these changes by adapting to them, but the result is something that feels fundamentally different from its origins.
That isn’t a criticism. If Metroid has taught us anything, it’s that sometimes change can be good. Dread is a slick, visually stunning package, informed by well over a decade of iteration and innovation, designed with precision and intention, never letting you lose forward momentum for a second. Dread is a sublime action game that represents a peak in the 2D series’ combat. It all feels dynamic and sharp in a way fighting as Samus has never felt like before. In the early days, though, Metroid wasn’t really ever a game about combat.
Metroid Dread is an action game. Early games were games with action in them. Maybe that seems like an awfully fine distinction, but it represents a long lasting shift in a design ethos. This isn’t new, either; the series has consistently drifted closer towards action. Prime also showed this change, as the third entry, Corruption, was a far more linear action title than the first venture into 3D. Zero Mission perhaps exemplifies this the most clearly, as a remake of the original NES title that was far more action heavy and far more directed. The NES game was awkward and janky. Even in the ever-venerated Super Metroid, Samus can feel unwieldy and floaty. This would typically be seen as bad, but it also lends itself to a feeling of spaciness, weirdness, and unwelcomeness that fit the games well.
With the release of Dread, we’ve seen more and more newcomers come to the series, and this is perhaps the perfect entry point for many players. (Speedruns of this game are going to be beautiful.) The game is loaded with affordances and quality-of-life improvements. The whole game is designed to be an almost frictionless exploration experience. While past entries’ attempts to become more approachable had previously been fraught, Dread feels elegant and beautiful in its execution. Zero Mission and particularly Fusion were controversial because their sense of direction felt like hand-holding. Exploration was explicitly guided, and it was overbearing. (Personally, I think this could have been fixed by just providing the option to ask for hints, rather than forcing them onto the player.) Dread has no need for wordy signage, as it’s designed to guide the player silently and subtly through its world, rarely needing to instruct. Following along the critical path is a blissful glide through ZDR. There’s always a ragged edge, another door to open, another room to explore. It’s deeply satisfying and engrossing. Many of Dread’s optional upgrades are also puzzle-like, requiring strategic movement and platforming. This is a far cry from the old days when secrets were often hidden in random blocks with what seemed to be no real care.
Early on, Metroid wasn’t really about a frictionless experience, though. It was often just about getting lost. The original Metroid is filled with friction, with labyrinthine and repetitive corridors and dead ends. Metroid 2, on the other hand, pivoted hard into linearity, while Super established a more concrete formula. In it’s finest moments, Metroid was often about exploring without direction, beating on with uncertainty as the intrepid bounty hunter Samus. They were scary, weird, often incoherent games. For many, this makes the games altogether unapproachable, but it also conjured an enchanting mysteriousness that still affects me to this day.
Of note is also the series' gradual emphasis on plot. This climaxed in the near-universally maligned Other M, but Metroid had been showing more of its story for years, with dialogue and lore. (Yes, I read the manga, too, don’t @ me.) Dread has a veritable plot, with plot twists and worldbuilding and an antagonist with motives. It’s apparently the end of the so-called Metroid arc, and how it goes about wrapping that up is interesting indeed. Meanwhile, Super Metroid was a masterpiece of wordless narrative, telling a story about very little, but filling it with contemplation and moodiness. (Prime did this well too, while also featuring robust lore in its scan logs.) It didn’t really have characters, and the writing essentially boiled down to an opening monologue. The rest was told by the shape of space and its inhabitants. They were tone pieces, at least for a moment, ever brief. The series has shied away from silent storytelling, despite always being capable of it when it wants to be, and supplements with big dialogue boxes.
The truth is there is very little dreadful in Metroid Dread. After all, it’s designed to be an empowering and engaging experience, not an off putting one. There is plenty to be seen that is horrific or intense, but there is not much dread, no oppressive weight hovering over your shoulders as you stride into the dark. Even the E.M.M.I, the poster child of Dread, which upon encountering can be heart-pumping and tense, do not feel dreadful. They can instant-kill you and are unkillable (at first), but this design choice means that the generous checkpoint system implemented here was more or less necessary. As a result, the E.M.M.I become more like puzzles, and less like looming threats they seem to be. All of the game’s challenges can be overcome. The game is designed for you to overcome it. Metroid Dread is actually quite welcoming, inviting players both new and old into ZDR to romp through its caverns.
This is, by all accounts, to be recognized as good design. All these affordances, from improved game feel to improved world design, are what is considered in most circles to be good design. And I agree. Metroid Dread is impeccably well made. It is the current apex in years of iteration. Cruising through an alien landscape as Samus Aran has never felt so good. But it’s important to recognize that all these improvements end up changing the character of the series significantly. It’s still Metroid, don’t get me wrong. Dread is bursting at the seams with series staples. But it has also taken on a very different tone. It has fundamentally different design goals. The series is allowed to change. It doesn’t need to be ambitious and weird anymore, and in many ways, it can't be. It’s allowed to just be a great game. And Metroid Dread is not only a great game, but also one of the best in the series. After years and years of waiting, Metroid Dread finally emerged from its cocoon, and while it is fundamentally different, it really is stunning.
But I can’t lie. A part of me longs for the mystery and unease of the past, a past that perhaps barely existed at all. When Metroid was an eerie tone piece haunted by uncertainty and melancholy. When it was a world filled with dread.