Metroid Dread turned out largely how I assumed it would. It seeks to rehabilitate a series that in public consciousness has been seen as having lost its way, or been absent altogether, and there's some irony to that premise of a grand return when Samus Returns of a mere four years past already had that opportunity and hopes of its own for staging the return to form, handled by mostly the same creative team. Why it didn't take as well as intended could be due to any number of present factors: the unenviable task of adapting a commonly maligned game like Metroid II; the resulting dissonance between the idiosyncracies of the source material and the crowd-pleasing sensibilities of the adapted work; the stigma of handheld gaming, and of staging a comeback on "outdated" hardware in its twilight. A rhetoric quickly arose that whatever Samus Returns was, whatever its individual merits and faults, none of it could really be applied to assessing MercurySteam and Nintendo's work on it, as the baggage of carrying Metroid II on their shoulders was too great a burden for anyone to bear. If only they could be freed from its crushing weight, the idle mutterings went.
Dread posits a relief from those ambiguous critical tensions as the first "new" 2D Metroid since 2002's Fusion, but this is promotional chatter concerned with the framing narrative of the series which Dread does plot a new chapter for. At its heart though, and in all aspects of its design and creative voice, it's as much maintaining course within the previous game's example as well as looking toward what had been in the back of its creators' minds from the start, in specifically Fusion--the game MercurySteam initially pitched a remake of to Nintendo instead of the second game in the series that they ended up adapting. Playing Dread, one cannot help but feel that the game in its pretenses of charting new ground for the series is also enormously concerned with providing closure on both ends of its creative dynamic: MercurySteam for their desire to revisit and reshape the concepts of another contested series entry, and for Yoshio Sakamoto and the narrative that he's largely been in charge of weaving for the many decades of the series's existence. In so doing, whatever is to be found in it cannot be taken as a blank slate as through its developers's priorities it's as informed and--if one deems--limited by its past as any literal remake would be.
As such, breaking free of the ostensible limitations that Metroid II's vintage design imposed on Samus Returns's otherwise modernized, conforming ethos isn't really a factor in what Dread does with itself. If the uncommonly linear and directed world structure for the series's typical context bothered in the previous game, Dread offers no solace; it is among the most aggressively directed and forward-pushing games of its type, for its series and otherwise. Fusion adopted a structure akin to this in its time, but tied it to the artificiality of its setting, the interests of its dramatic pacing, and the novel ways in which the surface boundaries were subverted and contorted due to unanticipated events in the game's world over time. Dread fashions itself, if not a freely, but a sprawlingly and interwovenly presented game space where exploration of one's navigational limits is the driving texture and appeal of the spatial story told. No compelling navigation or exploration occurs within this framework, however, as the game is insistent on nudging the player toward the nearest-neighbour primary path through the hand of its invisible design, from beginning to end. It conjures illusionary complexity in frequently taking the player on elevator, transit and teleport rides between the primary biome habitats, in service of creating an image of meaningful interconnectivity between them--these mandatory tangents tend only to break up the rhythm of play in maximizing the frequency the player is faced with a load screen in transitioning between areas, which remain as isolated from each other as they would have if such twists in the road hadn't taken place. If taken as a world to be lost or fulfill wanderlust in, Dread will turn miserably cloying in the implicit and explicit gating it places around the player's experiential journey every step of the way, at complete odds with what people tend to demand from the series.
In order to glean the most out of the game's fundamental nature, perhaps it needs to be reassessed entirely in the context that it creates for itself. Nothing about Dread communicates an interest in its nominal tonal premise, at least at first. Samus in this incarnation is the most capable and diversely qualified version of herself to survive her circumstances than she's ever been; the generously floaty and slighly slippery and momentum-full physics of earlier games now long gone, replaced with a hyperprecision evocative of snapping a mouse cursor into place on a computer screen, with the associated absence of kinetic friction. In an effort to innovate within the series's rigid traditions, she is now granted with many debuting maneuvers that in all cases prioritize additional twitch mobility to suit the game's priorities, which grants more options to the player but also creaters a layer of inadvertent challenge in mentally and physically keeping track of all the actions mapped to the game's packed control scheme it does its best to make intuitive sense of. Clutter is a sensation that arises in many aspects of the game's design, whether it's the amount of supplementary and overlapping action verbs, the layouts of the world itself, or simply perusing the map screen, a sensory overload of microdetail, aggressive colour-coding and oddly unclear visual denotation between obtained and unclaimed items marked on it. In so much effective and often arbitrary noise, it's difficult to be dreading much of anything short of yet another screen full of exacting antfarm navigation.
It's that increased aptitude at Samus's disposal that highlights the E.M.M.I.s as the well-earned centerpiece of the game. So much of Dread was absorbed by me as the rote fulfillment of a formula that I anticipated and had accepted as the series's fate going into the future, and while this is not an unprecedented upset, nor do I think that it will maintain itself past this singular instance, I'm glad the robo-stalkers are here to make at least one thing about the game worthwhile to my eyes. The game's Fusion heritage makes it tempting to view them as successors to the SA-X, but they are much more in line with Zero Mission's Zero Suit stealth infiltration sequence--that game's best mechanical and conceptual contribution to the series that it had to make. The E.M.M.I.s aren't strictly terrifying--Metroid rarely deals in outright fright--but they exert pressure on the game's design language in ways that best highlights its strengths and masks its weaknesses, in namely allowing the firmly choreographed world progression to maintain a sense of flexible menace that can be managed but never ignored or diminished--no matter how strong Samus grows in the game's power curve, contact with the E.M.M.I.s will always resolve fatally, absent of truly preternatural reflexes in securing the lone means of escape. The hyperdensity of the environmental design finds a more compelling voice in the instances of trying to navigate it expediently out of harm's way with an assailant on one's heels, as opposed to the usual baseline of penetrating its recesses slowly and methodically in search of trinkets, and so they also convincingly justify the game's unrelenting forward momentum with means that make one buy into the artifice. The face-offs with the automatons are especially well conceptualized, making practical and dramatic use of the game's camera in lining up the killing shot, and basing that opportunity on savvy use of the environment that the player was previously hounded through, in creating space between Samus and her target, while remaining conscious of the need to double back and escape to a better vantage point if needed. All of the game's design senses in how it moves, feels and the story it attempts to tell crystallizes with the E.M.M.I.s, to an extent that I mourned the dismantling of each one, for the window that now had closed in creating new angles on design concepts that badly needed that refreshing ventilation and dusting of cobwebs.
Finding value and meaning in helplessness is the tightrope the game ends up walking, in one way enforcing the acceptance of this worldview in surviving the stalking constructs, while exhibiting deep discomfort in ever allowing such a reading anywhere near its protagonist. Other M has been endlessly debated, dressed down, denounced and largely ridiculed on part of its audience in the more than ten years since its release for the narrative cudgel that it took to the series and particularly Samus's characterization, which people tend to have very strong feelings about on basis of what she represents, the pedigree of her games, and crucially to the point that was missed there, the vagueness of her personhood and how she expresses herself, allowing anyone to project whatever reading is most palatable to them and the conception they want their idea of "Samus Aran" to align with. The character assassination that Other M was labeled as was not borne out of a rejection of a meaningless "canon" so much as its adherence to a defined script at all--that it was potently infantilizing and sexist was the insult to injury, but ultimately not the cause of its widespread disavowal since. If audiences were affected by the game's storytelling to the described degree, it must follow that those on the developer side responsible for telling the story in the first place also wouldn't be ignorant of its perception in later years, especially so with MercurySteam entrenching themselves into the series's makeup, effectively blurring the lines between creator and fanbase.
Other M's existence must be acknowledged in contextualizing the decisions Dread makes in characterizing Samus and why the effort is expended in the specific way that emerges. The former game is reviled for many reasons, but it is commonly seen as emblematic of ushering in Metroid's quiet, absent years in its wake as a reaction to its failures--a legacy that MercurySteam have inherited and people are eager to see them "redeem" the series for. Sakamoto himself may just as well have been warned off of repeating the same mistakes in the years since after the critical and popular drubbing, so in this way too the stage has long been set on both ends of the creative paradigm to reject what most loudly arose to the forefront in what bothered people about Other M's writing. That is what keenly manifests in how Samus is depicted in Dread, where the absolute terror on part of the creators of reliving the days of mistreating one of gaming's most beloved characters exists in every frame and shot that characterizes Samus in absence of spoken or written word. This Samus is a take-charge, shoot-first-inquire-never sort of action protagonist; hero would be a stretch in context of the portrayal here despite the clear intent of treating her as such. There is nothing to her but a sort of aggressive boorish intimidation factor, undertaken in an effort to convey competence in contrast to the previously admonished "weakness" of character and action. Now we have a Samus who flaunts her abilities, mugs and poses for the camera as blood splatters around her, is made absent of emotion (other than violent externalization of such) in face of snarling murderbeasts as previously there was just a little too much emotion involved. It's completely overshooting compensation for past ills, just as artless and clunky as characterization for the subject, insecure of restraint being just enough or even ideal, painting a portrait of cruelty instead of ambiguity. But because the reorientation--the redemption--of Samus is coded in acceptably violent and masculine ways as expressed here, contrasting with the femininely-coded excesses of Other M, it will be read as rehabilitation and rescue of an icon long adrift.
To really get to the core of Dread and what drives it, that sense of aggression inherent in Samus in the moments she is not beholden to the player's instructions points one toward what ultimately pervades the entirety of the game and how it reasons with violence. Metroid in the sometimes past had a capability to instill a feeling of vulnerability in the player despite the fundamental arc of player empowerment that's always been in place for the games, and in light of the fantastical sci-fi premise where one steps into the shoes of a super-powered, extravagantly equipped avatar. It did this through the aesthetic and design factors of its day, where some would see limitations, while others could latch onto a tonality and expression that was reached explicitly because of those restrictions. It's a very common concept for most creative work, but especially in works that broach horror tenets as Metroid so often does; it made cavernous, repetitious scenery and soundscapes a point of identification for its atmospheric aspirations, and the combat that occured inbetween was equally as unvarnished and unstylized as a point of interaction and concern. Now, with Dread, decades of industry trends have swung the pendulum with accrued expectations of complexity and spectacle, and this is where Metroid finds itself, with increasingly aggressive enemies, setpiece bosses, multi-phase confrontations, and the constant feeling of being under siege from the game world and needing to respond in kind. It cannot be taken as some universal trend, as I'd lay much of it on the feet of who MercurySteam are as developers, where their interpretation of Castlevania was no less eager in its emphasis on celebrating the violence suggested by the thematics of the source material, made all the less interesting in their hands. It's what comes to define Dread as a play experience, as it comes by its level of difficulty not just by the Fusion-echoing high damage values, but through its commitment to the mind-numbing punctuations of violent duels that stress physical parries and other performance-based maneuvers that lead to ever more elaborate kill animations as reward for player interaction. As much as Other M may be denounced by the game within on one narrative level, in this way its spirit is still very much present regardless.
A lot of things ended up preventing me from investing much emotionally in what Dread was doing, and the above has been a partial catalogue of such. I could also point to aspects like the music, varying between tiresome (but mercifully few) remixes of old standbys, nondescript noodling, and at its worst, truly dire honka-honk mysteries that I can't conceive the atmospheric intent of; many times I would note the music in express opposition of whatever mood was supposed to be evoked by an environment or situation. This is a game of many slight sorrows and few joys for me, but within the expected parameters going from precedent. The game's most surprising curveballs are not very pleasant ones for me, as they intrude upon the narrative side of it that I'm invested in. Long story short, the primary antagonist of the game in the Chozo named Raven Beak breaks Metroid convention in what I value about it, in that this is a male figure opposing Samus, whose ultimate antagonists have always been femininely coded. Ridley doesn't matter to me, and has never mattered; Mother Brain, the Queen Metroid, the SA-X, and ultimately Samus herself are what interacts with the thematics of the series and Samus as a character to me in what I care about. Raven Beak is not only an intrusive dude, he's also a Chozo warrior and brings with him hordes of underlings to fight against, ceaselessly, and ensures this game either doesn't escape being defined by their presence in the process. The worst of it however is saved for the last, as we have the double jeopardy of a literal "I am your father" revelation with him being the DNA donor for Samus's particular Chozo-enhanced physical prowess, and a completely preposterous character-action final boss battle separated into phases of increasingly tonally flat action. This is the narrative flub of the game and what it orients around, not so much for the silliness of "I shall clone Samus Aran, the strongest Metroid", but in how it discards the series's longstanding--intentional or otherwise, I care not--matriarchal themes and struggles in favour of just another god complexed and patronizing overlord father. I guess there's some oedipal catharsis to be had in dueling one's one-winged angel dad to the death and blasting him away when he mutates into Kraid (don't ask, I think), but it rather clearly illustrates that whoever this is meant for or made to appeal to, it is most certainly not me.
Following that sentiment, I can't truly claim that Dread disappointed me: I had mostly scried what it would be before I'd played it--not for obsessively tracking it before release, but in simply recognizing what the series has focused on for a long while now, and particularly under this creative leadership. I don't resent Dread, or even think it's a bad game; I think most people will enjoy it a great deal and I would probably even agree with many of the arguments made in its favour in isolation. I just can't begin to care about it, not in the way media I actually like compels me to. It could've gone worse after a fifteen-year wait, I suppose.
