Post Script

Has Metroid been left behind by the genre it essentially founded?

For the purposes of review, we’ve taken Metroid in isolation (and, indeed, in Isolation). And in those terms, Dread is a great success, a series update with just enough ideas and polish of its own. But that means ignoring the wider context in which these games exist, and what happened to it while Samus was enjoying a 17-year cryosleep between 2D adventures. Consider it this way: when Zero Mission came out in 2004, it was on the eve of Cave Story’s release. This was five years before Shadow Complex brought the genre to the nascent Xbox Live Arcade, more than a decade before Axiom Verge, and the indie Metroidvania explosion that followed.

Today, then, Samus competes not just with the Belmont bloodline but with Ori and Shantae, luchadors and steambots, The Penitent One and The Knight. Many of these newer Metroidvania games are not just slavish recreations of the genre’s principles but significant expansions. And Dread seems uninterested in the lot.

There are a few concessions to modernity found in its map screen: each variety of door and block (once exposed) is labelled to show whether you have what is needed to pass it; areas that still contain some secret to be uncovered flash intermittently; and there are colourcoded markers for you to use as you wish. But the territory represented by that map – ZDR, the world you are here to explore – feels stubbornly old-fashioned.

Going back to play Super Metroid after completing Dread, it’s clear where the preoccupation with single hidden blocks comes from. Both games like to seal you off in an area with only one exit. Extra goodies, meanwhile, are hidden either in plain sight or at the end of long paths that lead only to that point. Sequence breaking is possible, as it has been in Metroids past, but for the most part Dread’s map is a funnel, albeit often a very wide one. Once we accept that, it becomes a perfectly satisfying shape, and we’re swept along by its momentum. But it does take a while for our expectations to adjust.

Those expectations can probably be put down to one game that worked so hard to explore this genre: Hollow Knight. Hallownest always feels porous, with new pathways and shortcuts opening organically. By comparison, ZDR’s map feels as though it has been tunnelled through at very specific points. We never find ourselves surprised by where we’ve ended up – those lovely full-circle Hollow Knight moments when two points you’d previously thought of as miles distant are suddenly, in the crumbling of a wall, connected.

In part, this is presumably the result of technical limitations, bearing in mind the greater fidelity of Dread’s world. ZDR is broken up into discrete zones, the boundaries between them breached at very specific points: calling points for elevators and trams that rationalise loading screens as travel time. But it’s more a question of design philosophy. It’s worth remembering that at least some of the authorship of Dread belongs to developers who were once fans of the series. With Samus Returns and, before that, a trio of Castlevania

games, the team at MercurySteam have demonstrated that they are avid students of both halves of that awkward genre portmanteau. And so, playing Dread is an education in what they personally value about the old games – something we recently found ourselves thinking about while playing Axiom Verge 2. In both cases, we’re left with the impression of the kind of player who was always keen to get the graph paper out and start mapping.

The thrill of navigation here is almost the exact inverse of the one we identified in Hollow Knight – two points that seem very close but that turn out to be far apart. We think of morph-ball tunnels beneath our feet, accessing which requires exiting this zone and re-entering via a teleportal elsewhere that leads to a closed loop of level, tucked away inside the one in which we started. It’s clever level design, for sure, but of a very specific, mechanical variety. There are habits picked up from other games in the genre that Dread forces us to shake. For example, if you bump up against a tough boss – at least, until the final one – there’s probably not much point searching high and low for items that’ll help you beat it. Attempts only serve to get us lost, with maybe one quarter of an energy tank upgrade to show for our efforts. Much better to bear down and learn those attack patterns.

That habit, in particular, can be traced back to another important thing to happen to the Metroidvania during those cryosleep years: Dark Souls. FromSoft’s games are a mutant strain of the genre, adapting its pleasures in ways that have subsequently fed back into more traditional Metroidvanias. We do briefly wonder if Souls is one influence that has been allowed to bleed into Dread, given the cranked-up tension and the simple difficulty of its boss fights. But if so, this is all that it borrows. Where Hollow Knight blended hard (ability gating) and soft (skill check) barriers to progress, Dread

is only really interested in the former. Which is, to borrow an old line, Samus it ever was.

Maybe it’s unfair to make the comparison in the first place: should birthing a genre make you responsible for its growth? But these habits and expectations are ones we can’t help but bring to the game. We didn’t spend all those years in cryosleep – and chances are, neither did you. Approach it with that in mind, and there’s a brilliant Metroid game to be found here. Even if it does nothing to push the broader genre forward.

Sequence breaking is possible, as it has been in Metroids past, but for the most part Dread’s map is a funnel