Five years after its release, Metroid Dread still occupies a permanent space in my brain. Samus Aran’s nightmarish escape from a robot-infested abyss successfully revitalized the dormant Metroid series in 2021 by delivering a tightly designed Metroidvania full of challenging battles. There’s so much that’s still vivid in my memory now, but there’s one moment I have come back to time and time again: that ending.

Metroid Dread begins when the Galactic Federation dispatches Samus to Planet ZDR. The mission is to recover the Federation’s lost EMMI robots, who were sent to the planet to find the last living X parasites hiding in the universe. Samus has a vested interest in that mission considering that those are the parasites that nearly killed her in Metroid Fusion, and now threaten to become an invasive species if left unchecked. The simple retrieval operation goes south in a hurry when a Chozo warrior named Raven Beak attacks and leaves her stranded deep underground — without her power-ups, of course.

That kicks off a horror-tinged escape story where a powerless Samus becomes prey to the reprogrammed EMMI Why do the robots want her dead? To extract the Metroid DNA swirling around in Samus’ blood following the events of Fusion. Samus was fused with the DNA at the start of that game to save her life after an X parasite attack, but it turns out that the risky operation painted a target on her back in the long-run.

While there are multiple story threads at play in Dread , Samus’ relationship to her own body is the real heart of the story.

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