It occurs to me that my thoughts in that post about “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” derive not only from that essay I wrote about puzzles and gymnastics but from something else I wrote in 2023—a postmortem for The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls. If you haven’t played that game, HOO BOY, YOU ARE IN FOR A TREAT. Go play it. Don’t worry about this post.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote after people had played LMG4:

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Why is it that almost every Metroid game begins with Samus losing all the upgrades she acquired in the previous game? What kind of life is that, getting knocked down to a state of powerlessness over and over again?

There are a few reasons. For one thing, losing upgrades means you get to collect them again, and collecting upgrades is fun. And, I don’t know if this is a second reason or just the other prong of the first reason, but by the end of any given game, Samus has become really, really powerful. Once she’s got the Screw Attack on top of everything else, it’s hard to imagine what other upgrades she could possibly collect. What kind of game would have her start out in that state? What would be left for her to do?

But also: Nintendo is trying to sell e.g. Metroid Dread to literally millions of people. They’re selling it to highly enfranchised Metroid superfans. They’re selling it to semi-enfranchised Metroid semifans. They’re selling it to the people who have never played a Metroid, but who are willing to jump into a new one because they trust Nintendo or MercurySteam or the franchise’s reputation. But they’re also trying to sell it to everyone else on Earth.

So the developers need Samus to start from zero with every mission. They can’t take the risk of starting at ten or fifty, because they can’t afford to trust the player to trust them! And that means both parties are missing out on the opportunities that mutual trust would afford them. Fortunately, you and I don’t have that problem.