Was out of town for a while but I am back! What have you been playing! I beat control resonant and started silent hill townfall. It’s decent so far. Also going to be jumping into Castlevania soon. Been playing a lot of playdate! Season 3 is off to a strong start!
The last Metroid is in the finished pile. My replay spree is complete.
Dread was so much better than I remembered, I think precisely because I replayed the whole series in a row. No longer is it its own thing compared against my favorite individual Metroids, now it’s a series finale tonally and mechanically paying off what the past three games have been setting up.
Now I have to avoid the genre until the new one comes out so I’m not sick of it then.
I had so much fun revisiting Dread after a year or two because that game lies to you about how linear it is—it’s crazy.
I swear to god, there’s a point somewhere in the first third to halfway through where it just becomes an open-world game.
I also love how the first area, Artaria or whatever, takes you through several loops of itself with such masturbatory level design—in some ways, it is my favorite Metroid sequence by far.
This was my third time through it. The first time I fell for the lies, second time was after I read about that slide jump and I tried all game long to break it all as hard as possible. Maybe context isn’t the only thing that made this run special, maybe it’s that I can finally bring that same balance of mastery and whim-following that I have with Super, where sequence breaking doesn’t even feel like I’m resisting anymore.