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It takes me a long time to figure out where I can go next. Is it because I can’t read the map or the visual language of the level design? Or is it because these things are too subtle?

That’s a matter up for debate. While I’ve been playing, there’s been a lot of coverage in the gaming press about Metroid: Dread, and one story I read from Scott Jaffe, the guy who designed God of War is upset with the game design because it’s not apparent enough to him how to proceed through some of these areas. There’s an area in the game where you have to shoot through the ceiling in order to proceed.

I can see both sides of this. Original Metroid had tons of these destructible blocks and seeming dead ends that you couldn’t go through unless you happened to know that some of the blocks in the wall weren’t solid, and you could just walk through them. Back in the day, this wasn’t really questioned. It was simply the way games were designed, and it was the way the designers created secret areas and hid things for you to find, if you were clever and smart, or in the know. It’s part of the Metroid franchise’s legacy, and if Metroid maps didn’t have some of this, the game wouldn’t feel as much a part of the Metroid franchise as it otherwise would.

The area Jaffe complains about didn’t really present a problem for me, at all. In the area, there’s an flying alien who is near the ceiling, giving you all the reason you need to shoot at the place where the destructible blocks are, and discover the secret. If you don’t happen to miss, or you don’t bother engaging the enemy, then, sure you might not discover this right away. But there’s other clues as well — you can see that there’s a chamber directly above, the wall that separates the chamber you’re in and the chamber beyond is one “block unit” thick, and you’ve seen places elsewhere in Artaria where you can blow away the walls.

The thing is, some of these are more obvious than others. Some of the destructible terrain is permanently destructible — you’ll see a part of the wall that looks like it’s organic tissue. It’s red, it’s got some veins coming out of it, it looks gross, and maybe a threat, so it invites being treated as a target. If you shoot it, it reacts, and if you shoot it several more times, it is destroyed, and when it blows up an entire section of the wall will be destroyed, opening up a new passage for you to travel.

But other areas, you can shoot and destroy a block, and it is temporary. After a time, the block will re-spawn. Sometimes you can shoot the wall, and it will reveal a destructible block that you have to hit with a specific weapon, such as missiles. You might not have the weapon you need to destroy that type of block yet. This is the game’s way of re-using the map by blocking off areas until you can unlock them with a newly-gained ability.

This is one of the main defining aspects of the Metroid franchise. So if you don’t like it, Metroid just isn’t the game for you. And that’s fine, not everyone has to like something. But Metroid is good in so many ways, and I don’t mind this aspect of the game. I accept it for what it is, and I enjoy it.

Most of the time.

Other times, I do get the feeling that the design is a little too subtle, a little too obscure. I get stuck, and I get frustrated for a while. Sometimes longer than is enjoyable. A little frustration should be expected, or a game is just too easy. But there gets to be a point where you’re tired of being frustrated, and it stops being enjoyable. That doesn’t mean that the game is flawed, it just means that there’s a challenge curve to the game, and you need to climb up it at your pace. When you’re ready, you figure out the things, overcome the challenge, and move forward. Making progress feels good. But then you’re presented with something new, a new type of challenge, something new you need to learn in order to continue making progress, and until you learn it, you’re stuck, and if you’re stuck for too long, you get frustrated.

Sometimes the game is pretty good about telling you what you need to learn, what you need to do. These are straightforward challenges: you have to defeat this enemy. It’s hard, but you can do it. You just have to get good. Master the controls, learn the enemy’s patterns, learn what you need to do to defeat it, figure out a strategy, and execute it.

Other times, the game is less straightforward. There’s no signpost telling you “do X to proceed.” You have to put it together yourself what the solution is. You have to observe carefully, pick up on clues, what clues there are, and once you realize what the answer is, doing it is easy, but it’s discovering the solution that’s hard.

Sometimes it’s kindof both: figuring out what to do is hard, and then doing it is also hard.

I think great games offer a good mix of these elements, but it’s also fine if a game is all one type or another.

One problem with Metroid is when you can’t tell whether you’re stuck because you don’t have some ability yet, and you need to come back later, or if you’re stuck because you haven’t figured out what to do yet. It’s more frustrating when you have the abilities you need to make progress, but don’t realize it, perhaps because there’s some obscure way of using a new power that you haven’t used enough yet, or missed the clue about.

The first problem I have is with this section of the map in Artaria, where you use the Spider Magnet ability for the first time. There’s a vertical area where you can use Spider Magnet to crawl up the walls to get to a part of the room you couldn’t get to before. The top of the room splits down the middle, and the first way to go is to the left. From there, it’s not obvious what you do next.

After a long time I figure out that you can shoot the wall at the top, and get from the left half of the top of the chamber over to the right half. You get rewarded with a missile container for figuring this out. It took me forever because at first I didn’t realize you could shoot enough of the wall away to just jump over — I only hit one destructible block at first, and by convention I thought that meant that I’d have to come back when I get the morph ball ability, so I could roll through the low tunnel that I opened up by destroying that block. It turned out that there was a whole section of blocks that I could have destroyed, and if I’d just kept shooting I would have realized this and saved myself about a half hour of head scratching trying to figure out what to do.

Immediately after getting past my own stupidity on that puzzle, I couldn’t figure out what to do again. But there’s a section of wall over on the right side which is covered with the magnetic tiles. If you cling to this, your weight will pull it down to slide on a track, and this moves the wall out of the way and exposes a new passageway that is the way forward.

What I didn’t notice right away was some glowing tiles that in effect are a signpost, they make arrows that point downward and that’s the clue that you’re supposed to read to realize that the magnetic section of wall can move. Even if you don’t “read” the design of the level, you’ll probably discover it by accident eventually, if and when you climb on that section of wall and hang on it long enough for the gravity to pull it down.

But part of what makes it frustrating is that these “physics puzzles” are only in very specific parts of the game. There’s pressure plates in floors, movable platforms, destructible blocks, but they’re “special” — deliberately put there for a particular purpose of the designers of the game, who wanted to create a puzzle for you. But after playing Breath of the Wild, which had much more integrated game physics, where pretty much anything and everything could be interacted with in multiple ways, leading to no-one-solution puzzles where you could overcome the obstacles in any number of ways, some easy or obvious, others not at all easy or obvious. But Metroid: Dread isn’t like that. It wants you to figure out one specific solution to most, if not all, of the puzzles it throws at you.

There might be some sequence-breaking opportunities to get past some of these obstacles without having yet acquired the ability you’re meant to use, but I haven’t discovered any yet,

But my main complaint is that when you discover a solution to some puzzle, you can’t apply that same logic to other things in the map. If these blocks are destroyable, why can’t I just tunnel through any wall by blasting it? Etc. Obviously the game needs to constrain you in ways that make the game a challenge and a fun experience, and if you could blast your way through any amount of wall and tunnel your way out to the surface, you could just bypass the whole game, and the game would be called Metroid: Nope, and the mission would be “dig to the surface, get on your ship, and don’t get any new abilities, your normal blaster and jumping is all you need…”

So… I get it. But the consequence of this is that there’s some “now you can, now you can’t” issues with the game continuity that make it a little bit frustrating. “This ability only works when you’re solving this puzzle, but in another situation where it looks like that would be a thing to try, it won’t work.” Why? Because.

It’s not really that bad if you know all along what you’re supposed to do, but when you’re trying to figure out what to do, not knowing what you can and can’t do, and not knowing what you’re meant to do, it turns a game that could probably be played through in a few hours into a 100+ hour slog through your own incompetence, as you fumble about trying to make your way forward, hoping you don’t accidentally take a wrong turn and end up somewhere you’re not meant to be yet, or worse, that you can’t go back from to get back to the familiar area you haven’t quite fully explored yet.

Anyhow.

I got through the magnet wall secret door and start exploring a new area. Very quickly I find myself in another boss fight, before I realize it, expect it, or am ready for it. I run down a long corridor and at the end of it there’s this weird organic door that I have to blast through. It looks like a charge shot door at first, but has something growing on it. It comes alive and attacks me, and I hit it with a volley of shots and it doesn’t take too much to destroy it. The doorway now opened, I proceed.

As I walk through this doorway, I guess I should have known to expect something special after that weird encounter, because the game switches to a cutscene mode.

(As an aside, I love the way the game handles cutting from gameplay mode to cutscene mode. It’s very fluid. The camera just changes angles and behaves in a more cinematic way, but the whole time the game is presenting itself to you in one engine. It’s really well done, compared to how games used to be decades ago, where they would cut to pre-rendered full-motion video that didn’t look at all like the regular in-game graphics that the game engine churned out.

So Samus walks into a large chamber, and pauses to examine a large sculpture in the middle of it, when suddenly a creature appears behind her, and attacks! It’s a huge, whale-sized scorpion-like thing with a nasty mouth and a whip-like tail. Samus blasts it in the face with a missile, and then slides under, between its legs and gets behind it.

This scene serves as a very subtle mini-tutorial for how to fight the boss. You have to hit it in the face with charge beam shots or missiles, and dodge its tail attack. If you let it get too close it’ll hit you with a bite attack, and it will also spit globs of poisonous-looking goo at you. It has a nice mix of attack modes, and keeps you on your toes. The tail whip is very subtly telegraphed, so if you can pick up on when it’s about to strike, you can jump and dodge out of the way, but the timing is pretty tight.

After you do enough damage to it, its tail develops a weakpoint, a glowing red swell a few segments back from the stinger. You have to shot this spot a bunch of times, and I found that it’s easiest to stand still and use the aim shot and just rapidly spam out normal-power shots. It’s the one thing that it’s vulnerable to the normal shot. You can hit it with charge beam or missiles too, but it’s moving constantly and hard to target, and you don’t want to waste shots. After doing enough damage to the vulnerable spot on the tail, the game switches back into cutscene mode for a moment, and the creature turns its back, as though it’s trying to protect its head, while simultaneously lining up for a tail attack.

If you don’t take the cue, you can stay bedhind it and try to hit it more, but it’ll basically corner you and you don’t have enough health to withstand more than a few hits. But if you try to slide under, you can get back in front of it.

There’s a split second where you can use the melee counter ability just as you’re coming out from the slide, and then you’re back in front of it again, and you have to pound it in the face and the weak point on the tail again with missiles or charge shots.

If you take damage or run low on ammo, its goo globs can be shot down with the regular beam, and they’ll drop a few health or missile pickups, which really helps. The monster will also exhale a cloud of poison, which will creep toward you slowly. To get away from this, you need to jump up and cling to the magnetic sections of the wall until the cloud dissipates.

Then you have another chance to slide under it again.

If you hit it enough times, eventually it goes back again to cutscene mode and you finish it off.

I had to run this fight a good 20 or 30 times before I figured out all the different tactics and “you have to do this now because nothing else will work” aspects of the fight, but after I finally figure it out, I realize that I’ve gained some skill and that if I have to do that fight again, I’ll be able to handle myself and succeed nearly every time now. It truly feels like I have accomplished something and leveled up.

Figuring it out by myself, and not relying on a strategy guide feels especially good.

Having now defeated this thing, I gain its ability: the Phantom Cloak. This power makes you invisible and enables you to sneak past EMMI without being detected. It also enable you to walk through special doors that are triggered by sensors which lock the door if you get close to them. There’s a bunch of these doors in different places throughout Artaria, so now I have a few more places I can explore.

I pick a direction, and before I know it, I’ve come to an elevator that leads to a new section of the world: Cataris

I figure I’ll check out Cataris, and if it looks like it’s too much and I’m not ready for it yet, I’ll turn around.

I don’t get too far into Cataris before I’m stuck behind a one-way and can’t retreat to the relative safety of Artaria, though.

There’s another EMMI in this region of ZRD, of course. This one is yellow. I can put my new cloaking ability to good use. The regular enemies here are tougher, take more damage to kill, are more aggressive, and do more damage. They feel like legitimate challenges that I need to deal with, rather than bump-on-a-log targets that I can farm to top up my health if I need to.

Cataris is big, and fiery. There are a lot of things to burn yourself on — enemies that shoot fire, geysers of flame shooting from the walls, floors, and ceilings. Zones where the temperature is so high that just being there inflicts damage. I explore as much as I safely can, and find more magma flow controls, which I activate and these in turn unlock more areas of the map.

I haven’t found a lot of additional power-ups though, so far. Just one missile container that I’ve been able to grab, and that’s it.

I feel lost, cut off from the way back, and uncertain about how to make progress again. I’ve opened up a lot of new territory, and it’s time to take stock of it and figure out what I need to do next.

I’m exploring Artaria, I am starting to explore the new area that I opened up by lowering the water level in the room guarded by the EMMI-025M, when a section of the floor gives way, like a trap door opening, and before I know it I’m sliding downward.

Somehow, I stumbled into a new area, and before I knew it, I slid into a low corridor that lead to a chamber with a boss fight. I wasn’t expecting this and I feel off-balance and unprepared, but there’s no turning back. I have to fight.

I love this. So many video games prepare you for a boss fight by making it very obvious that there’s a difficult fight ahead. They practically put a billboard on the pathway to the boss’s arena that says “BOSS FIGHT AHEAD LAST CHANCE TO SAVE AND TOP OFF YOUR HEALTH AND POWER.” This time there’s none of that, and without warning I have to do battle, survive or die.

A robotic-looking metal eye occupies the room, and when I fall into the arena it wakes up, looks at me, and then moves upward to the top of the room. It’s on.

But it’s a bit of a letdown from there. Weak-looking lasers shoot at me lethargically every few seconds, and what looks like the rinkas from the original Metroid’s Mother Brain chamber emerge every few seconds as well and slowly float towards my location. Both are so easy to dodge by just stepping aside, there’s barely even a need to jump.

The eyeball is up at the top of the room, in the center, and I can aim upwards and blast away at it with my arm cannon. Regular shots don’t seem to affect it, but missiles and charge beams do. Dodging its fire is easy. I just walk right and left every so often when I need to get out of the way of one of the slow-moving attacks, and aim up and blast the eyeball when I’m under it. My current missile capacity is 21, and I shoot all of them. After a few shots, the armor plating on the eyeball blows off, and it’s exposed. A few of my shots miss, but mostly I hit it. The very last missile does it, it blows up, and I’m rewarded with the Omega Beam again.

I need to use the Omega Beam to blow open the only exit to the boss fight chamber. The EMMI-025M that has been stalking this general area is alerted to my presence, and is apparently drawn to the Omega power. I guess I have to fight it now. I’ve done this once before, how hard can it be?

EMMI-025M is at full strength, while the first one I had defeated was damaged when I encountered it. EMMI-01P was dispatched with an Omega charged blast to the face plate, but this time the attack doesn’t seem to phase EMMI-025M, and it keeps coming. I run and get more distance, then charge up my shot and hit it again. It still keeps coming.

Due to the imprecision of the Joycon thumbsticks, it’ not very easy to aim the Omega beam, and I’m not sure if I’m missing, barely, or if the EMMI just needs to take a few hits before I can defeat it and move on. I reason that since this one is in better condition, it would make sense if I need to blast it a few times, but I’ve run up against it a dozen times and on my best runs I’ve managed to hit it maybe 3 times, and it doesn’t seem to have taken noticeable damage.

My major criticism of the Switch hardware is that the joycon analog sticks are terrible, so I’m feeling handicapped by the hardware. I can Switch to docked mode and use a pro controller and maybe get a bit of advantage, but it’s frustrating not to be able to get the most out of the Switch by being able to use it as a handheld due to the poor control offered by the Joycon thumbsticks, when this hybrid console/handheld concept was the main selling point of the system.

So it seems that the way to do this fight is to keep your distance, charge up an Omega shot, and nail the EMMI in the face with it, then run, get more distance, and repeat. All you have to do is avoid screwing up and getting caught, and ideally not miss your shots when you take them. It doesn’t seem that hard, and if it weren’t for the imprecision of the joycons, I’d probably have done it on the first try.

After about a dozen or so attempts, I finally figure out what I’m doing wrong. The door to exit the boss room is actually a mini-tutorial for the way to fight the EMMI. I didn’t realize it at first. The door takes two types of Omega blast to open. First you have to hit it with a sustained burst of rapid fire, which blows off some kind of shielding. You can see the shielding heat up with an orange glow before it fails. After that, you hit it with the charged Omega shot that you used to take down the first EMMI you encountered. Because I thought I had learned from the first EMMI encounter, I didn’t realize that the game was trying to teach me a new mechanic with the Omega blaster. But apparently with an EMMI at full health, hitting it with the charged shot at first doesn’t do it; you have to hit them with a sustained blast of the rapid-fire Omega stream shot to blow off the face armor, then hit it in the face with an Omega charge shot.

After realizing this, it only takes me 2 or 3 tries, again, thanks to the crummy precision of the joycon analog sticks. But I do finally defeat this second EMMI, and it’s not really too difficult.

My reward for defeating this EMMI is a new ability called Spider Magnet. This allows me to climb special walls and ceilings. I’ve seen a few areas with these surfaces already. The ability makes sense to get from the EMMI, because it has the ability to climb walls, but it ability to do this isn’t limited to only special surfaces.

Of course, now that the EMMI is no more, my Omega cannon has run out of power again, and reverted back to the normal cannon. This feels a bit artificial, especially now that it’s happened twice. Why the Omega power and the EMMI’s life force should be linked with one another isn’t explained, and doesn’t make sense, other than as an artificial rule for the game to force you to be able to deal with the EMMI only when the game wants you to be ready to do it. Realistically, it should be possible to exhaust the Omega energy without killing the EMMI, resulting in the game soft-locking you into having to die in order to start over. And as well, it should be possible to kill an EMMI with some energy remaining in the Omega gun. The designers could have easily made it so this left-over Omega energy would never be enough to kill the next EMMI that you encounter, and doing so would have given you a bit of false hope, or an ability to deal a tiny bit of bonus pre-damage to the next EMMI encountered, which would be a nice way to reward the player for making an efficient kill on the previous encounter.

While I’m on the topic, I don’t understand why I can’t disable an EMMI by taking out its arms and legs, or at least slow it down. The knees, elbows, and hip and shoulder joints look like they should all be vulnerable to damage, and it would be cool to have another way to deal with them, and render them less of a threat on their way to being permanently deactivated.

Anyhow, I now have a new ability that I can use to explore Artaria. I make my way back, trying to ascend upward toward the surface of the planet, which is after all my mission objective. I find it difficult to move in a direction that feels like progress though. The most of the direct pathways out of the area are still the one-ways — ramps that I can’t climb up, and low-height corridors that I can’t slide into because the entrance on my side is not on ground level, and there’s no mechanic to enter the slide from a wall climb or fall, until I find the morph ball ability.

I do find some magnetic walls and get into some new areas that I couldn’t get to previously, and find a missile upgrade or two. My capacity is now up to 29.

But I’m still trying to find a way out of the immediate area, and go upward, trying to reach the surface, and I’m having a hard time. I need to study the map more and try to read the markers so I now which routes I can really make use of, and which are locked to me because of one-ways and abilities that I don’t have yet. And this is not easy.

One thing I find frustrating is that whenever I switch back to the map, it resets the zoom level to its default, and I have to repeatedly zoom back to the detail level I need in order to see the immediate area I’m in, and trace my path. I hope some future quality of life update addresses this, because it sure gets annoying when you are lost and need to examine the map every few seconds.

I also would like it if you could plot way points on the map and then the in side scrolling action view, you’d get a HUD display indicating the path you’ve plotted out from the map. That would be super handy and help you to avoid wrong turns. Obviously this should only be available where you have already explored or downloaded the map data from a kiosk. If I had this capability I’d be able to spend much less time switching back and forth between map and action views, and get on with making progress.

It’s possible to explore and find the way out, of course, I just need to take time and figure it out.

But right now it feels like a good stopping point. So I find my way to a save point and log my progress.

I got stuck in the area around where I encountered the 2nd EMMI. According to the game’s built-in progress log, this one is called EMMI-025M, for what it’s worth. The first one was called EMMI-01P. I don’t know what the names mean.

I have found an Energy Tank, and a few missile containers, but I can’t get to them. The map has a lot of areas that are cleverly designed to allow one-way transit only in places, creating bottlenecks and flows that force me to follow a route. At each of these spots, I’m forced to decide to commit and go through the one-way or backtrack or take another route. There’s a few places in this area where I encounter the one-way on the wrong side of it, so I can’t proceed through, and there I see the power-up item. And so far, I can’t figure out the right way around.

The only other thing left to do in this area seems to be to play cat and mouse with the EMMI-025M. I enter its patrol area, and mostly I’m preoccupied with avoiding the thing, hoping to not get detected and chased. This keeps me from searching the room thoroughly. I find that if I keep ahead of EMMI-025M, and keep moving, I can avoid it detecting me, but this doesn’t seem to gain me anything.

I take a few laps of the EMMI-025M’s patrol zone, wondering what I’m supposed to do, when I notice in one spot there’s some water, and the ground platforms I’ve been walking across appear to be floating on pontoons. Over to the left, I notice what appears to be a pressure plate. These blend in with the regular background pretty well, and it takes a trained eye to be able to spot them, but I’ve found a few places where they are more obvious — usually they’re save points or weapon or life energy refill points, and they generally have very obvious kiosks and machinery around them to help you spot them. This one doesn’t so much have that, so I must have ran past it a good fifty times before I noticed it.

I stand on it for a few seconds, triggering it, and the water drains and the floating floor segments drop, exposing a low passage that I can squeeze through if I use my slide.

This must be the way forward, so I take the new path. It leads me to a new area within Artaria, and I explore a bit, encountering some random weak enemies. I find a missle container, and then my first Energy Tank that I can collect. It’s not the same one that I found earlier but couldn’t get to. But this one, I can get easily, and so I do. This doubles my life energy and gives me a little more confidence. Although, so far there hasn’t been a whole lot of combat, and what there has been has either been very easy, or with the EMMIs that I can do nothing against and have to run from. So life energy doesn’t seem to be all that necessary, yet. I’m sure at some point it will become vital.

Continuing to explore, I work my way through the complex, and eventually discover a chamber with a familiar-looking statue that appears to be offering a ball-shaped item to me. I take it, and it turns out to be the Charge Beam power-up. So now if I press and hold the cannon button, I can charge up a more powerful attack, and also this charged-up beam will enable me to open certain doors that I couldn’t open previously. There’s a few of them right in this immediate area, and I go around and try to explore more.

I find another chamber, what appears to be some kind of control room, and activate it. This changes the flow of magma, which is apparently in use as some kind of power source for this area. During my exploration I had encountered a few doors that led to areas that were glowing red hot and did damage to me, and I had to retreat back to the normal-temperature area. Activating this thing doesn’t seem to have cooled down those areas any, so I’m not sure entirely what I just accomplished.

But there’s a new bit of story revealed, and ADAM tells me that my mystery assailant may have been a Chozo warrior, and that this area appears to have been a settlement of their species. Apparently they may have been responsible for reprogramming the EMMI and turning them against me. ADAM again re-iterates that I’m currently powerless to confront the EMMI and will have to be very careful, avoid them, and flee if I encounter them, and that my primary objective is to return to the surface of the planet and rendezvous with my ship.

I’ve made a bit of progress, but now I’m not sure where to go next. I guess returning to the areas I’ve been and seeing where I can go now that I’ve gotten the Charge Beam.