Metroid Dread

Let’s establish the stakes. When Nintendo announced Metroid Dread at E3 2021, the reaction wasn’t excitement so much as disbelief. This was vaporware made flesh — a project first teased in the mid-2000s, presumed dead twice, resurrected by MercurySteam, the Spanish studio that earned its shot with 2017’s Samus Returns remake. Dread isn’t a remake. It’s the first wholly new 2D Metroid since 2002’s Metroid Fusion, and it carries the weight of concluding the five-part Metroid arc that began on the NES in 1986.

That’s a brutal brief: satisfy people who have been speedrunning Super Metroid for a quarter century, onboard an entire generation that has only known the genre through Hollow Knight and Dead Cells — games that ate Metroid’s lunch while Samus was on hiatus — and do it on Switch hardware that was already showing its age in 2021.

Dread mostly clears the bar, and in places vaults over it. Samus lands on planet ZDR to investigate a transmission suggesting the X parasite survived Fusion’s ending, gets stripped of her abilities (yes, again — the series’ most tired ritual), and works her way back to full power while seven E.M.M.I. research robots hunt her through sealed zones. The premise inverts the series’ core fantasy: the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter spends significant stretches of this game running away. It’s a bold structural bet from a franchise that hasn’t taken many, and it gives Dread an identity beyond “the new one.”

At launch it was full-priced, Switch-exclusive, and short by genre standards. All three facts matter, and we’ll get to them.

• E.M.M.I. stealth zones: Discrete, greyed-out sectors patrolled by nearly invincible robots. Getting caught means death unless you land a frame-tight counter. This is Metroid as horror game, and it’s the headline innovation.
• Modern movement suite: Sliding, ledge parkour, 360-degree free aim, and the Melee Counter returning from Samus Returns — now usable mid-sprint. Samus has never been designed to control this well. Full stop.
• Classic ability-gated exploration: Spider Magnet, Phantom Cloak, Speed Booster, and a deep bench of returning power-ups gate ZDR’s map the way the genre demands, with shinespark puzzles that will humble completionists.
• Difficulty options at both extremes: The post-launch Rookie Mode softens the damage numbers for newcomers, while the unlockable Dread Mode — one hit, you’re dead — exists for people who think the base game is a warm-up.

The movement is the argument

Every review of every Metroidvania eventually says “movement feels good.” Ignore the cliché inflation: Dread’s traversal is built to a genuinely high standard. Samus accelerates instantly, slides through gaps without breaking stride, mantles ledges, and snaps her arm cannon to any angle with the left trigger. The design leaves almost no gap between intention and action, and MercurySteam understood that in a genre built on backtracking, the feel of crossing a room for the third time is the entire product. Rooms crawled through early become parkour lines by the endgame. That transformation — the map staying still while you become faster than it — is the genre’s oldest trick, and Dread executes it with more precision than any game since Super Metroid.

The Melee Counter deserves scrutiny, because it’s the mechanic most likely to divide veterans. Standard enemies telegraph a flashing lunge; parry it and they die instantly, coughing up health and ammo. Critics of Samus Returns argued this turned exploration into a rhythm of stop-wait-parry. Dread’s fix is elegant: the counter now works while dashing, so you plow through enemies rather than pausing for them. It converts a defensive mechanic into an offensive one and keeps the game’s tempo relentless.

The E.M.M.I. gamble

The E.M.M.I. zones are the riskiest design in the game and the most interesting to argue about. Inside these sectors, the soundtrack drops to a heartbeat, the color palette goes cold, and an unkillable robot pathfinds toward every sound you make. Your tools are the Phantom Cloak, environmental awareness, and prayer. The escape counter, when caught, has a window so tight the game openly tells you not to rely on it.

When this works, it’s designed to produce the most genuine tension Nintendo has published in years — a scramble through vents with a robot’s spider-legs clattering one screen behind you is legitimately dreadful, in the way the title promises. When it doesn’t work, it’s a checkpoint-retry loop that interrupts the exploration you actually came for. The failure case is real: repeated deaths to the same E.M.M.I. curdle tension into tedium, because stealth systems this binary don’t allow for improvisation, only route memorization. The zones are smartly checkpointed and each robot introduces a new wrinkle (one hears better, one freezes you, one moves faster), but the mechanic peaks in its first three encounters and coasts afterward.

The counter-argument — a persuasive one — is that the E.M.M.I. sections exist to make the power fantasy legible. Each zone ends with you acquiring the Omega Cannon, reversing the hunt, and executing your tormentor. The loop of fear, then revenge is the game’s emotional engine, and no other Metroid has one.

Bosses, and the difficulty question

Dread’s boss fights rank among the best in the series and the genre — multi-phase duels that demand you use everything: counters, free aim, movement, positioning. The final boss in particular is a superb piece of escalation. They are also hard. Not artificially hard; every attack is readable and every death teaches. But a short game where individual bosses can eat long stretches of attempts will bounce some players, and the original release shipped without Rookie Mode. The free update that added it (and Dread Mode) fixed the difficulty curve at both ends, which is the correct outcome arrived at a year late.

The remaining structural criticism is guidance. Dread is more linear than it appears — hidden one-way doors and subtle environmental funnels shepherd you along a critical path with surprising force. Purists who want Super Metroid’s get-lost-and-like-it opacity will notice the invisible hand. Everyone else will appreciate never being stuck for the wrong reasons.

A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and MercurySteam clearly treated that headroom as a statement of priorities, spending it on animation and camera work rather than resolution. The trade shows in some visibly muddy background textures — a trade any action game should make and many don’t.

The art direction is colder and more industrial than Super Metroid’s alien lushness — lots of steel corridors and biomechanical labs — which suits the story but occasionally blurs one region into the next. The camera work is where the presentation earns its keep: transitions swing dynamically into cinematic angles for counters and boss phases without ever surrendering control, stitching gameplay and cutscene into one continuous read. The E.M.M.I. zones’ desaturated palette is smart, functional design — you know the rules changed before a single UI element tells you. The map is built for quick reference, legible and filter-searchable, which sounds minor until you’re hunting your last four missile tanks.

This is a Switch exclusive, and it’s a good fit rather than a captive one. The game’s structure — dense, checkpointed, sessionable in short bites — suits handheld play. Two caveats. First, the parry timing is demanding enough that Joy-Con drift or the mushy stock d-pad-buttons can cost you; on a boss with one-shot phases, hardware matters, and a Pro Controller (or the Switch OLED’s better ergonomics) is a real upgrade rather than an audiophile affectation. Second, HD rumble is used sparingly but well — the design feeds E.M.M.I. footsteps through the controller before the robot enters the frame, a small touch that does real work in handheld mode with headphones on.

The uncomfortable question hanging over Metroid Dread was never whether it would be competent — MercurySteam proved that in 2017. It was whether a 2D Metroid could still matter in a market its descendants had saturated with longer, cheaper, wildly inventive alternatives. The answer is yes, on execution alone. Nothing in Dread is conceptually new — indies did stealth, parries, and cinematic bosses first — but little in the genre is this polished, this fast, this confident in its pacing from first slide to final boss. The short runtime at full price is the one honest knock, and we’d counter that Dread is a runtime with no filler in a genre that increasingly pads. Samus came back after nineteen years and reminded everyone whose genre this is — with reservations worth naming, but reservations worth setting aside.