I'm a little conflicted on the game itself. The controls are exceptional, combat feels good, the abilities I've acquired all feel great to use, with one or two small exceptions (aiming the grapple just after aiming and charging the omega beam made my hands feel like lobster claws). Early on the game feels pretty hand-holdy, in that it gives the appearance of letting go of the control of where to go without actually doing it ... I defeated the first two EMMI, and I wanted to go back and explore those areas a bit more to look for powerups but it wouldn't let me do that, until I did something else first. You know how in Super Metroid, sequence breaks aside, all of the original areas you go through are accessible until you get past that one way gate in Brinstar? This game sends you through one-way gates constantly, especially in the beginning. It's like the game doesn't trust the player to find the way forward, so it blocks off a lot of the previous avenues.
I surprised myself, because I was able to sequence break some things (and get the quick kill on Kraid) which was cool to do. But I was only able to do that this first playthrough because I heard it was possible, so I spent an extra few hours intentionally avoiding the direction I thought the game was leading me and tried to break some things. And it's neat they allow you to do that! But there's still something about the exploration for me that isn't really hitting as much as I would like it to. For example, I was also able to get a pickup early, and it said I wasn't allowed to use it yet, which was kind of a bummer. I think a lot of it comes back to they keep trying to add story into these games. Which isn't a bad impulse, necessarily, but I think for Metroid it's not great. Super Metroid is a masterpiece of understated storytelling, but aside from the very beginning and the very end there's no plot that isn't gameplay.
Yeah, I noticed this but I think there's a legitimate reason - the map is vastly bigger than Super and I think if they gave people carte blanche to wander about at will they'd get horribly lost.
As an experienced Metroid head it was pretty irritating, but I imagine the scope for going wildly off the plot is huge. Also as the map is bigger the proportion of new places power ups unlock is smaller so it saves old bits for when you'll have more stuff to do.
I've been really noticing this a lot, and I'm torn.
On the one hand, I think of
Carrion, the game that looks like a Metrovania but isn't really, it's a linear path that twists through an open-ish Metrovania-like world with little free exploration. The path through Dread feels exceptionally routed, despite being absolutely littered with ability-gated doors all throughout. Instead of "super missile door here, I'd better come back" you get a lot of "This door is apparently openable with a normal or charge beam, but its just "access closed" until I can open it from the other side for some reason, so... OK, I guess I'll get to that when the game wants me to?" Part of the fun of a Metrovania is getting a new skill and immediately backtracking to hit all the places you've been passing up, checking for the powerups you can get now and seeing what new routes have opened. Teasing new areas just out of reach until you get the right item or ability is like, one of
The Defining Features of the genre. Rather than that, Dread relies on putting you on the wrong side of a one-way door pretty often. Now, coming around to the other side of a one-way gate or block and opening a new shortcut can also be a really strong element in the genre, of course (see how often and well it works in e.g. Soulsborne world design), but I feel like the balance has shifted waaay to hard from the former to the latter here. I very much feel like I'm on a route the devs want me to follow and it feels a lot less like "exploration" because of it. When I got, say, the
morph ball or the
grapple beam, two abilities that I'd seen countless gates requiring, I wasn't able to really go back and explore all those new areas that had just opened up; I had to follow the path forward, and trust/expect that the intended path would guide me back through the previous areas on a later part of the route. The route twists and turns through different areas with all their connections, rather than "finish one area, do the next, maybe come back to grab a few items from the first at the end of the game," and I do appreciate the cleverness of the routing. But it also feels very guided.
On the other hand! I also think of
Hollow Knight, which is very open and has very little guidance, which resulted in my spending a lot of time tracking back and forth and back and forth, searching for where the hell I was supposed to go, until I stumbled on or looked up the one corner of the one room I didn't remember to put a marker on. The map in Dread is very big and in some areas, a lot of the sections start to feel pretty similar; it's easy to get lost. (I remember getting the speed booster and thinking ooh, I can get that item in the wind fan now! and thinking "it's right over there" like three different times, getting confused because it wasn't where I swore it was, until stumbling on it later.) Keeping it wide open and going "alright, go nuts" would lead to a lot of backtracking and poking at every corner to find the way forward, and I know that can get frustrating too, especially with all the twisty-turny ways that the path can lead multiple directions through a single area without intersecting, so you take one tram from area A to area B and find out that you can't reach the part of area B you needed from that tram route, you had to take the elevator from area C, because those two parts don't connect yet (thanks to one-way doors, mainly). Dread cuts down the options at certain times and prevents some instances of getting completely lost or confused. Though, that also leads to some instances of "Ooh, I can open this gate/go through that space now! ...nope, it just leads me to a different corner of the big room I already had access to, nothing special."
I dunno, I see mention of sequence breaks and such, so maybe this is a first-play impression and on replays you find that you can pick at the seams and pull it apart a bit more. Guess we'll see.
I just started playing this last night and I'm having fun, but making the critical path when you first arrive in Cataris hidden behind a breakable wall is absolute bullshit. The only other rooms available are high temperature hazards, so I was like "Okay, guess I'm not supposed to be here yet, better turn around and go back through the loading screen again." Ended up having to look up a damn walkthrough after being unable to backtrack in any other meaningful way.
I also had to look this one up, since I was stuck with no way forward. Even more frustratingly, I
had checked that immediate area for blocks I could open, I just apparently missed the two blocks I actually
could open.
