Metroid Dread feels familiar, if you’ve played Metroid Fusion recently.
Sinister soundtrack and level design, a powerful stalker,
a computer companion that won’t STAY IN HIS LANE. But whereas Fusion really felt like a horror game,
Dread feels a lot more actiony. Which is fine! I love both my Metroid babies equally.
Except that I read a GameSpot interview with Yoshio Sakamoto, who directed Fusion and Dread
and like… most of the other Metroid Games. He said that Dread is “focusing on the fear element,”
and that “the main theme that circles around this game is fear and dread.”
Is it?
Does it?
These games have a lot of the same ingredients, but Sakamoto explicitly wanted Dread to feel
scary... so like, why doesn’t it feel scary? The answer why boils down to the way the game handles two things:
the EMMI portions, and Samus’ characterization… or lack of characterization, depending on who you ask.
The EMMI is analogous to SA-X in Fusion, a relatively unstoppable monster hunting YOU,
in the tradition of action-y survival horror games. SA-X is inherently
creepier than EMMIs too, because it's like a malicious alien clone, and EMMIs are just like...
...a glitchy robot.
I think that's creepier.
Maybe that’s just me. I’ve had to put down a lot of roombas... over the last
few years.
It’s been a tough few years.
The way these encounters are handled makes
a big difference in how they feel. In Metroid Fusion, the player gets to see and start worrying
about the SA-X before Samus is even aware of it. It’s common in horror for the audience to
see the monster before the protagonist because it creates a dramatic tension and makes the audience
more invested in the story. The second time, you’re moments away from encountering it, so you
get this great near-miss feeling of relief. You don’t know, on your first Fusion
playthrough, what SA-X's mission is.
So there’s this constant threat that you might cross paths with it unexpectedly. It's sort of like if you and your ex
still shop at the same grocery store 'cause they have that that bouillon you like.
And! Like exes, it’s unclear if SA-X is an intelligent creature.
All of that uncertainty is vital in developing the flavor of fear. If you’re making scare soup,
then uncertainty is like the broth, it’s the thing that keeps the rest of the elements all cohesive.
And it’s the thing that’s missing from the EMMI encounters, which are
more like a stressful frittata. Here’s your first encounter with this li'l critter.
First of all, top-tier scary design… but you’re also immediately engaging with it. There is no
time to dwell on it in any meaningful way. You’re given a tool to defeat it moments later, and then
you do that. It’s classic tutorial stuff, but it devalues EMMI as a legitimate, creepy threat.
The second encounter feels like when you’re in the bathroom and your cat sticks its little paw under
the door because it wants to be with you. Games treat unbeatable antagonists differently now
than they did when Metroid Fusion was made back in the early 2000s. Fusion is closer to the Clock
Tower style of scares. Clock Tower is one of the earliest survival horror games – so early that it
predates the term “survival horror,” which was coined in 1996 to describe Resident Evil. The
unbeatable antagonist of Clock Tower is Scissorman and, listen, I know he doesn’t look like much. He
kinda looks like the berries and cream guy.
But it's the way that he’s deployed makes him scary, honest.
You don’t have a gun or missiles in this game. You’re just a person.
You're Jennifer Connelly. You're actually, like, specifically Jennifer Connelly.
Scissorman can appear anywhere; you can leave him in a room and
he will manifest in whatever direction you’re running. You don’t know when or where you’ll
encounter him, so you maintain a low-level state of anxiety about his presence.
In Clock Tower, you often have to hide from Scissorman. But these are functionally puzzles;
once you “solve” the puzzle by hiding, the Scissorman goes on his merry way.
His Berry Way!!!!
This is important because in the late 2000s, horror games started treating
unbeatable monsters as stealth segments and not puzzles or elevated cutscenes.
For the worse.
Like in Alien: Isolation, your pockets are filled with flash paper and fidget toys,
so even if the alien catches up to you, you have options to distract or deter it.
The fight isn’t immediately over. In Dread, you’re either captured or you're not,
unless you manage to hit that parry window. The power-ups you eventually unlock do change that…
into being more like a stealth game. Invisibility helps you hide, but it also
slows down or stops the action. This is the biggest issue for modern unbeatable monsters:
they're not skill trials, they’re patience trials.
And a watched pot never gets to do stunts.
In a horror game that’s committed to being horror the whole time, those pauses can be great anxiety-builders.
Holding your breath to avoid detection makes it feel like you’re doing something because there
are still stakes, a chance for success... or disaster.
[crack] [Jenna gasps!!!]
Like adding some chopped vegetable to your soup,
it adds a little texture variety.
In stealthy horror games, the big boys are usually cordoned off to a specific portion
of the game. In Alien: Isolation, this is fine because
it’s a horror game the whole time. Even when you're not in an alien-hunt section,
you're still worried about something. But you don’t get that in Dread. The non-EMMI
sections are just pure action-platformers. You’re either worried or you’re not,
so there’s no way for that feeling of anxiety to build into true dread. By which I mean,
the scare soup isn’t building up layers of flavor complexity.
Dread also telegraphs EMMI’s presence a lot.
If you’re anywhere near its physical space, you’ll know thanks to this handy
vision cone. This is another stealth thing! You don’t normally get this in horror games,
because it’s once again removing a state of uncertainty.
Metroid Dread does have uncertainty. But
it’s not very well0used. Dread is the first Samus
story we’ve had since Other M. 11 years ago! Other M was well-received when it was released, but in
the decade since, it’s been branded a franchise killer because it didn’t sell 1.9 million units.
Just a paltry 1.3 million! Now everybody just thinks of it as that one game with terrible
characterization and writing, and like….
[an extremely flat, robotic voice from Metroid Other M]
The cry, the baby’s cry, the cry that’s meant
to sound especially like the baby.
Cronk: That poison? Yzma: Yes, that poison!
Jenna: The lesson Sakamoto seems to have taken from Other M is... to not have Samus talk. She’s not a silent protagonist like
you get in a lot of games. That trope is about characters that are out in the world interacting
with people and they just never carry their weight in conversations. That’s not Samus;
she’s great at parties. And to dispel the idea that she can’t talk,
she does have one line in Metroid Dread.
Samus (in Chozo): “Don’t worry. I’ll end this.
Once and for all.”
Jenna: Imagine getting cast as
Samus Aran and then getting handed the post-it note that the script is written on.
I mean, what a downer.
Despite her silence, we do get a
lot of character-building moments. Anybody who played it would agree that Samus is a badass.
She’s confident and unflappable and very respectful; she always lets these big monsters
finish roaring before she just obliterates them. [sound of Samus obliterating this dude]
In that same interview I mentioned earlier, Sakamoto says that Samus’ thoughts
“would be better conveyed to the player not through actual words or actual voice,
but more with acting or visuals.” So we do get these interesting, tight shots
of her eyes reacting, which was a really great idea because it reads so clearly on the Switch
in handheld mode. The game establishes early on that her battles are not always effortless,
so when it is effortless, it feels cool and not just straight from the can. So to speak.
There are also lots of moments when we’re treated to a close-up of Samus’ face – only,
with the glass glazed over so we can’t actually see her reaction. The framing is clearly meant to
put us into Samus’ brain, but we aren’t given any information about what’s knocking around in there.
We don’t know if she’s upset or scared or if she’s trying to remember if she left the burner on.
And this is on purpose; Sakamoto says his intention was to get the player to think: "What is
going on? What is Samus feeling right now?" But that’s a weird choice for a scary game. Horror
lives or dies in the reaction of the people experiencing the horror
first-hand. If Jennifer Connelly wasn’t screaming in response to the Scissor Man, how
would we know he’s supposed to be scary? We base our projection of Samus’ feelings on
the scraps of information the games give us about her. In Fusion, we get a peek into Samus’ inner
workings during these elevator monologues. So we know Samus doesn’t know how powerful the
creature is, and that she’s worried. So I’m worried about SA-X when I embody her.
In Dread, we get a lot less information about who Samus is and how she feels,
so in moments when we need to fill in the blank, there are fewer options.
And none of those options is “scared.” The developers justify Samus' silence by
saying it was meant to create a feeling of dread. But it’s that lack of characterization
that makes it hard to feel any. Am I sad that Dread isn’t a full-blown horror game?
No, I still thought it was a great game, and I love that Adam is like “you’re helpless, Samus! Succumb to your fear!” and
Samus is like “nah, dude, whatever.” But that is an action genre thing, not a horror
genre thing. In horror, these kinds of harbingers burden the main character with a sense of
foreboding, which is then proven correct by some sort of horrifying experience. Then
when the protagonist fights through and ultimately triumphs, it feels poignant. Like how seasoning,
if you layer it up in a soup correctly, builds flavors by making all the elements more vibrant,
and that’s a metaphor that you can eat.
Ohoohoo, spooky!
[a dread inducing drone of electronic music]
Some horror movies have fun twists at the end.
This is my way of telling you, I was actually making pot pie filling this whole time.