Embraces open-world excess in a way that undercuts Breath of the Wild's more meditative appeal and turns into a far more uneven experience as a result, but all the new shit it does attempt is SO peak that it sorta evens out.

My friend Heather once said about Katamari Damacy that it's a game about interesting sensations rather than interesting obstacles and the way Tears of the Kingdom lets you interact with space, objects and materials is something I promise you've never quite sensed in a video game before.

“The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings.”

As early as that original E3 2015 trailer, Final Fantasy VII Remake labored to clarify its mission statement: “We’re about to take some artistic liberties, please bear with us.” If you listen past the fluffy prose, it becomes clear that this narrator isn’t actually part of the game’s fiction: when they speak of “us” and “them,” they’re literally describing our perspective on the original game, the “silence” following in its wake, every “remembrance” since (Advent Children, Crisis Core, etc.) and the natural fervor resulting from that very announcement. As we all know by now, the final game would go on to completely defy traditional understandings of that “Remake” moniker, literalizing its meta context in the form of the “Whispers” (the plot ghosts) — it’s a “remake” in the sense that the events of the original FF7 are literally set in motion again (supposedly in some alternate timeline,) only for Cloud’s party to eventually destroy the Whispers, defying the boundaries set by that game and leaving the door open for Remakes Part 2 and 3 to go off in a completely new direction.

I, too, gave that aspect of FF7R a reluctant nod of acknowledgement in my original review for the title, which was a more traditional and comprehensive look at its failings as a game first-and-foremost. If you’re reading this, it should be clear by now that that was not enough to exorcise my demon; if FF7R wants to be a cheeky little meta prank this badly, it seems only appropriate to look at it again primarily in this larger meta-context for its third anniversary. And the statement I want to lead in with is that leaving that proverbial door open for any upcoming games to realize the potential of its message was giving it way too much fucking credit.

FF7R wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Three years on, I’m still floored at the amount of hypocrisy and hubris in literally constructing an entire plot around the message “please have faith in our original ideas uwu” while leaning this obsessively on your past and succumbing to the shallowest trends. Think about the premise of redoing Midgar with current technology — a 3D camera with polygonal environments means seeing the world from the kinds of angles and at an intimate scale unthinkable on the PS1. It could mean more granular interactions with your surroundings, NPCs that genuinely inhabit the space instead of being mere exposition delivery bots. It could mean a more seamless flow to the experience, letting the player dictate more autonomously how they transition between locations or conveying story while maintaining player control.

Instead, FF7R copies the original’s design scope almost verbatim, placing a giant magnifying glass over its limitations when coupled with these jarring new production values. You have bartenders verbally offering you a seat, yet all you can actually do is stand around and watch them cycle through their idle animation as they repeat that one line of dialogue. You can transition between rooms without the game cutting to black now, but that’s accomplished via squeeze-through loading tunnels that will not benefit from any future hardware improvements. Environment traversal is now expressed via bespoke gameplay for those sections, but the way that works in practice is that you hold up on the analog stick for five minutes at a time as you watch Tifa robotically climb across an entire room of monkey bars — and do you really want me to talk about the part with the robot hand?

Some environments now invite you to hang out in them for longer stretches, but the new activities on offer here include highlights such as “have quest giver tell you to kill some rats, go to dead-end circular combat arena, kill rats, return to quest giver, be told you ‘didn’t kill the right rats,’ literally go back the exact same way, kill the new set of rats that just spawned there, return to quest giver again and receive your reward.” Combat now takes place within the game world in real-time, but the only way for you to decipher the properties of any given attack still is to read the big dumb name popping up over the enemy’s head, with no consistent indication for how these attacks conform to any of your defensive options, be it your three different parry moves or the non-functional dodge roll. This is a game that puts you up against flying opponents, but is somehow reluctant to give its characters anything in the way of aerial mobility, so what you’re left with is either linearly throwing out some kind of ranged option or watching your one robotic alibi air combo play out. This is a game that goes to the length of eliminating the original’s instanced combat transitions, yet it also makes you watch its characters slowly throw out potions one-by-one to heal outside of combat, with no way to have these kinds of items take effect immediately on pressing the button the way it literally worked in Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. (https://twitter.com/wondermagenta/status/1286438919916093444)

Instead of focusing on how hard I’m nitpicking, I really want you to think about just how absurd all this shit is. Consider FF7R’s approach to loading specifically: consider that it literally re-released on the PS5, a console whose entire premise is “we know what an SSD is,” only a year later, yet the game’s flaws are so deeply embedded in shortsighted design that a whole generational leap can’t salvage them. This remake was dreamt about for a solid decade before its eventual announcement, and yet somehow it manifested into a game that feels so much more outdated than its source material. It’s “upscaled PS2 JRPG (derogatory.)”

Consider further how much more intimate you could get with these characters now that you’re spending so much more time in this setting. They could’ve gone for a Mass Effect-esque structure, where you inhabit Midgar a day at a time, watching your crew progress and go through various personal struggles — the game is even hinting at this by giving Cloud his own apartment! Instead, you’re still bound to a rigid progression of events and set pieces, now padded by vapid exposition. You now regularly spend PS1-FF7-Midgar-level stretches of time simply running through linear tunnels, and somehow the only type of dialogue that void is filled with is “damn I hope we don’t get lost in this linear tunnel.” You have locked doors that are opened by flipping a single switch within the same room, characters regularly making observations that don’t actually match their surroundings in a way that makes them sound like complete himbos and a general disregard for the player’s intelligence.

In a sense, this game does actually cater to our current-day sensibilities in its Marvel-fication: more, more, more of “thing you already love,” thematic focus be damned. How ironic that this game desperately contorts itself around some vague message about the value of artistic freedom in its final act, meanwhile the way there is paved by shoving tear-jerk origin stories into the framework of every random background character the original presented that contribute absolutely nothing to any kind of overarching message. We literally will not be “free” until we realize that stories like this or Kingdom Hearts can be spun ad infinitum — Square have effectively proven you can reuse the same iconography for 20 years in slightly different scenarios, and people will show up. This game wants to be all meta, yet it never actually analyzes or challenges its source material, it’s all empty reverence.

What this means is that almost every “original idea” in FF7R either directly undermines the original’s pacing, drama and charm, or fails to be compelling on its own terms. This is why any charitability toward future entries in this series feels misplaced: so many resources at their disposal, so much talent eager to put their mark on a monumental game, so much distance to analyze its legacy from… and this is what you come up with? You may be inclined to call this game brave for being so explicit in its intentions and willing to subvert expectations with its finale, but there’s nothing “brave” about grafting these hollow-ass platitudes onto a shallow, rigid, predictable 40-hour fan service vehicle. The creative team here may have attempted to kill the burden of fan expectation alongside those plot ghosts, but the only thing they truly eviscerated is my interest in their games.

If you reached the end of this post and feel disappointed at how many points I remade from my original review, you may have some understanding of how I felt when I rolled credits on FF7R. Damn this meta shit is easy. 🤪

EDIT: had to bump up the score by half a star because I couldn't justify having this at the same level as TLOU2.

Great game if you think you like shmups but won’t try anything that doesn’t have stats.

Sorry that was mean. The juice carries hard! I’m sold on this engine at least on a game-feel level, cutting through mobs like a tiny red-haired buzzsaw on my lil PSPgo mildly kept my interest for about two hours. Felghana is at its best when it locks you in a room with dense twin-stick-like enemy and bullet patterns, where the extra Z-axis and melee attack options give the game a distinct flavor from comparable challenges in other titles. Mashing the shit out of your fire spell is innately enjoyable, staggers enemies regardless of damage and presents an interesting dynamic in that you can’t aim at your target without also moving there.

Bosses dictate the pace of their fights and have odd punish windows — the first Chester encounter for example has multiple, visually identical instances where he’ll idle a bit after completing his attack, yet the only one that’s actually safe to punish is following one of his big white aura moves. Not respecting this will regularly get you owned, and it doesn’t exactly make for an exciting dynamic.

This is probably the game’s most abrasive quality, but one I could’ve looked past rather easily were it not for the abundance of filler mob-corridors you have to trudge through. This is both a level design / structure issue — it’s trivial to jump over and run past enemies, the only reason not to do so is that it might leave you underleveled (DMC combat walls may have helped?) — as well as a seeming weakness of the mechanics: I like me some consistent enemy stagger, but Adol puts out hitboxes so fast that most mobs are unable to offer any meaningful counterplay unless they pelter you with projectiles from multiple angles (like in those shmup rooms I mentioned.) Many action games tend to make it so that the final hit in a combo knocks the enemy away, both as a strategic option for the player, as well as to give the enemy time to prepare an attack of their own, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here very much. Playing Ys Origin’s opening fight for comparison points to some careful rebalancing measures in that game, namely how the melee character Yunica seems to attack much more slowly.

Which segues nicely into why I ultimately decided to drop Oath — all the homies make it sound like Origin just emphasizes that game’s positive qualities while trimming most of the fat. Bring it on, baby. I don’t regret the time I spent in Felghana, but I also wanna keep it that way lmfao. The comfy JRPG vibes are definitely off the charts if that carries for you!

Enjoyable if wildly unfocused mechanics, paired with situations that permit expression without exactly inspiring much strategy: as cursed as it sounds, Bayonetta 3 has big Action RPG energy in how it lets you choose a setup and run that exact flowchart for the entire game. It's cool that these massive enemies aren't limited to formulaic set-pieces, instead roaming each arena relatively freely, but individual actions seem to not carry much weight when 90% of your button presses amount to screen-filling unga bunga shit. Enemies either stagger in a roughly similar, sort-of simplistic way or are still weirdly inconsistent (Grace & Glory parry in mid-air now, which wasn't the case even in Bayonetta 2; unique health thresholds for when enemies can be launched in a game with this many foes leads to an awkward amount of memorization for an intentionally-minded player; leg sweeps sort of exist but only work on a particular set of enemies and don’t actually result in a proper “downed” state, etc.)

This is obviously disappointing when compared to the original's roster of challenging enemies that allow for a wide variety of meaningful soft-counters, set against devilishly varied level design: Grace & Glory with their distance-blocks and fast movement, encouraging attacks with strong hit-stun, knockdown effects or wide hitboxes, Fairness with their anti-air grabs, disincentivizing (but not strictly prohibiting) jumps, Route 666 allowing for risky insta-kills or how you’re asked to maintain a combo during chase sequences — nothing really like that here in the regular mid-level verses from what I’ve played.

So, rather than Bayonetta’s happy medium, 3 ends up opposite to 2 on the “BRUHHHHHHHHHH”-end of the expression vs challenge spectrum: as a pure technical action game, the experience feels about as inconsistent and littered with holes (still no item penalty, totally broken strats like Phantom’s self-destruct, density of mini-games only an insane person would want to master, etc.) but the fact it’s so much less prescriptive appeals way more to my sensibilities. Demon Slave feels like a different take on Umbran Climax that is much more flexible and inviting to experimentation: you get to use it more regularly for longer spans of time (meaning you feel less rushed and encouraged to mash,) but the attack speed and range of your demons is now focused enough that it’s difficult to just stagger the entire screen by mashing X (despite my prior hyperbole in the opening paragraph.) Not only are you allowed to instantly switch between demons mid-combo (either adopting the previous demon’s position or summoning it right next to Bayonetta, granting even more flexibility,) it’s even possible to queue up commands and then take back control of Bayonetta while your demon executes them. It is genuinely clever that the queue can only hold up to two commands (rather than having a larger queue you can fill up for longer just by mashing,) meaning you’ll have to regularly tag between the two actors and coordinate between them positionally to get the most out of the system (specifically, you have to tag back to your demon before the second command has been executed to prevent them from leaving the play space.) The scoring system (while flawed) even takes this into account by having each actor contribute differently to point acquisition (Bayonetta raises points, demons raise the multiplier.)

Like I said, whatever strategy you pick kinda linearly works for the whole game — but at least there’s a lot of stuff to play around with! It almost doesn’t matter that I don’t actually click with a lot of the weapons and demons here when playing through the entire game mostly with Scarborough Fair (meaning “as sub-optimally as possible”) somehow doesn’t turn it into an active chore. I’m not fond of demons where control feels indirect and disconnected (Umbran Clock Tower, Dead End Express) or how weapons in general take control away from Bayonetta for too long (Yo-Yos, Color My World charged Heel Stomp, etc.) and don’t seem to follow intuitive/useful patterns in their dial combos and hold properties, but if anything that actually speaks to the variety on offer and just how many swings Platinum took with the player’s arsenal here. Unique Shot or Umbran Spear variations per weapon don’t even strike me as great inclusions (having Shot as a consistent action was helpful in the previous games to cancel out of certain states or target enemies, and a lot of this stuff just feels linearly better/worse,) but I’m honestly not sure any action game up to this point matches Bayonetta 3 as far as the pure AMOUNT of shit in it. That, and how much freedom you’re naturally given over the enemy’s position as you're toying with them, makes it an absolute buffet for combo fiends, and I can respect that.

I suppose if I had to sum it up, I would say that Bayonetta 3 is packed with interesting and sometimes even very thoughtfully implemented mechanics that spark a lot of intrinsic enjoyment, but the game Platinum have built around them doesn’t immediately inspire me to want to get truly serious about it. You spend a lot of time dicking around and exploring, with movement mechanics that are surprisingly versatile but still feel weirdly kneecapped in some ways (again lacking Bayonetta 1’s satisfying momentum) and are used in platforming challenges that are mostly just kinda quaint and insubstantial. Even rushing through all that, you’re stuck playing through what are probably the shallowest mini-games Platinum have put into code yet (Rock-Paper-Scissors, literally just moving an aiming cursor across the screen — the P**** shmup section was cool though.) But like I said going in, the biggest offender for me so far still is the seeming lack of meaningful encounter variety — at least the Alfheims with all their weird stipulations are a massive step up from Bayonetta 2, but based on what I’ve hard, I’m skeptical that mid-level verses will reveal more sauce on Infinite Climax difficulty.

TLDR: I recommend it! Expectations about met! Incredibly scuffed around the edges but I’ll take that over Bayonetta 2 any day.

I was dooming extremely hard when my long-range Wicked Weaves didn’t hit despite lock-on in the intro mission though. Come on guys.

Discussion stream I did with more practical examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxop2B5b4rQ

The most obvious contribution Shredder’s Revenge makes to Turtles in Time’s basic formula are multi-hit AOE Super attacks governed by a meter. Supers can be thrown out once the meter is full, and landing regular attacks is what gradually fills it, but there’s another way to get there, too: pressing the Taunt button locks you into an animation for a few seconds, at the end of which you instantly receive a full bar. The only condition that has to be met is that you can’t let an enemy attack interrupt your taunt, meaning it’s possible to use the downtime between combat rooms to safely stack up up to three Super bars (in Story Mode) and have them ready to rip the millisecond an enemy enters your general vicinity.

The obvious balance issues arising from this pose a question that’s unfortunately far more interesting than the game itself. Even within battles, the enemy AI can get so lethargic that it’s trivial to find breathing room for a taunt and delete entire rooms of mobs or take massive bites out of a boss’s health bar. Essentially, I kept having to stop and think: maybe I’d be enjoying this more if I stopped myself from exclusively jumping to the Instant Win-button at every opportunity?

To answer that question in a literal sense, I’m leaning toward “nah” — enemy behavior ranges from “literally won’t even attempt to track you across the screen” and “will grab you out of nowhere with no telegraphing” with little in-between, and they’ll even regularly enter the screen with active hitboxes when you might very well be in the middle of an uninterruptible action, leading to a good amount of cheap shots. It’s possible to launch enemies into the air with an uppercut or laterally and into walls with a satisfying dodge attack, but these hit reactions are yet another area with no pleasing middle ground: foot soldiers go from zero to death with basic launch-dive loops while most of the tougher enemy types take little to no hitstun. The final set of bosses actually attempt to counterplay Super spam by literally only being vulnerable in rigid intervals, but this results in fights where you stand in one corner, jump over any incoming projectiles and then walk up to get your three hits in. If that’s the kind of gameplay I can expect from a no-Super challenge run then I can’t say I’m interested.

But it’s also possible to look at my earlier question from a more philosophical angle: clearly, the existence of easy, exploitable strategies colored my perception of the game in a way that’s hard to shake retroactively. Fundamentally, I believe in the idea of encouraging players to find their own fun — be it from the perspective of a designer or even just when you’re recommending games to friends. Basically: why would I dismiss a game’s enjoyable qualities when its shortcomings are something I could technically opt out of?

Death Stranding, a game I may write a separate review for once the stars align, happens to be a case where I managed to do just that. The PS5 Director’s Cut includes the Half-Life Gravity Glove as an unlockable item, which naturally lets you beam objects directly into your hands from far away. I can’t imagine this would actually do serious harm to the game’s balance in practice, but I personally still stopped using it after a few missions — so much of what draws me to Death Stranding is the tangibility of its world, with every piece of cargo being spatially represented as a physics object. And the seemingly tiny quality of life improvement provided by the Gravity Glove was enough to undercut a lot of that appeal.

I may be stating the obvious now but what I’m trying to get at with this tangent is that Death Stranding clearly had something about it that hooked me, and that I wanted more of as I played — be that something as simple as the satisfaction of squeezing the right trigger to pick up a box of porn magazines and then letting go in the middle of Sam’s punch animation to organically hurl it at a guy’s head.

“Is it the game’s fault? No, it’s the players who are wrong.” — a hotly debated sentiment at least in my bubble, and one with enough nuances that I’ve been meaning to make a separate video about it. You may have come across or even held opinions like “it’s the designer’s job to force or at least encourage you to utilize all of a game’s mechanics;” DOOM Eternal game director Hugo Martin has famously described this idea as “pushing players into the fun zone,” even going as far as calling it a fuck-up on their part to not kill the player for fighting in a “boring/unfun” way (see the pre-release noclip interview.) I know I for one have traditionally erred on the side that you’re kind of a lamer if you can’t “FinD tHE fUn” on your own.

While I’m skeptical I’ll ever be fond of games like DOOM Eternal pushing their intended playstyle so aggressively that the experience turns into a glorified schedule, it’s cases like Shredder’s Revenge that make me realize my earlier perspective still was somewhat of an oversimplification. Because asking players to “find the fun” should naturally raise more questions: when or how do I know for sure that there’s no “fun” to be found? Could whatever cogent mechanical analysis I presented over the course of this 2/5 review still be missing the point? How much time do I owe any given game, how much experience with the medium and critical thinking of my own do I need to bring in to draw the most out of it?

Imposing rules and guidelines à la “X SHOULD be like Y” isn’t healthy for any artistic medium. But if there’s one idea swirling around in my himbo brain that seems worth sharing, it’s to encourage devs to at minimum know what the fun in their game is and put their best foot forward accordingly. I understand you may feel inclined to take the kiddies on a guided tour through the candy store so they don’t get food poisoning, but it’s okay to let go of their hand if you just make sure the stuff on the shelves is actually good. What I know is that Shredder’s Revenge’s bubble gum got a little too stale a little too fast, and it lacked the nuance to make me curious enough for another taste test.

no schmovement + linear + cringe + ratio

Prime takes its series to new heights in atmosphere, environmental storytelling and polish, but also sacrifices a little too much of Super Metroid's sweaty energy and genius level design structure for my tastes. Morphballing over bumpy terrain, side-stepping around Space Pirates and double jumping between platforms is fun, but is it as fun as it could be when every room is a tiny self-contained box? It sucks ass how you can get the Ice Beam, see eight Ice Beam doors on your map and then realize that seven of them are dead ends.

The wide-eyed little gamer in me hopes Retro will take inspiration from more loosey-goosey schmovement sandbox FPS games like Quake, Titanfall 2 or Halo Infinite for Prime 4. As it stands though, I can appreciate this more rigid Ocarina of Time-style take on Metroid for what it is!

As modern retro-styled 2D platformers go, Steel Assault unfortunately doesn’t offer many compelling reasons to really sink your teeth into it. You can aim your Castlevania electro whip in eight directions, do non-committal double jumps and perform low-profile slides with cooldowns in-between to squeeze through attacks/gaps and close short distances. There aren’t any more intricate enemy interactions outside of just dealing damage to them, like bouncing off of heads in Shovel Knight for example, and power-ups (a shield and a buff to your whip) present linear improvements to your character that you don’t have to meaningfully change your strategy around, like you would in Castlevania. It feels odd how your character will often ignore those cooldowns I mentioned earlier and do consecutive slides in cutscenes, highlighting just how little fun there is to be had with the mechanics outside of what the game strictly intends for you to do.

Steel Assault dedicates its third action button to this zip-line you can launch at any time and hook between adjacent surfaces. You can probably imagine that that makes it a mostly situational gimmick: if you run into applicable geometry, the game will either specifically expect you to use the zip-line to progress, or it’s a random corner in the level design where it serves no purpose. Again, it feels odd how many obvious-seeming opportunities weren’t taken: you can’t hook into basic enemies, and there’s at least one boss where you’d expect to be able to position it between its gigantic hands, only to be disappointed. Its one universal function is to buy yourself extra air-time when not aiming at a surface, but a majority of the enemy patterns are timed with this in mind as well, so it doesn’t exactly lead to more spontaneous gameplay either. It honestly wasn’t until the final boss that Steel Assault started to scratch the surface of its rigid barebones mechanics, where the ground suddenly becomes inaccessible and you have to shift the position of your zip-line at a moment’s notice to dodge attacks.

If you subscribe to the idea that visuals on their own give a game value, Steel Assault’s eye-watering excess of chunky pixel art will please to some extent, but even that raw spectacle was diminished in my experience with how poorly the developers chose to present it. The game’s default “CRT filter” comes not in the form of horizontal consumer television or PVM scanlines, but a strange LCD grid with wide gaps between vertical lines. It’s nonsensical when the in-game pixels are all square, and it’s misaligned with the art enough that it creates a messy impression in motion. It’s even stranger with the added bilinear filtering on top, which obviously isn’t what games look like on an LCD, but also doesn’t match Steel Assault’s art style, since it mostly doesn’t rely on dithering (which would be used to create the impression of smoother blending and shades on a CRT.) It’s preferable to turn all that stuff off, but even then the final output is treated strangely (my guess is there’s some artificial over-sharpening and saturation going on that makes the whole image look grainy.)

As nitpicky as that last paragraph was, I’m sure the developers had their heart in the right place, but I ultimately can’t help but think of the following Matthewmatosis quote as I unpack Steel Asssault: the amount of effort put into something doesn’t necessarily determine its quality.

RESIDENT EVIL - THE MOVIE: THE VIDEO GAME, FEATURING:

- THE VILLAGE (watered-down baby-version of RE4)
- THE CASTLE (watered-down baby-version of REmake)
- THE SWAMP (you walk over some planks and do Uncharted jumps aka MOVIE)
- THE DOLL HOUSE (actually just a movie)
- THE FACTORY (kinda ass but unironically has the highest density of uninterrupted gameplay)

I did a more rambly and detailed review on my YouTube: https://youtu.be/_B-ACzf5ZcA

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.