Parallels Between Metroid and Dead Space (The Case for Dead Space - Spiritual Successor to Metroid).
Doesn’t it feel like forever since a great Metroid game came out? That sentence can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But for me, though, I’ve been waiting for a true successor to Metroid for over a dozen years. I don’t feel many of the later entries really held up to the high standard Super Metroid had set over 20 years ago, with a couple exceptions.
Today the latest Metroid releases have been divisive, with major mechanical changes to the formula, pinball games and the disappointing Metroid: Other M. After even more years of hibernation, we see the release of of a handheld four-player co-op first person shooter with a soccer minigame attached.
Let’s just say the apple has fallen quite far than the tree of the series’ roots. This may not be a popular opinion, but I believe we DID in fact get a spiritual successor to the beloved series, just not in the form we expected. I will now make my case that Dead Space was as close as we may get to a modern reimagining to the themes, mechanics and gameplay that Metroid offered.
The first comparison I’d like to make is the dark sci-fi atmosphere. It may be a little hard to see now, but Metroid and Super Metroid were some of the darkest video games made at the time. The original 1986 game opened with a surprisingly brooding title score for an 8-bit game.
As soon as you enter the game, you are bombarded with attacks and hazards from all sorts of alien creatures. Lava pits, reptilian monsters and a giant brain in a glass case running the horrorshow. Whereas Metroid features a mix of metallic and terrestrial locales, Dead Space bathes in the industrial environs of a ship hull.
They both feature an important creature unique to the series: Metroids and Necromorphs respectively; and both creatures have mysterious alien progenitors. Super Metroid opens up player control to the remains of a research lab, slaughtered inhabitants and all.
Though the game does evens out its tone mid-game, but the intro and ending have real horror vibes and thick dark sci-fi atmosphere. I was terrified to go through those sequences as a kid, and walking among the corpses at Ceres Station, or descending into the hellish underworld of Tourian still gives me chills to this day.
Dead Space opens up to the similarly foreboding starship Ishimura with the remains of what was the crew scattered all over. Dead Space is more on-the-nose with its setting and atmosphere, preferring a blunt and bloody punch of evil and gore, rather than Metroid’s more subtle denizens.
You could also argue the game borrows some setting and story cues from the System Shock series, too. “Wait, what? Metroid wasn’t a survival horror game!” one might say. Wasn’t it though? Wikipedia defines survival horror as “a subgenre of video games inspired by horror fiction that focuses on survival of the character as the game tries to frighten players with either horror graphics or scary ambience.” In recent years, the Metroid brand shined up its once dark persona and you wouldn’t really have known it for survival horror elements, but its roots definitely show it.
From the claustrophobic, living alien world you explore, the Giger-eqsue aliens of a wrecked ship, to the screeching jaws of the metroids themselves, who quite literally suck their victims dry of life. Metroid was scary.
Metroid 1 had probably the most urgent survival mechanics as you didn’t even start out with one full energy tank, and recharge stations and save points didn’t exist.
Making it a punishing and harrowing experience. There are also occasional scenes in both Super Metroid and Dead Space where it plays off the sense of security the player has in a specific room type like an upgrade room, an elevator or a save room -- only to surprise and shock you with a sudden attack.
Both games have moments of building dread that you have to push on through and endure, and Dead Space was no exception, with horrible abominations around every other corner that you would have to put out of misery. Another coincidence is that the shape and stance of the space pirates in Metroid are similar to the necromorphs in Dead Space, note their blade-shaped forearms.
In a couple sequences, Dead Space features a run for your life from a regenerating necromorph that will chase you continuously. This echoes the scenes where you are being chased by SA-X in Metroid Fusion. As has become standard in Metroid games and in later Castlevania games, the “Metroid-vania” formula has always included large maze-like maps that you would traverse and revisit when you were able to unlock new areas with newfound abilities.
Both games emphasized opening doors to get to each new room. These also double as a way to contain the main character in an important battle. Elevators separate the regions of Zebes in Super Metroid, the tramway gets you around the different zones of the Ishimura in Dead Space.
Although most of Metroid relied on jumping verticality to expand the scope of the world, Dead Space had you grounded to the floor most of the time. Where the real verticality in Dead Space happened was in the zero-gravity rooms where you were able to leap off the floor and land on another plane, which became your new floor.
Dead Space 2 refined the zero-G sequences, allowing you to float freely through space, using small jets as boosters - adding a whole new level of movement to the game. Some Metroid games featured grappling hooks to allow you to traverse areas though a leaping movement.
Dead Space mirrors that again by doing of the opposite: the kinetic beam lets you move objects other than you, to get through areas. Later on in each Metroid game, you can gain the Freeze Beam which lets you freeze charging enemies in place in order to easier kill them or jump on them as a platform.
In Dead Space, you get the Stasis Module, which lets you freeze enemies in place, or slow moving parts, doors or machinery in order for you to get around them or solve puzzles. Harsh Climates and Suit Upgrades In the Metroid games, you have areas such as Norfair or Maridia, which are difficult or dangerous to traverse until you upgrade your suit, adding tension and horror.
Alternatively, Dead Space features vacuum areas where you have limited oxygen that you must conserve or you will die. Like Metroid, fear is present in these areas. Vacuum squelches out most sound, and all you can hear is the thumping of your heart and your uneasy breathing, adding a sort of silent horror when you run into hostiles out there.
Getting into a new suit was always a gameplay milestone in the Metroid games, allowing new areas to be explored with the Varia suit, or granting the traversal of aquatic areas and lava pools with the Gravity suit. You would also regularly collect additional missile, bomb and energy tank storage hidden around, which greatly increase your survivability.
Dead Space has suit upgrades as well with similarly dramatic reveals. Here instead of finding static upgrades, you collect parts, scrap and credits you can spend to tailor your suit for more health, stasis and air capacity, or improve your weapons’ effectiveness and ammo capacity.
Although more iterative than Metroid’s suits and upgrades, they are still quite important to survival. Dead Space is no remake, as there are plenty of differences between the two series. I do find it interesting though, that so many clear inspirations were pulled from a clearly unrelated franchise in this case.
Some may disagree, and these may well be just coincidences. But it’s interesting to me that a survival horror game published by EA can to me feel more like Metroid than anything Nintendo has published in the last decade or so. It is sad too, that even Dead Space fizzled out in the end, when its sequels focused on less interesting aspects of the series and watered down its atmosphere and mechanics.
Hopefully though we’ll see a new rebirth of the sci-fi exploration, atmosphere and splendor of Metroid and Dead Space in future titles to come. We can hope. Agree? Disagree? Have a different case to make? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be happy to discuss with you.
