The Metroid series is probably my favorite in all of gaming. It has everything i can't get enough of. Worlds dripping with atmosphere. A feeling of isolation. Exquisite level design. Amazing characters and lore. Incredible music. Games that are a blast to explore from beginning to end. So when a company gets to work on a title in the series, they have a very high bar to reach, let alone surpass. But boy, did Mercury Steam do just that. Like they did with their Castlevania games, they not only achieved greatness, they blew right past it.

Metroid Dread is a masterpiece. I love what they did with Samus. I love the world and levels they created. I love what they did with the Chozo. And i love how the game controls and feels. It's so dang fun to play. I truly feel like a nimble, unstoppable, bounty hunting badass. Kudos to every single person that worked on this amazing experience.

I knew within the first few minutes of playing that i would have to try and screenshot the entire game. It was too good not to. You might think, a (mostly) fixed camera angle sidescroller, made for a handheld system? What can you get from that compared to a graphically cutting edge game with things like ray tracing? I thought, challenge accepted. A lot of the assets in Dread weren't designed to be seen close up, or from certain angles. So more care than usual had to be taken to avoid/hide specific unflattering things. And due to the normally locked camera placement (and the way the lighting could break if you deviated too far from it), a lot of freecam angles you might usually use were off limits. But still, Dread had so much love, effort and quality put into it, i had to see what i could pull from it. It was really fun trying to capture everything from the feeling of exploring a mysterious new planet, to beating an epic boss that's 3 stories tall. Another neat thing was to pull the camera back a good bit so you could really appreciate detailed, intertwined and flowing level design.

I ran the game a bit over 11k, used a handful of public/unreleased mods to do things like, change some suits and/or keep specific ones longer, remove certain effects like Dof, motion blur, etc, as well as used Reshade for AA, atmospheric fog, gamma adjustment, Dof, and Ambient occlusion. Finally, i edited some game files myself to remove things like the laser pointer, specific distortion effects, the counter alert, etc.

Huge thanks to the team at Mercury Steam, as well as Theboy181, Heebo and Postposterous once again for the mods/tools, along with Nova77, Sabre230, Hario337, Bigsharkz, Mr.Mendelli and Prism_shift for the additional mods and helpful info.