The first new trailer forMetroid Prime 4: Beyondin months debuted during a recent Nintendo Direct, and the reactions have been somewhat mixed. As the biggest Metroid simp in the lower 48 (there’s a guy in Alaska who named his kid Mother Brain), I can’t help but feel blessed by every solitary frame of actual gameplay Nintendo has deigned to bestow upon us. I like the new planet, Viewros, and I’min lovewith Samus’ new space suit. The chunky red armor? The sleek body-outlining gun metal? Perfection.
But I can also see where some of the more negative reactions are coming from. The big reveal in this trailer is Samus’ new psychic abilities, which you’ll use to “operate mechanisms and open doors”. Frankly, that doesn’t sound all that exciting, and the gameplay demonstration - Samus grabbing a light ball from one place and psychically throwing it into another to open a door - doesn’t seem like the kind of mind-blowing new mechanic one might expect after waiting 18 years.
We also saw an example of Samus using her psychic powers to control the trajectory of her beams, which looks a lot like using Batman’s remote-controlled batarangs in the Arkham series.
Metroid Has Always Been A Game About Opening Doors
I suspect that what makes Samus’ new psychic powers cool is something that’s hard to convey in a brief trailer, so I’m giving the game the benefit of the doubt here. While I agree there’s nothing particularly novel about grabbing a key over here and putting it in a lock over there, no matter how you try to fancy it up with Jedi powers, anyone who has played Metroid knows there are going to be deeper puzzles and more complicated abilities than what we saw in the trailer.
Both examples of Samus’ psychic powers in the trailer are technically telekinesis though, right?
When the average gamer hears “operate mechanisms and open doors,” they yawn. But me, a connoisseur of the genre and powerful gaming warlord, hear nothing but music. Metroid is, at its very core, a game about opening doors. Sometimes those doors are simple to open: you see a door with a red outline around it and shoot your plasma beam at it - bang, it’s open. You see a glowing orb of energy so you grab it with yourtelekineticpsychic powers and hurl it at the first weird statue that looks like it wants a glowing orb of energy, and bam! The door is open.
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
But of course, that’s notallit is. This is just a little taste, something meant to spark your imagination and get you thinking about the cool puzzles Retro could potentially be working on with this new mechanic. Throughout all of Metroid’s history Samus has interacted with the world through her weapons. You find your way around by shooting things, dropping morph ball bombs, and turning aliens into frozen platforms. Metroid Prime 4 will explore a new type of interaction for Samus - one in which she is touching the world, not just blasting it. If you’re a Metroid fan, I think it’s easy to see a lot of potential in that.
Maybe we’ve become desensitized to telekinesis as a puzzle-solving tool now that Link’s Ultrahand ability in Tears of the Kingdom’s pushed the mechanic as far as it could possibly go, and maybe Retro Studio’s talent for design hasn’t actually evolved much in the 18 years since Metroid Prime 3, but I’m not ready to poo poo Psychic Samus just yet. There’s a lot of opportunity to take a familiar mechanic and make it distinctly Metroid’s, and as long as we’re opening doors, we’re on the right track.
