Metroid Prime

One of gaming’s advantages over other kinds of artistic media is its ability to tap into the feeling of wonder through exploration directly: since we are the ones moving the camera, and choosing where to look, where to go, and what to investigate, games can turn us into intrepid explorers venturing into the unknown. And, to this day, few games have been able to leverage that sensation to the same degree as Metroid Prime.

Responding to a distress signal, bounty hunter Samus Aran arrives at a derelict space vessel to find that it’s now a graveyard: its crew – the fearsome Space Pirates – are mostly dead, and while we move through its barely-lit halls, we can use Samus’ scan on the bodies to discover the cause of death, finding out that while one pirate succumbed to some heavy burns, for example, another perished due the lacerations on their body. Sure enough, we soon discover a monstrous larva floating inside a huge glass container. There are two other containers nearby, but not only are they empty, but the glass is also shattered as if it was burst from the inside. We’ve already come across the corpse of one of these giant beasts, having found it entangled in cables, covered in flames, and surrounded by those dead pirates and the body of a small similar creature, but the third big specimen is still missing.

Close by, we find a screen displaying the creature’s form and biology, but if we happened to scan the body of the small one before, we already know that these critters are vermin indigenous to the nearby planet, Tallon IV, and are called Parasites. And we’ve read the text saying Parasites are small and mostly harmless – in small numbers, at least – while the flames dance in the background near the dead Space Pirates, teared metal, and the corpse of a Parasite the size of Samus’ ship.

Eventually, we find a room full of computer logs written by the pirates: we learn that they had been testing a substance called Phazon and making experiments on lesser life forms. They’ve discovered that, on Parasites in particular, not only did Phazon increase their overall mass but also the venom secreted in their saliva ducts. Phazon makes things big and more dangerous, in other words, and probably makes them angrier too, as one log states that, “bioform pain tolerance levels at 13% and holding.”

This prologue already displays how Metroid Prime handles environmental storytelling: the story of what exactly happened in that Space Frigate is not hard to piece together, but we have to pay attention to our surroundings, notice those shattered containers, scan those dead bodies, and read the monster entries and computer logs so that, when we finally arrive at the end of the spacecraft, and a humongous pissed-off Parasite drooling venom all over the ground comes out of the reactor core… we can get the payoff. The thing about environmental storytelling is that it ties the narrative to our curiosity, rewarding the more attentive player: those who blaze through the game without a care in the world will be constantly skipping Chekhov’s favorite weapon.

The battle with the Parasite Queen at the Reactor Core doesn’t end very well for Samus, however. She loses most of her weaponry while trying to get out of the Frigate before it falls and crashes on Tallon IV – an opening that mirrors the one from Super Metroid, putting a timer on the screen for us to escape. And, much like in that Super Nintendo classic, here Samus also encounters an old nemesis – a high-ranking Space Pirate – and decides to fly down to Tallon IV in pursuit.

In Metroid Prime, each time Samus leaves her ship, the camera pans inside her helmet, and we go into first-person. In the game, we’re seeing the world through the bounty hunter’s eyes, with the map, her health, and the rest of the HUD contextualized as actual diegetic elements being displayed on her visor. We’re seeing what she’s seeing, so when we get near vents, the smoke obstructs our view, or we see the humidity fog up the panel. When we shoot down larvae, their muck gets spattered on the screen, temporarily obscuring our vision. An explosion may make us see Samus’ own eyes reflected on her visor. Like the greats, Metroid Prime is never afraid to commit to the bit: if we let go of the controller and stay put, for example, the camera keeps gently swaying up and down to simulate Samus’ breathing. The effect is mesmerizing.

Metroid Prime only properly begins when we land on Tallon IV and the most haunting music starts to play while we stare at the planet’s caves and waterfalls: the tune is eerie, teasing the mysteries we’ll eventually uncover and hinting at the dangers that lie ahead, but also majestic, inviting us to explore that world, to take the first steps away from the ship and set foot on its many caverns and temples.

But the rub is that the game has just removed our recently learned powers. In the prologue, while we investigated the Space Frigate, it taught us the importance of firing missiles against armored enemies, the many uses of a charged shot, and how Samus’s ability to morph into a ball allows her to sneak inside cramped places and tight vents. And then the game stripped us of our whole arsenal right before leaving us stranded on this foreign planet teeming with hostile alien life: the point is to greatly enhance our feeling of powerlessness in the face of the unknown, for it wants us to be explorers, yes, but also to understand that this is not an easy role.

Talos IV, after all, is not a welcoming planet. We quickly find ourselves closely watching our steps after coming into contact with toxic mushrooms that violently explode when disturbed, for this is a world where dog-sized beetles burst out of the ground to eat us; where plants spew toxic fumes at one corner, and swarms of exploding scarabs block our path at the other. This is a place where the weed moves by itself, retracting when afraid, displaying signs of “basic sentience,” and where “immobile organisms entirely composed of ocular tissue” adorn temple walls, emitting energy beams that hurt unwary passersby. And we’re stuck on this planet badly equipped and with little direction on where to go next.

Not all life on Tallon IV wants us dead, however. While exploring the nearby ruins, for example, we soon find ourselves in a room with a couple of fairly big shining flies: despite their size, these Plazmites mean us no harm – if we stay out of their way, that is –, so if we’re trigger-happy – and after the hostile encounter with swarms of  “hivemind war wasps” in the previous room, we’re bound to be – and recklessly shoot them down… we end up losing the room’s main source of light, and may then fail to notice the pools of toxic water on the path to the exit.

Tallon IV was once the home of an ancient species shrouded in mystery. Bird-like in appearance, if their broken statues serve as any indication, they’re the ones who built the dilapidated, abandoned temples and structures we come across in our travels. The Chozo, they used to call themselves: “The history of the Chozo stretches back into ancient times, so far into the fog of the past that we know not where our ancestors came from. One thing is clear, however: the Chozo who colonized Tallon IV made a conscious choice to eschew a civilization of advanced technology,” the first mural we find on the planet states.

These murals contain the words of a long-dead people, telling a history of hubris and calamity, where the Chozo scribers claim to have built a society in harmony with nature until a fateful meteor strike spread a terrible disease – for nature is as relentless as it’s random: we can never prepare enough for it or fully control it. Soon after the mural, we see the wooden branches of a tree serving as a bridge between two structures, breaking and distorting the rocks, and we may imagine that, even in the glory days, that so-called harmony didn’t come without a price.

After all, when we get to the lava-filled Magmoor Caverns, with its intense musical theme mixing marimba with a strong choir, and the first living thing in sight is a sightless fire-breathing serpent coming out of the magma pools, we realize that nature in Tallon IV is a force to be reckoned with. Next to the serpent, for example, in the stone platforms that cross the room, we also have the puffers: floating balls of deadly gas described as “aggressive hunters” that also explode when shot, leaving the place where they were standing before unsafe to traverse. The caverns are an oppressive place, made even more so by the constant warning sign popping up on the left side of our visor, which is warning us about the deadly gas, the lava pools, the heat… It’s warning us of basically everything.

And then we arrive in the next biome, Phendrana Drifts, and the game’s whole vibe suddenly changes: if in the caverns we were barely surviving the constant onslaught of threats, this cold, mountainous region now invites quiet contemplation. The music is melancholic and eerie, with a female voice playing on top of the distant sounds of wind, creating a rhythm that starts soothing and ends much more foreboding: it builds a sense of history, making us feel that we’re standing in a place that is as old as it is dangerous. If Metroid Prime’s whole soundtrack is a masterpiece in ambience and atmosphere, Phendrana Drifts still stands out amidst the other excellent tunes. And when we add the stark contrast with what came earlier in the anxiety-inducing Magmoor Caverns, the effect can be nothing less than goosebumps: we have no choice but to stay still for a while and calmy absorb the new surroundings, watching those unknown flying organisms pass by a snowcapped temple, and some hard-shelled insects slowly walk over the icy platforms, minding their own business, while the snow falls on our visor. It’s as peaceful as Tallon IV can get.

Each biome in Metroid Prime has its own very distinct feel and design. Take the Phazon Mines, for example, which is mostly a harrowing gauntlet of Space Pirates that hit hard and rarely stop coming: it’s a combat heavy area, a Litmus Test of our knowledge of the game’s main mechanics, where we keep praying for the next room to be a save station… and it almost never is.

The first time we land in Tallon IV, Metroid Prime disguises its most important lesson as a tease: it puts items we could have previously reached with our lost abilities in clear view. We can’t get them now, but we know that if we just recover our equipment, we’ll be able to reach those places again. The game is teaching us its overall structure, which is the bedrock of the genre that gained its name: in Metroidvanias, we’re regularly finding new pieces of equipment to reach previously inaccessible places and finally get the power-ups, lore entries, and even more equipment that were hidden there. Exploration, in other words, is driven by our progress: the more we find, the more places in Tallon IV we can reach.

One of the secrets of Metroid Prime’s success is how most of the exploration is related to how we see the world. The game is constantly inviting us to not only pay attention to the environment but actually study it. Samus’ standard scan is an invaluable tool for that: it can disable defensive mechanisms from a distance, grant access to rooms, and activate elevators, but also gather crucial logs and monster entries, and even reveal their weak points. The scan is there for us to have a reason to not blaze our way through a room mindlessly, but stop to take our surroundings carefully and then… maybe notice a powerup hidden behind a pillar or a suspicious spot on the wall that can be broken with a missile.

Some of those new pieces of equipment we find can also deeply impact how we perceive our surroundings: somewhere in Tallon IV, for example, we can get our hands on a thermal visor, which allows us to locate hidden enemies and objects in a room by their heat signature. There’s this moment in Phendrana Drifts, where we’re underwater near a wall of ice containing some fossilized fish, and we can’t see two feet ahead of us clearly. So, we activate the thermal visor and the whole lake suddenly comes to life: we can now see not only the path forward, but also how it’s covered by a line of hostile tentacles on the middle and, on the left, defended by a aquatic predator – we can now see even the harmless shoals of fish swimming by.

Finally, the text from the murals and logs also deserves praise. While the Chozo murals detail the history of a people in increasing despair, without being able to contain the damage the meteor strike continued to inflict on their land, who started to place their hopes in the uncertainty of prophecies, the pirate logs vary from detailed accounts of their research on Phazon and their strategies to defeat Samus (they really hate her) to casual orders to not feed Metroids or bring pets to the Phazon mines.

Tightly designed and offering one of gaming’s most memorable settings, Metroid Prime is an outstanding achievement. With its focus on exploring a richly detailed alien world, emphasizing the study of its flora and fauna, it’s basically the videogame equivalent of the excellent 2023 TV show Scavengers Reign, with the miniseries (which HBO renewed in a better parallel universe) now serving as a great library of ideas to where the Metroid franchise can go now in future installments.

May 16, 2025.