There are two types of gamers: those who enjoy getting lost and finding their own way around, and those who never want to spend a single moment wondering what they're supposed to do next. While preferences are entirely valid, it would be extraordinarily difficult for a game to please both crowds. It’s why Hollow Knight is heralded as the greatest achievement in gaming or the biggest waste of time ever, depending on who you ask, and why the Metroidvania genre itself is so divisive. One of Metroid Dread’s greatest feats is the way it impossibly manages to appeal to both audiences by perfecting the illusion of exploration. Dread can make you feel lost even when your path forward is right in front of you, and it can make you feel like an explorer even when it’s holding your hand and leading you along the entire way.

When people talk about the original Metroid, they often criticize the way it obscured the critical path with hidden breakable walls that were too hard to find. Metroid 2 and, to a greater extent, Super Metroid, remedied these complaints by improving the signposting that leads players to those hidden portals. They never went away, they just became easier - and more rewarding - to find. Dread further iterates on the Metroid formula by not only leading you to the breakable walls, but trapping you into a room with them so that you can’t wander off looking in all the wrong places.

Related: Adam Takes All Of The Dread Out Of Metroid

There’s a point in Super Metroid where everyone gets stuck. Right after collecting the Power Bomb, you’re meant to return to a glass tube and bomb it to open the way to Maridia. The game teaches you to do this by showing you another broken glass tube near the wrecked ship, but if you didn’t pick up on that clue, you can easily find yourself wandering all over Zebes looking for a regular path forward.

Dread does something very similar at the beginning. When you take the first elevator to Cataris, you’ll find two doors that lead to lava rooms that you can’t enter yet, and nothing else. The only path forward is a breakable wall in the elevator room, which you won’t be able to find by looking at the map. Most players will take the elevator back down to Artaria to look for a route they missed earlier, but unlike Super Metroid, Dread doesn’t let you backtrack very far. You’ll quickly find the way you came is now blocked and you’ll be forced to return to Cataris and find the hidden wall.

Metroid-Dread-Catarsis

This early puzzle teaches players a very important lesson about Dread and the way its levels are designed: the path forward is always in front of you. The game often leaves you to your own devices (when Adam isn’t telling you exactly where to go next) but it’s always funneling you forward with little tricks like one-way paths and conveniently placed portals.

There’s a subtle genius to the way Dread leads you by the hand while making you feel free to explore. In past Metroid games, you would find an upgrade to unlock a certain type of door and then have to backtrack through each zone to find the right door that will lead you to the next upgrade. Dread looks like it progresses the same way, but it’s actually leading you directly along the critical path without you even realizing it. One of the clever ways it does that is with teleporters that take you back to previously explored areas. Of course, the teleporters aren’t just randomly returning you to somewhere you’ve already explored, they’re taking you exactly where you need to go next, or close enough to it that there’s no way you can miss it.

Compare the teleporters in Dread to the Stagways in Hollow Knight. Both are fast travel systems that help you get around the world faster, but they serve very different purposes. In Hollow Knight, you’ll use the Stagways when you need to get somewhere across the map quickly or circumvent a blocked path. You learn how to navigate the map on your own, and the Stagways are useful tools that help you get where you want to go. In Metroid Dread, you use every teleporter just once, right when you find it. Every teleporter is integrated into the critical path, and you never have to decide when you’re meant to use them or where you’re meant to go. If you see a new teleporter, you should use it. It doesn’t matter where it goes because it always leads where you’re meant to go next.

By cleverly guiding players forward without explicitly telling them where to go, Dread manages to appeal to both players that love and players that hate getting lost. Even when the game gives you a new upgrade and leaves you to your own devices to figure out where to go next, the answer is always either in the same area or on the other side of a conveniently placed teleporter. It feels like the kind of open exploration Metroid is known for, even though it’s anything but.

Next: The Hardest Part Of Metroid Dread Is The Control Scheme