Been a little, sorry. I know you've been anticipating this entry in my personal top 10 with bated breath though, so here goes.
Other entries in this series:
10. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
9. Perfect Tides
8. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
7. Chop Suey
6. Knights and Bikes
4. Gone Home
3. Butterfly Soup
2. The Last of Us Part I
1. The Last of Us Part II
5. SUPER METROID
There's a defining exchange in Greta Gerwig's 2017 film Lady Bird that goes like this:
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SISTER SARAH JOAN: You clearly love Sacramento.
CHRISTINE 'LADY BIRD' MCPHEARSON: I do?
SISTER SARAH: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
LADY BIRD: I was just describing it.
SISTER SARAH: Well it comes across as love.
LADY BIRD: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
SISTER SARAH: Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?
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To me, besides some kind of thematic relevance to my own life, the crucial test of a game's merit lies in whether the developers wanted to play their own product, and the answer to that question I find can typically be ascertained in the extent to which care went into the details. In the open world games that increasingly dominate the modern AAA landscape, this is what separates the rare Skyrims, the Breath of the Wilds, and the Elden Rings from the much more common Far Crys, Assassin's Creeds, Cyberpunk 2077's, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarots, and Sonic Frontiers'. It's typically pretty easy to tell when people weren't really feeling what they were making. Half-hearted, profit-driven titles will be rife with mostly forgettable missions highlighted on a map and nothing of note in-between. Nondescript backgrounds, for example. No wildlife in a "wild" space. Waterfalls that could've easily been made just as convincingly two or three console generations ago despite the vast budgets the company could afford. Music you forget the second its over because it's just noise. Characters so unnaturally wooden that they seem to converse with you without breathing or necessarily even lip-syncing their painfully patronizing script anywhere near accurately. Or perhaps the game is released all but broken because meeting a release deadline was more important. There's a good chance you'll have to sign an in-game contract before being allowed to play it even after purchase. And I won't even get started here on in-game transactions. Etc. We know the signs. We've all seen them before. Titles that are made in an open world format only because that's what you want, right? Easily 90% of today's open world games don't benefit from being structured that way and would function more efficiently if they were just made in straightforward, linear, stage-by-stage progression instead. To that end, the open world game structure is something I'm inclined to compliment sparsely these days. In my mind, the genre must earn its right to go on existing at this point.
Maybe I'm commenting too much on the state of blockbuster adventure gaming today. My point was that the proof of passion can be found in the details. Is this a world that seems to literally just exist for the player to plunder it dry and make everyone else's decisions for them or does it instead feel like the game's world is alive; like it would go on existing if you weren't in it?
What makes Super Metroid so special is the degree to which the game's world itself seems like a living entity. Early on in your journey, it scans you and thereafter hordes of hostile creatures suddenly appear everywhere, in all kinds of rooms and corridors and elsewhere. It's fucking creepy! (No one said a game's world needed to be inviting to feel alive!) Everything exists in service of cultivating a menacing ambience in different shades and varieties appropriate to different settings, from the lighting techniques in play to the highly detailed backgrounds that often seem to move even in metallic settings that in other games would've been quite visually bland and one-note. The hauntingly subdued music and the smoothness with which it transitions from setting to setting exhibit a special level of care that I really don't feel has been rivaled by many other games at all, ever. It's frankly amazing to feel legitimately scared of a 2D environment, even after you've long since familiarized yourself with its contents!
But despite its hostile surface-level trappings, Super Metroid's Zebes is a world that demands to be explored. Nearly every room, hallway, and outside area hides useful secrets, including some environmental secrets that were mind-expanding in 1994, like the Chozo statue that picks you up and walks you through a bed of spikes into a hidden area beneath when you curl up in its hands and a tunnel in Maridia you have to blow up in order to access a whole new area of the game! This to say nothing of everything that's enabled by the new abilities introduced in this game beyond power bombs, like wall jumping, speed boosting, and shine-sparking. And so you feel compelled ever further into the planet's depths.
Earlier Metroid entries just didn't have the serious feel that Super Metroid does, opening right from the get-go on a scene of dead scientists, just as the word "NINTENDO" you'd not associate with such a scene, appears, followed by a very story-driven prologue that feels quite motivating not just for the 16-bit era, but by any standard, complete with a camera that tilts diagonally as you try to climb platforms to escape in time, obstructing your view (...which, were this game made today, the "form must follow function" crowd would likely contend constitutes bad game design because it inhibits the efficacy of your play 
). Your mission, whatever it is, feels urgent. And then nothing! You're just thrown onto Zebes with no guidance whatsoever, expected to figure everything out on your own. Clearly a game for gamers! Beyond a brief recap of events preceding the prologue, there's not even any dialogue in the whole game. The lack of formal guidance works well thanks to a deliberately minimalistic narrative that focuses on heart pricks just as subtle, and also just as powerful, as the soundtrack. And yes I'm referencing the events of that famed final fight in particular that convey a message I've learned time and again in life: that sometimes the best of friendships can come from the most unexpected places. It's mainly the special value of this message to me that separates the position of Super Metroid on my list from that of Metroid Prime. It's amazing what can sometimes be accomplished without dialogue or direction! Perhaps one day I'll learn to lean less on lengthy exposition in my own messaging. 
Speaking of direction, Super Metroid, furthermore, invented one of the most brilliant approaches to progression ever conceived of in the history of this medium. The original invented, for the world of 2D platforming games, the adventure style of progression that involves a world built to be searched out for tools that unlock more of the world (as opposed to traditional stage-by-stage progression lacking a unified world structure). This third entry in the franchise though adds another layer of exploratory incentive to that formula by designing its world in such a careful way that beginners will find a definite path through that works very well, while more experienced players will notice, on later playthroughs, that they have more traversal options than they first realized; options that were likely previously unknown to them that enable them to "break" the game and proceed through its areas and bosses completely out of the predestined sequence. And one is incentivized to do so through a (...certain...) system of rewards that's intended to encourage fast, efficient playthroughs with different endings. In short, the game was actually designed for what we today call speed runs looooooooooooong before that was any much of a thing!
Innumerable games have sought to recapture Super Metroid's alchemy, but I don't know that it can even be done. Invariably I find that attempts to change up its core design approach or expand on its atmosphere-driven approach to storytelling with increased exposition invariably land on varying degrees of speeding up the pace of game play, the intensity and frequency of firefights, and, well, just coming off as, for lack of a better way of putting it, more conventional and less mature, all for the worse, at least to some degree. That's my opinion anyway.
I'm also partial to Samus's physically fit appearance in this game, which comes across with or without an armored suit on.
Although I really could go on for ages about everything I love about this game (like how mind-blowing it was to briefly fight a "Kraid" the size of the original model from the first game, figure I was done and that that was lame, only to enter the next room and find another Kraid monster bigger than the screen waiting on the other side...!! 
) and how much fun was had playing this with a friend or two over, this post would then expand forever if I did so. What's needed to be said has been. The galaxy is at peace.
