I'm probably stating the obvious opening my review this way, but whether or not Metroid is truly BACK with Dread depends entirely on what you look for in the series. It's Samus, it's caverns, it's bombing random blocks, but is it intricate world-design and schmovy survival action? Ehhhh.

Mechanically, Dread picks up where Samus Returns left off, which itself picked up where Fusion and Zero Mission left off more than 15 years ago. Samus snaps onto ledges, automatically curls up into a ball when you approach tunnels, accelerates and decelerates immediately and falls like a rock. For the average person, the adjectives that will come to mind when comparing these controls to the "old" and "clunky" Super Metroid are likely "tight" and "slick" and "modern."

I find it interesting to think about Dread in this context, because it illuminates how we often cling to obvious answers for why certain games are the way they are, instead of simply looking at the experience for what it is. And the experience Super Metroid provided was to let the level design essentially act as a blank canvas for your consistent, non-arbitrary moveset. The tiniest bit of wall can still be kicked off of, and the morphball lets you squeeze through whatever gap you feel you should be able to, because so little of Zebes's geometry was put in place specifically to require the use of individual movement mechanics. One of Super's most famous skips involves barely rolling under the metal gate in Brinstar just before it shuts, which works not because it's a set piece specifically crafted for the morphball, but because the collision boxes are so generalized and speed is retained so naturally.

Look at Zero Mission meanwhile and if you try to wall-jump off of a small platform at a low angle, you won't be able to, because for as saucy as its movement tech may look, the game still expects you to contend with its rigid ledge grabs and pull yourself into arbitrarily positioned morph ball tunnels. All the way back in 2004, we were already playing a Metroid game where speedruns end up hinging more on deliberately hidden shortcuts in the level design, rather than deep exploitable movement tech à la Super.

And don't misunderstand; it is cool that these newer Metroids try to specifically cater to that kind of player mentality. But it's also at least a little mistrustful toward those same players, to expect them to learn all these incredibly specific ways the level design can be broken, rather than hand them a deep set of movement mechanics and let them look at any given part of the game world and say "hmm yeah I can probably do that." If anything, these games have to rely on deliberate speedrun shortcuts because the mechanics on their own give you so little to work with.

Dread's exact place in this debate is confusing, as it's already proving to have far more speedrunning tricks up its sleeve than I personally expected. Originally I was going to go off on how dumb it is that the game bars you from using your power bombs if you find them early, how that proves that the game doesn't really work in a systemic fashion (like Super Metroid, where pick-ups function completely independently of each other within the game's logic,) blah blah blah.

Clearly though, a lot of the skips we're seeing in this early stage of Dread's life are simply the result of clever hitbox manipulation and routing. With how many power-ups come as direct rewards for completing set pieces and killing bosses, I sincerely didn't expect people to reach sub-two-hour playtimes within mere weeks of Dread's release; my expectation was that Dread would be too reliant on tight event triggers. For what it is, it's impressive the game doesn't just come apart at the seams when you break its sequence, and it would be short-sighted to dismiss Dread purely based off that earlier power bomb example.

That said, that fundamental philosophical difference between Dread and a game like Super is still deeply felt in every fiber of the experience. Dread is ultimately still a game that tries to restrict you at every turn, with its rigid wall-jump arcs and doors that conveniently lock behind you even when you're closing in on the final boss already. You can go into either experience with a solid grasp of Samus's movement, but no knowledge of specific level design skips, and Super will feel far more spontaneous and freeing than its 2021 successor; that sense of "yeah I can probably do that" is never coming back. And I feel this says a lot about MercurySteam's priorities with Dread: dogged surface-level adherence to Super's tropes, items and hands-off vibe, without genuine mechanical follow-through.

Instead, Dread is a 2021 video game through and through, meaning it's highly concerned with having you go through a tight progression of escalating challenges. Here's the part where you pull out blocks with your Grapple Beam, here's where you Shinespark through a billion walls in a row for a bit, here's where you're ambushed by a mini-boss. And you know what, I'll say Dread pulls off that modern action romp thing as well as you could hope for. The high movement speed, instant acceleration and low input lag make for a game that's immediately fun to pick up, being able to 360-aim or parry while running and slide right into tunnels without ever breaking momentum makes Samus feel like a fresh bar of soap in your hands. Sprinting through ZDR's many expansive rooms, evocative panoramas stretching out behind you, rays of light softly flowing in, thumping sound effects massaging your ears as you light up the entire screen with big neon-yellow laser shots -- it hits.

The bosses are a surprising highlight. They'll often use different types of projectiles in conjunction with each other, which either can or can't be removed from the screen with your own shots, and some even have relatively dynamic movement and spawn patterns. As rigidly as these enemies tend to cycle between individual attacks, there is enough variation and opportunities to stay on the offensive within those attacks for them to stay remarkably fresh over repeat attempts. I was especially impressed with this duo of mini-bosses you encounter a few times over the course of the game: you can freely bait each one of them to any given part of the sizable fighting arena, resulting in dynamic outcomes and spontaneous situations that feel like relatively uncharted territory for this kind of 2D action game.

But Dread's pursuit of action movie bombast comes at a cost. As I said, it's a tight progression of escalating challenges: the game never stops funneling you forward, often going as far as locking anything that's not the critical path behind you, the proverbial carrot always right in your face. In fact, if you've gone through Dread with the creeping suspicion that the game never actually lets you stray from its single intended path (unless you specifically sequence break or backtrack for capacity upgrades,) then I'm here to rip that band-aid off and tell you that that seems pretty accurate. I'd do more serious testing into this if I were writing something a little more legit than a Backloggd review, but: every one of Samus's key upgrades (minus Space Jump and Scan Pulse) has a corresponding type of lock in the world, and it seems there's never a point where getting one upgrade opens up enough paths that you could, for example, choose the order in which to get the next two.

This is my fancy way of saying that Dread is basically a straight line, except for those few cheeky shortcuts that let you adjust the item sequence a little bit. But that's really only shocking if we forget that, again, it's Fusion and Zero Mission that set Metroid on this exact trajectory in the first place. Comparing Dread to its GBA predecessors, I can kinda take or leave individual aspects of either style. Zero Mission for example showed that you can have a pretty linear game without inhibiting wall-jumps so aggressively, but at least Dread has the decency to not put big glowing waypoints on my map. Etc., etc.

Dread is forcing me to accept that I'm a bitter 16-bit boomer and how, for as much as games can't stop using the same ingredients, the particular way the Super Metroid dish is assembled has just not been matched by anything. Everyone who's played Super Metroid remembers making it back to the surface, to Samus's ship, the dreary rain giving way to triumphant horns, after running a whole lap around Zebes and getting all the key power-ups you need to explore the rest of the planet. It's not only emotionally powerful, it's where the real game begins, finally letting you search for the path forward in whatever way you see fit. This is complimented by a whole slew of genuinely optional upgrades like the Spazer or Plasma Beam, which present a much stronger backtracking incentive than Dread's endless supply of Missile Tanks.

This structure -- first a guided tour around most of the planet, then letting you loose to kill the game's remaining bosses -- hasn't been replicated by any other Metroid. But approaching Dread in particular under this lens reveals just how haphazard MercurySteam's approach to level design is, and how it and Super are too fundamentally incompatible to really be compared, even though Dread is constantly setting itself up for that juxtaposition.

I urge you to play close attention to how Dread's world is assembled. The game world's elevators always connect to these one-way horizontal tunnels: a dead-end to one side, a door to the rest of the area on the other. Individually, many of the rooms have dense, zig-zaggy layouts, but they're stacked together in a relatively linear fashion: the path keeps snaking West for example, until you reach the end of the respective map and the room suddenly curves backward, to naturally guide you back toward where you started.

This way, Dread essentially always auto-pilots you exactly where it wants you to go. Try any alternative door on this path, and they'll always feed into some kind of dead-end (again, unless it happens to lead to a sequence break.) It's to the point where, sometimes, you're funneled into a random teleporter that connects to a random room in a totally different area that you would never think to visit otherwise, and once you're there, the cycle I just described begins anew. Unlike every other Metroid, even the games outside Super, Dread never actually asks you to backtrack or figure out where to go yourself. The level design always curves and bends conveniently to guide you forward, and at best you might have to intuit which wall to bomb next.

The difference is easiest to explain with Super: here, every area is instead entered via a vertical shaft, which ends up functioning as a kind of hub, with many different spokes on either side. These can fork into one-off rooms, long horizontal tunnels, or even another hub-like vertical shaft. You play around in that set of rooms for a bit until maybe you get a new power up, which is where you're meant to draw the connection that "hmm maybe it's time to go and check out some of those other rooms."

It's not just that Super is asking you to understand its level design as an actual world, it has the knock-on effect that you can understand it in the first place. The layout feels planned and internally consistent, rooms have actual navigational functions (again, singular tunnels and shafts that connect to many different rooms on their own) instead of just being video game levels for you to blast through.

Maybe you also played through Dread and couldn't shake the sense that it was kind of flavorless? That it lacked pacing? And the sense that I'm actually moving through a world? You may find those feelings hard to pin down exactly, but they have real game design reasons behind them, and as much as Dread tries to wow you with visually stunning one-off rooms and events at key progression junctures, the way there can't help but feel hollow. MercurySteam stacked together all these set pieces and micro-challenges in the most seamless 2021 way they could, but once you take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's clear you're dealing with an un-traversable clustered mess of mini-video game levels, rather than a world you're meant to understand every inch of. It's telling you unlock the ability to warp freely between any of the game's previously one-way teleporters in the post-game: the map is just too fucking cumbersome to navigate otherwise.

This lack of commitment to actually capture the essence of those older Metroids is even more evident in Dread's use of a modern auto-checkpoint system: we're at least back to dedicated save rooms to lock in your progress and get a break from the action after Samus Returns, but anytime there's even a slight chance of death, you can expect to respawn just one room earlier. Under that light, you can't help but feel incredibly underwhelmed with how inconsequential the EMMI prove to be to the overall experience, considering they're the game's only major gameplay element not cribbed verbatim from older Metroids.

I suppose this is another aspect that has me thinking on how design and player sensibilities have fundamentally shifted over the years. To me, many of Dread's challenges felt fleeting; often satisfying to learn and execute, but ultimately with no real tension or significant room for error... and that last part is what's crucial. I'm going to state the obvious again, but if EMMI kill the player instantly, that means a single mistake will be enough to erase all their progress since the last checkpoint. It stands to reason then, that as a designer you'd make these runs as short as possible to keep possible frustration at a minimum.

So really, what makes the EMMI fall flat is less the lack of real consequence for failure specifically, and more how that reverberates on the design of the EMMI sections themselves. You never actually spend significant time with the first four EMMI (this does not include the first tutorial variant,) the run to the exit is so short you're actually likely to get it on a random attempt without having had to consciously study their behavior or the level design much. Early gimmicks like having to stand still to raise the room's water level do get the blood pumping a bit, but they're far too infrequent to turn the EMMI zones into something more substantial-feeling.

Here's the contradiction many game designers and players don't seem to want to acknowledge: if you give me a trial & error challenge that lasts a minute, kills me instantly, and will take ten attempts to get past, you actually use more of my time than if you'd given me a more substantial challenge with more room for error that sets me back circa three minutes in the event that I fail (which I might not.) Not only that, while the latter situation actually has stakes, the former will have me go through the motions and get used to it so much that I'll be too emotionally numb to feel much of anything by the time I succeed. It's too easy to forget that the idea behind game design is to elicit feelings from the player; you have to understand that they're going to be way more afraid of punishment than they actually need to be. That's the whole point.

It wasn't until the purple and blue EMMI where I got into extended tugs of war and felt legitimate... well, dread, having to move through their domains. The way water is used to slow Samus down in places is especially intelligent, as it becomes impossible to outpace the EMMI once you enter. You'll have to carefully estimate how long it will take you to get across, and you may even want to lure your predator somewhere else first based on your planning.

Consistently exciting was the use of the Omega Blaster, where you get to flip the tables and need to assess the ideal spot in the level design to shoot at the EMMI from (since you need to deal damage consistently to take out their armor.) It leverages your previously gained knowledge of the room layout back when you were the prey, and having to gauge distances and movement timings in this way feels legitimately original in the 2D game space Dread is occupying.

And UNLIKE Metroid Dread, I don't have a smooth convenient segue into my conclusion for this review. It's ultimately a game that left me excited and disappointed in pretty much equal measure. It's undeniably fun to have Metroid's base mechanics back in this giga-polished AAA 2D 2021 Nintendo game, but Dread is not really any less conservative than Samus Returns was four years ago. And even if all you wanted was "more Metroid," is Dread really meeting that bar when it's following up at least FOUR games that were all incredibly daring, sometimes even groundbreaking in their time? The most disruptive thing Dread does is not giving the normies an Easy Mode.

Reviewed on Oct 26, 2021


13 Comments


2 years ago

Love the EMMI section in this, very interesting and well put

2 years ago

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This is why I just replayed Castlevania instead
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2 years ago

Shit, has AJ gotten wind of this review yet?
AJ seething

2 years ago

Excellent writeup!
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2 years ago

Apollo Justice wanted an Easy Mode and now hes pissed
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2 years ago

Great write up here, the EMMI section especially is something I echo wholeheartedly

2 years ago

Yeah, I can’t disagree. Even in my first playthrough it always felt weird that the teleporters were always conveniently placed at the end of a path right next to where I got an upgrade. It felt very unnatural to me. Overall I still think Dread’s a good game, but it could’ve been so much more than a lesser Fusion.

2 years ago

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2 years ago

I feel like games like this often try way too hard to capture what made their long-past predecessors successful without actually putting the legwork into finding out why those things work in the first place. Optimized routing and speedrun tricks are fun in Super Metroid because they stress the core design succinctly. The new design feels artificial, like it is cramming in these elements despite them not fitting the game in the first place. I know this sounds basic but no games seem to get it right anymore. It reminds me of the modern Sonic games that keep trying to force all this non-linearity in without actually understanding why it was fun in the first place. In Sonic 2, you use your knowledge of the terrain and momentum to cleverly break the game in two, completely bypassing sections that use to give you trouble. You skip the Chemical Plant moving block platforming segment by using clues in the environment and/or cleverly jumping with the right speed. In Sonic Generations, you jump on the platforms at the beginning of Chemical Plant just because you can. Sure they branch off, and you do need to be reasonably skilled to jump on them, but is that really fun? Do you really find that engaging? Say what you will about Sonic Adventure being "more linear," but that game's stages are perfectly designed around what the systems are built for and are thus far more replayable. Shinesparking in Super Metroid is no different. In Super, it naturally opens the game up, but in Dread it is only here for some admittedly fun puzzles that become obnoxious when you're struggling with the fiddly stick on the millionth one. Your reward for doing it isn't a greater understanding of the game, but instead some missiles to add to a meaningless list.

1 year ago

Really strong writing here that I can see genuinely giving clarity to those that have a hard time pinning down certain issues (myself included). The guiding hand of the designer feeling too strong for its own good may be dismissed when players look at the ant colony like map and say to themselves "well this must be really complex and im just not able to appreciate it". Your point about dead ends winding back and forth highlight in a concise clear way why the map design is deceptively restrictive.
thanks chilly!

1 year ago

TL;DR: this game is not Super Metroid so it's mid
world-shattering critique right here