'Metroid Dread' is a thrilling twist on a classic, but it made me miserable

It’s not that Metroid Dread is a bad video game. I just never want to touch it again. If masochistically punishing games aren’t your thing, I’d strongly recommend avoiding it.

In every way, the latest side-scrolling adventure for intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran is faithful to the spirit of its predecessors. In fact, this new story is a straight-up continuation of the narrative that the original game kicked off. Dread, like the Metroids that came before it, sets our armored heroine loose in a sprawling complex of corridors, ducts, and chambers, with most of those locations sealed off behind obstacles that can only be circumvented using one tool or another.

All of those tools are, of course, locked behind fearsome boss fights and other threats. Most of the baddies can be defeated with Samus’s trusty arm cannon and missiles, same as always. However, clearing the hazardous locales of planet ZDR, where Dread is set, is no easy task. Like every other side-scrolling Metroid game, this is a game of pattern memorization and recognition.

Enemies move and attack in predictable ways and they always appear in the same locations when you re-enter a room. Bosses work the same way, though they draw from a wider pool of attacks that are tougher to read and hit harder than your average alien murderbug. But whether it’s an enemy-filled chamber you need to clear or a whole, entire boss, the expectation is the same: Throw Samus at the threat again and again to learn the patterns, master the timing, and persevere.

That’s been the approach for Metroid games — and Metroid-like games, such as the widely beloved Hollow Knight — since the world first met Samus in 1986. The tricky part for the creators of these games is finding the line between satisfying challenge and punishing slog.

Samus can climb along these glowing blue walls only after you find the tool that allows her to do.
Credit: MERCURYSTEAM / NINTENDO

Of course, what qualifies as “challenging” is deeply subjective and influenced by everything from the underlying creative vision to the tastes of the would-be audience. But games always have the capacity to make compromises. Difficulty settings can make a tough game more approachable. Accessibility settings can make complex controls less of a burden for players who need (or even just want) an easier time. Games don’t have to be grueling to be great. For a beloved elder franchise that has fans spanning multiple age groups, a high barrier to entry is a crushing disappointment.

That’s where and why Metroid Dread is a resounding failure for me. You can’t change the difficulty or make the experience more accessible. There are no compromises that might ease the pain of a particularly challenging encounter. If you get stuck on a boss for two hours, well, hopefully, you’ll get a handle on it before the third hour passes. Or the fourth, or later. Because that’s your only option!

Comparing hard games to Dark Souls may be a tired meme at this point, but this is a case where the spirit of that meme actually applies. It’s not that From Software’s hit series is hard so much as it is uncompromising; you have to meet the Souls games and those like it on their terms. That’s the case as well for developer MercurySteam’s work on Metroid Dread: This is a hard game, yes, but it’s a static challenge. You’re either going to get it, or you won’t.

The uncompromising approach extends beyond the moment-to-moment gameplay, too. Metroid Dread is incredibly vague about what you’re supposed to do at any given moment. That’s been a series trope for a long time with the side-scrolling Metroid games. But just because something is an established tradition that doesn’t mean it’s the right idea.

I spent inordinate amounts of my time in Dread scanning around the massive and intricately detailed map screen, with its dozens of icons for phase beam doors, missile doors, morph ball launchers, speed boost blocks, and other interaction points that work with some specific tool or another. The trick to finding the way forward is to look at the last few tools you picked up and then scan the map for previously visited areas where there may be a door or path you couldn’t open before, but now can.

Dread lets you highlight doors and blocks by “type” on the map, which makes it easier to find areas you haven’t broken into yet. But that isn’t terribly clear in-game until you start experimenting with the controls listed on the map screen. The map is also just extremely large and dense, with tiny, difficult-to-see details, even when you’re zoomed in. (This right here is an extremely basic accessibility issue that could be solved with the addition of some basic display settings. There are none in Metroid Dread.)

Unfortunately, those tiny details are often where the path forward is found. Also, you’re not choosing the doors or blocks you want to tag from a list; to use the “highlight” feature, you actually have to find one of whatever it is you want to tag on the map and then select it. So if you’re already having a hard time locating a particular block or door, you’re stuck. The feature isn’t terribly helpful in those situations, and it doesn’t remotely solve all of the pathfinding problems.

It did help me, though, especially after a friend and fellow critic suggested leaning on that tool specifically whenever I felt lost. I just don’t understand why the game itself doesn’t make the presence and use of the highlight feature more explicit during the early tutorial hours. It’s a rare bit of help in a game that would seemingly rather just not offer any.

Games don’t have to be grueling to be great.

The rigid design here is heartbreaking for me, not just as a longtime fan of Metroid but also as a lover of video games who sees all the wonderful new ideas MercurySteam injected into Dread. The biggest and coolest addition is a direct reflection of the subtitle. This Metroid’s “Dread” is realized by seven hunting robots called EMMIs.

These spindly terrors each behave a little differently from one another and occupy their own, specific “EMMI zone” areas of the map. You can’t defeat them using conventional weapons, and being caught by one is almost always an immediate trip to the “Game Over” screen. So, most of the time evasion is your best bet for dealing with them. But that’s difficult because every EMMI has a keen robot ear that picks up on Samus’s movements when she’s in their rather large detection range. They don’t go into alert mode and seal off exits until they actually spot Samus, but the moment they hear her they’ll rush in to investigate.

Like so much else in a Metroid game, each EMMI is a puzzle to be solved. You’re taught early on that there is a way to defeat them, but it’s a different process for each one that always includes a miniboss fight and a (frequently tricky!) final tussle with the EMMI itself. Defeat one and you’ll get a new tool for Samus, but even better: That particular EMMI zone gets permanently cleared, freeing you up to explore and hunt for secrets or new paths without the fear of an insta-fail haunting your every move.

The addition of EMMIs really shakes up the typical flow of a Metroid game. It’s still the same basic process of following roughly linear paths from one objective to the next, until you find a new tool that opens up more opportunities for free exploration — and, eventually, a new basically-linear route to your next objective. But more often than not, you’ll find one or more EMMI zones that need to be passed through, and possibly dealt with, before you can reach Samus’s next objective.

It’s cool, new ideas like this that really make Metroid Dread a heartbreaker for me. I love the tension that EMMIs bring to the mix. It’s plenty stressful to get a boss’s health down low when Samus only has a sliver of energy left — and extremely satisfying when you survive in those circumstances — but the hunts are different. They’re tense. Samus has ways to hide, like a limited-use cloaking ability, as well as tools in the environment that can cut off a pursuing EMMI, but they’re all fallible. Make a mistake and you’re toast.

The washed out color scheming of EMMI zones only adds to the tense feeling that Samus is alone and hunted during these moments.
Credit: MERCURYSTEAM / NINTENDO

The penalty for failure, in the face of an EMMI or anything else, is generally mild, at least. Save locations are few and far between, but Metroid Dread is littered with invisible checkpoints. If an EMMI catches Samus, you’re sent back to the last non-EMMI zone room you visited. If a boss fight goes poorly, Samus respawns only a short distance away, making the need to try and fail again and again a bit easier to swallow. However, generous checkpoints aren’t a solution for the deeper issues here.

It’s not one particular thing that broke Metroid Dread‘s spell for me. The real issue is how fundamentally unfriendly it is as an overall experience. It’s challenging, but that challenge is a solid, vertical wall here. There’s nothing in the way of help for players who can’t climb that wall. You’re expected to just be patient, keep trying, and, to borrow one of the more annoying gamer troll catchphrases, “get good.”

I don’t want to get the kind of good that’s required here. I tried and it was deeply unpleasant. When I got stuck on a certain boss for multiple hours, so much frustration built up in my repeated attempts to beat it that there was no satisfaction when I finally succeeded. That was a recurring issue with boss fights, with pathfinding, and even with some of the later run-of-the-mill foes that you encounter. The more I played Metroid Dread, the less I wanted to keep playing. I didn’t manage to finish in the end, and I’m sure I never will.

It’s a damn shame. I love Metroid. I want to play all the Metroid and experience its whole story for myself. But MercurySteam decided, for whatever reason, that only those people who pass the test, who master the controls, who happily throw themselves at challenges again and again — who, to use that atrocious shorthand again, get good enough — can experience all the joys and wonders that Metroid Dread has to offer. What a waste.

Metroid Dread is out for Nintendo Switch on Oct. 8.