mariner's Metroid Dread review

Great review. How did you feel about the 2.5D? In other games that had a lot of action, 2.5D felt imprecise and unfair. Does it get in the way here?

I love Metroid, but outside of the first game, I think most of them are very linear with a set order for the main upgrades, with the illusion of being nonlinear. Sequence breaking usually requires uses a glitch or an aability in an unintended way.

there is no hand holding, the game is fair enough that most people can feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming the obstacles themselves, and the game has a high skill ceiling with intrinsic coolness for those that want more

That's one historical virtue of Nintendo games, and one I prize the most among their set of historical virtues.

Where they haven't done that, and focused only upon the mid-to-bottom tier players, they lost me, and quite some of my respect: unfortunately they have done this a lot of times over the last two decades.

I didn't really have a problem with the 2.5D. It felt pretty natural, and I never blamed the controls for my failings. I'm not into the whole shinespark puzzle thing though, so maybe it doesn't work well there since precision is required. Can't tell you one way or another with that part of the game.

As for the nonlinearity, Super Metroid definitely has gates to progress in a specific order, but the game feels very open and not always clear what order to go in. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to feel lost. And there are lots of surprising shortcuts or new paths opening up to you as you go along. That is what Dread is missing, although again, I think it's fine that it misses it.

And yeah, I like this type of difficulty best. It's so much more natural than the "Easy Normal Hard" settings you get. OK, so Dread has a hard mode too, but whatever. I was playing one of the throwback Bloodstained games recently, and it was frustratingly annoying. So tried the easy mode, but then it was frustratingly boring. Getting difficulty just right is, well, difficult, but this game nails it.