Metroid Dread was announced in 2005 for the Nintendo DS, went quiet, was rumoured for a decade and a half, and then turned up in October 2021 on Switch as if the intervening sixteen years had been a scheduling error. Produced by Yoshio Sakamoto and developed by MercurySteam with Nintendo EPD, it is Metroid 5 — the direct sequel toFusion, which came out on the Game Boy Advance in 2002. Nineteen years between instalments of a numbered series is a long time to think about what you are.

The remarkable thing is thatDread clearly used the time. This is a game with a very specific and slightly severe opinion about what a 2D Metroid is for, and the opinion isn’t the one most of the genre’s descendants arrived at. The rest of the metroidvania field spent twenty years adding — skill trees, roguelike runs, dialogue, builds.Dread subtracts. It plays like somebody re-readSuper Metroid, wrote down the three things that made it work, and threw the rest overboard.

Movement is the whole subject

PlayDread for ten minutes and the first thing that registers is how fast Samus is. She slides. She free-aims in any direction while walking. She has Flash Shift — a short teleporting dash, chainable — from early in the run. The Speed Booster is still here, the Shinespark still fires her diagonally through the architecture, and the Spider Magnet reads walls as surfaces rather than obstacles.

None of that is decoration. InSuper Metroid (SNES, 1994) the pleasure was the moment your capability changed the map: a Grapple Beam turned a ceiling into a road, and a wall you’d walked past four hours ago became a door.Dread pushes that idea to its limit. Nearly every upgrade in the game is amovement upgrade — a new verb for crossing ground — and the ones that are weapons mostly function as keys. So the entire progression is one continuous statement: you have become better atgoing, and here’s a place that punishes anyone who can’t go well.

MercurySteam’s own history explains the second pillar. TheirSamus Returns (3DS, 2017) introduced the melee counter, andDread refines it into the game’s other axis. Enemies telegraph, you press the button on the beat, Samus knocks them into a free-aim slow-motion window, and you convert the parry into a kill. It’s a rhythm layer inside a movement game — the same instinct that runsSekiro, scaled down and applied to a corridor of frog-things.

The counter does something structural, though. It makesstanding your ground viable in a series whose combat has historically been a tax on exploration. Old Metroid enemies were furniture: you shot them, or you walked past them, and either way they were an interruption. Countering makes each one a tiny beat you can choose to play. That is the single largest change to Metroid’s minute-to-minute sinceSuper, and almost nobody talks about it because it’s not what the game was marketed on.

The E.M.M.I. zones, and why they work

They marketed it on the robots, and the robots are more interesting than their reputation.

E.M.M.I. are near-invulnerable machines that patrol sealed sections of ZDR. Enter their zone and the music drops, the map tints, and one of them starts hunting. Your beams do nothing. Caught, you get a single frame-perfect counter attempt with an extremely narrow window — succeed rarely, and die usually. The escape is the zone’s exit, and the exit is a door you have to reach while a machine that outruns you closes in.

Read as stealth, this is thin. There’s no meaningful hiding, the Phantom Cloak is limited, and the AI is more of a pursuit than a puzzle. Read aslevel design, it’s superb, and the reason is the same reason the counter works: it’s a tempo device.

An E.M.M.I. zone converts a map you know into a map you mustexecute. You’ve probably crossed that room before. You know where the exit is. What you don’t have is time to think, and so the zone tests the movement vocabulary the game just gave you — slide under, Flash Shift through, magnet up the wall — at speed, under pressure, with a fail state. It’s the Speed Booster puzzle with legs. And when you finally acquire the Omega Cannon and turn on the thing that’s been chasing you for forty minutes, the release is enormous precisely because the game spent forty minutes making you run.

The complaint that the zones break the pacing has it backwards.They are the pacing.Dread has no dialogue, few cutscenes, and no dramatic engine of any kind; the E.M.M.I. zones are the only device the game has for creating pressure and then removing it, and the reason the run feels like it has a shape is that the shape is made out of hunts and their endings.

The real ancestor is theMetroid II Metroid encounters — a hunt through a corridor with a countdown attached — given modern animation and an actual off switch.

Where it fights itself

Dread’s severity has costs, and the honest ones are worth naming.

The world is a machine rather than a place. ZDR is efficient, legible, beautifully signposted and slightly airless.Super Metroid’s Zebes had rooms that existed to be looked at, dead ends that were just dead ends, and a general willingness to waste your time in the interests of atmosphere. ZDR has almost no waste. Every corridor is a test, every room does a job, and the map is so well-designed that you’re rarely lost — which is a strange thing to complain about until you remember that being lost on Zebes was the entire experience. The signposting is so good it occasionally does your exploring for you.

Bosses run hot. The fights are excellent — sharp, readable, fast — and they arrive at a difficulty the rest of the game doesn’t prepare you for. Kraid is a wall. Escue and the Chozo Soldiers ask for a counter precision the corridors never demand. There’s a genuine gap between “very good at moving” and “very good at bosses”, andDread doesn’t build a bridge across it.

And the Aeion abilities — the resource-driven kit, Phantom Cloak and the rest — are the least-used thing in the game, for the same reason the prosthetics are the least-used thing inSekiro: the core loop is too complete to need them.

The verdict

Dread is the best-playing 2D game Nintendo has published in years and one of the most conservative, and those two facts are the same fact. It says a 2D Metroid is a movement game with a map on top, and then it executes that thesis with a precision the genre’s sprawling, generous descendants can’t match. It’s also the fastest-selling entry the series has ever had, which is a slightly funny outcome for a game whose main innovation is deciding what to leave out.

I’d hand it to anyone who thinks they like metroidvanias, because it will tell them whether what they actually like is the map or the running. Switch is the only place to play it, and it does not need a better machine.

I came to this from the wrong side. My 2D exploration-platformer of the eighties wasTurrican on the Amiga — Factor 5’s answer to this shape, all sprawl and firepower and no economy at all.Dread is the discipline that game never had, and playing them a lifetime apart makes the argument for restraint better than any review can.

For the descendants:Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown takesDread’s movement-first thesis and adds the systemic depthDread refuses, and it’s the better game for a lot of players.Animal Well goes the other way entirely and puts the whole progression in your head.

Spoilers below

Raven Beak is the argument’s conclusion, and he’s brutal. The final fight is a counter test — a long, escalating, four-phase demand that you read a Chozo warrior’s animation set with the precision the E.M.M.I. demanded and the corridors never did. It is the hardest thing in the game by a distance, and it lands because it is the only fight that asks for both halves of the toolkit at once: the movement to survive the arena, the counter to make progress in it.

The story around it is the partDread actually cares about, and it’s more pointed than the series usually manages. Samus’s Metroid DNA — theFusion inheritance, the thing that has been a plot device for two decades — becomes the resolution. She wins by being the monster the series has spent five games having her exterminate. That’s an ending with a real idea in it: the X parasites, the Chozo, the Federation and Samus herself are all the same story about a weapon that outlived the people who built it.

And then the game ends, cleanly, after roughly nine hours, with no post-game grind, no season, and nothing left to farm. Nineteen years of waiting for a thing that respects your evening. It closes the sentenceFusion started, and it closes it hard.