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Frogger on 10 January 2015
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Samus Aran said:

There are plenty of horror elements in the Prime trilogy.

Metroid Prime 2 is probably the most atmospheric and "creepy" game of the entire franchise. Besides, Echoes has the most references to Alien thus far: 

  • The idea of the main planet having a turbulent atmosphere which damages the protaganist's ship is a concept which also appears in Alien when the Nostromo is damaged while landing on LV-426 and has to stay on the planetoid until repairs are complete.
  • Samus being sent to Aether to restore contact with the troopers is another concept in Aliens in which Ripley and the Colonial Marines are sent to restore contact with the colony on LV-426.
  • The Splinter hive in the Federation Troopers' Ops base and the discovery of the dead troopers caught in webs is similar to the discovery of the Alien hive and cocooned colonists in the colony complex in Aliens.
  • The scene where Dark Samus aims at the real Samus when they first meet is, according to storyboards, based on the climax of Aliens.
  • The Federation Troopers can be considered similar to the Colonial Marines from Aliens.
  • The part where Splinters manage to get on board the Tyr and damage it beyond repair is similar to the scene in Aliens where an Alien boards the first Sulaco dropship and kills the pilots, causing it to crash, stranding the remaining survivors.
  • One of the deceased Marines, PFC G. Haley, is described to have lost his sanity during the Splinter attack. This is similar to Hudson, one of the characters from Aliens, who also loses his sanity when all hope of surviving the mission on LV-426 is lost.


Even in Metroid Prime 3 we have the abandonned spaceship Valhalla that was the victim of a space pirate attack. In the ship lurk all kinds of phazon enhanced creatures and the bodies of the victims (both marines and space pirates) tell brutal stories. The metroids leaving behind empty shells of bodies that desintegrate on touch was also a nice addition.


I never said that the Prime games don't reference Alien, but they don't have the same atmosphere at all. And I would absolutely disagree that Prime 2 is the creepiest of the series. Definitey the most uncomfortable in a good way, but not the creepiest.

If you think that I made all of that to simply say that I wanted more "horror" elements in Metroid, then I clearly did a bad job of protraying what I want. Super Metroid had an atmosphere that wasn't present at all in Prime. That's not me criticizing Prime; Prime was good and that atmoshpere would have clashed with the stories those games tried to tell. That same atmospere is present in Alien, and it's present in Metroid Fusion a little bit with SA-X, but it is the entire game of Alien Isolation. And I don't want an entire Metroid game to feel like that, but Prime didn't feel anything like that. There are parts of Prime that feel almost exactly like parts of Metroid games, like the Under Water Frigate, but there are parts that feel nothing like it, like the entire "star trek" atmosphere and lack of "Alien" atmosphere.

And it's not so much the "horror" that I'm focusing on. I made sure to use words like eerie and unnerving because I didn't want anyone to think that I just wanted a scarier Metroid. That's not the point. It's things like seeing the muscles desolve off of Crocomire so that only his sceleton remained. It's how grossly organic much of it felt as opposed to futuristic and cybernetic. Craid didn't feel like a giant monster, but a giant reptile. Any place with tech had a distinct "1980s" spin on it that Prime doesn't have, but Isolation does. I don't even like Isolation, but I think it nails an atmosphere not felt in any game since Super, and done in a completely different way in Bioshock.

And again, I'm not criticizing Prime. Prime's atmosphere was perfect in all three games. I just want something different, and I don't think Retro would do that.