Metroid Dread Does Well When It Isn't Trying to Tell a Story

Nintendo's latest installment delivers rewarding mechanics and a truly dreadful ambiance - hampered only by its attempts to have you think of something other than wanting to shoot space aliens

Metroid Dread accomplishes its number one mission: it is a fun game to play. The classic schematic of level-crawling adventure, punctuated with rewards of new weapons and gratifying boss battles, flexes its muscles to great effect in Samus's latest excursion. Fans of the classic Metroid titles as well as the more contemporary ones like Zero Mission and Fusion will be right at home. Those hoping to achieve a sense of closure to the 'X' saga of the series, however, might end up disappointed in the lack of punch from the storytelling.

    Horror in a video game understandably shares similarities with how it is portrayed in film. The cinematic elements of video games are, for better or worse, a mainstay in most modern games, and some deliver fully-rendered cutscenes that you could easily see appear in even blockbuster movies.

Consequently, scenes attempting to sow fear in the mind of the consumer of a video game might well be categorized along the same demarcations as that of movies. You have shock, better known as 'jumpscares'; nausea that you'd find in gore, torture and snuff; and the sense of unease that is derived from the use of atmosphere and ambiance, as well as such psychological exploits like the fear of the unknown and the 'uncanny'. This sense of unease might better be known as the feeling of dread.

    For me, the first game that featured something truly dreadful was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Those familiar might recall the scene in the Royal Family Tomb where you find the Sun's Song, and the horrific enemies known as the ReDeads. To this day I'm still not sure why I find them so disturbing - my best guess is something to do with their humanoid appearance, triggering that sense of the uncanny. OoT remains one the only game in my career that I quite literally had to come back to after I was older, since an entire level of the game later on requires you to traverse areas littered with ReDeads. 

    Off the top of my head while writing this is only one other game of my childhood that instilled such dread into my mind that I still recall the feeling of playing it years later: Metroid Fusion, which by any other name is the spiritual predecessor of Dread. Fusion begins in much the same way: the not-so titular bounty hunter and main character Samus Aran descends onto an unfamiliar location (usually an uncharted planet or an "abandoned" space facility, in this case the latter), with vague orders from a faceless boss setting the agenda of the bounty. From there the story hinges solely on what you discover, which you can bet has something to with the franchise's main baddy, the parasitic, jellyfish-looking Metroids. 

    In this way, the Metroid franchise is reliant on the fear of the unknown to drive its storytelling. This is not unlike its cinematic counterpart, Ridley Scott's Alien; indeed, both feature female protagonists, predatory space aliens, and the sense of dread one finds in silence amidst outer space (not to mention the occasional self-destruction of space stations). In the case of Fusion, the unknown is whether your adventure is over before it begins. As you slowly proceed in the derelict space station you've been ordered to investigate, you encounter an enemy that turns out to be a mere clone created by a parasite called the 'X' - a virus that infects Samus in the game's prologue, nearly killing her and stripping her of most of powerful weapons in the process (another repeating theme in the games, designed to make the player feel as defenseless as possible but still make Samus out to be a badass otherwise). With the door locked, the facsimile of the enemy defeated and the X parasite now free-floating in the air, you've nothing left in that moment but to be attacked by the X once again. Of course, this is all before the game tells you that your prior X infection has already rendered you immune to future ones, least of all that absorbing the X parasites now recovers your health and weapons, instead. But in that moment of unavoidable confrontation, all you're left thinking as you backtrack across the hushed and blacked-out hallways of the mysterious space station is that you are once again royally fucked. 

    Dread faithfully adopts the blueprint of this opening scene of Fusion, but replaces with a pre-rendered movie file of Samus's new attacker, not a gelatinous flying virus but rather a sleek, black-feathered, gigantic walking bird creature of the race called the Chozo, the same race that raised and trained Samus from infancy. What otherwise might be a simple change in preference to how Nintendo wanted to tell this particular installment of the Metroid universe is actually a radical deviation from how the developer has mostly told Samus's story. I've played every installment of the franchise since Metroid Prime, both 2D on the handhelds and 3D on the home consoles, and each one has always adopted a sort of code of silence and restraint in its storytelling. On the one hand such simplicity is the wellspring of the game's elegance; on the other it is just another example of the tabula rasa silent protagonist that is at this point a vestigial organ of video games, born out of a time in the early epoch of the medium when memory constraints could not accommodate robust character development or complex plots. 

    Dread tries to inch Samus Aran's story towards the modern era of storytelling in video games, and on paper it initially feels like it's going to succeed. The player learns about how the Chozo, Metroids, and the X interrelate and form the baseline motivations of most of the antagonists of the franchise's history. It even explains the trajectory of Samus from Chozo-raised warrior-turned bounty hunter: the opening sequence features remarks from Samus's AI companion 'Adam' saying that he doesn't believe the particular bounty in question in the game is 'worth it'. 

    Perhaps this is the source of my disappointment, however minor, with the game. I'm sure the game's writers tried their best not to make Dread a trudging exposition-dump of a story, but I couldn't shake that laborious feeling that the story was trying too hard to drive the game and not the other way around. 

    As rich and deep as I found the gameplay, the atmosphere and especially the terror brought on by the dreadful EMMI's, the murderous automatons that pursue you throughout the game instead of surveying specimens like they're supposed to, so too did I find the exposition to be dry and clumsy. It was certainly a step towards a brighter future for the series as compared to the now-infamous Metroid: Other M, but ultimately it seems that Samus has not yet found her voice. And no amount of atmosphere, however dreadful, can fill that void.