When Dread was revealed earlier this year all I needed to know was “They let MercurySteam make Metroid 5”. They did a great job reinterpreting Metroid 2, letting them make another made a ton of sense after that success.

That first video at E3 looked like “hey it’s Samus Returns but with way better hardware”, and that’s exactly what we got. . . which isn’t bad? Samus Returns was a pretty sweet game, and MercurySteam clearly demonstrated that they know how to make a Metroid game. So this is that, but again! And More!

They already nailed all the basics in Samus Returns, so there’s no surprise that they’re all still . . nailed? Movement, Powers, Map Design, Map QoL, General QoL, Puzzles, etc. All done to perfection. No point even talking about it.

Where’d they fall down? Since Fusion, Metroid games have been trending towards linearity, and Dread is no exception. What’s weird, though, is that while fully linear, they bounce you all over the different zones. Like, they’ll send you from F-land to G-land (all the forgettable zone names are named alphabetically, A-I), you’ll get $NEW_ITEM within like two rooms, and then immediately they railroad you into a teleporter back to D-land. There’s no thinking “hm, what does this open up?” it’s just “nah dogg time to go to the next zone”.

It’s fine, it’s just A Choice.

There were some nice new quality of life things implemented. Dropping Spring Ball as a distinct thing was good. Cross bomb? Sliding is great. The map highlights zones with upgrades you can get, when you get them. You can highlight a specific door or type of block in the map, and see all of those across the map. It’s really well done, and something I can’t recall seeing in basically any game in the genre.

The cornerstone feature of the game was a shift in the loop from find environmental lock -> find powerup -> use powerup as key -> beat boss -> repeat, to adding these exclusion zones throughout each biome where you’re actively being hunted. It took the “hide from the SA-X” segments of Fusion and the bonus act of Zero Mission, and turned it into an integral feature of the game. It lead to a lot of deaths, but the deaths were quick to recover from. Not Celeste-fast, but zippier than a normal death in a Metroid game.

Puzzles were pretty good. 99% of them were super super fair. The 1% were . . not. As expected, there was Obtuse Shinespark Garbage. Like, 30 minutes worth of slamming my face against it. Sadly, it wasn’t as fulfilling as some of the stuff in previous games, where you’re Shinesparking across zones, lining up ramps to extend it across room after room after room. Here there’s like, two or three upgrades that are pretty hard, that’s it.

For everything MercurySteam got right, I was dismayed to see a lack of a typical game-complete screen. Metroid games are supposed to end with Samus shooting the screen, your completion time, your completion percent, and the scene changes based on time/percent. None of that here. There’s one scene, it tells you your completion time, and then they give you a piece of art. It doesn’t even use the loadout / character model you beat the game with. It was a very weird decision.

Overall? Great game. Some weird decisions here and there, but overall it was ok.

Still salty that this only shipped alongside the OLED Switch and not a Beefier 4K Switch, especially since we see from emulation that it absolutely can do 4K with no problem.