A review conversation about Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
Ryan and Jeff talk about the long-awaited next installment in the Prime franchise.
We wanted to try something different in how we approached a review of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. This is a shared, dual review — think of it more like a conversation than a traditional review.
Ryan
I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that captured the sense of fear of the unknown better than Metroid Prime. I mean, I have, but I wasn’t 8 when those games came out. But I was 8 when I got Prime and Fusion, my first games in the Metroid series. And Prime terrified me. Every new room was another piece of the maze. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. And I loved it.
I specifically remember playing Prime the first time my mom ever left me home for 20 minutes, and I spent the entire time talking to her on the phone so I wouldn’t be afraid of being alone … so I wouldn’t be afraid of Prime.
To me, the Prime trilogy is a masterpiece of first-person puzzle design and traversal. Echoes and Corruption never reach the original’s quality, but they do the one thing they have to do: they put you in interesting places and challenge you to navigate the web the developers have built for you with the tools you have.
Prime 4: Beyond has gotten a lot of guff for chatty nerds who hang out in your camp and its empty desert. But these are just mildly controversial design choices — like the Dark World in Echoes or the reliance on motion controls in Corruption — compared to Beyond’s true sin: its linearity.
Jeff
I had quite a rollercoaster of emotions as I started playing Beyond. In the initial draft of this review that I started as I was playing, I wrote about how much I was loving the experience. I was not 8 goddamn years old when I played Prime, but it was still a foundational game for me.
My major concern at the time was that Beyond wasn’t doing enough to distinguish itself. It is very much a Prime game, and that’s great if you were already a fan, but it wasn’t putting in the work to win fans on its own merits. If you weren’t already a fan, Beyond was going to be confusing at best and boring at worst.
But then I made it out of the first area.