Samus Looking Cool2
Image: Nintendo

SPOILERS, obviously...

Metroid Dread has been talked about a lot over the past week, largely in positive terms. Plenty of us are still on a first playthrough, frantically running away from E.M.M.I foes and navigating our way around the rather sizeable map. For some, though, now it's time for optimising follow-up runs and potentially speedrunning; it's a game that seems very well suited to those players.

Here is your second spoiler warning, read on at your own risk.

If you need any evidence that MercurySteam and Nintendo have been good to their word in making the map and its progress flexible, @glaedrax (hat-tip to Eurogamer) shared a fun video using bombs to kill Kraid. Now, many of you are likely in the same boat as this scribe in thinking "but I didn't have bombs". In a follow-up playthrough it's clearly possible to go a different way and get the power-up earlier.

The timeline of @glaedrax is full of interesting observations from multiple playthroughs, too.

It's classic Metroid design to allow speedrunners and optimisers to find smart alternative approaches, so it's great to see this in Dread. For the rest of us mere mortals, too, it encourages us to try different routes for second playthroughs.

Are you planning to play through Dread multiple times to experiment with different routes and tactics? Let us know in the comments!

[source twitter.com]