THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: METROID: FUSION THE NIGHTMARE

Not a series you'd perhaps expect to find in an article relating to horror. Whils the Metroid franchise does boast a powerful horror pedigree (the original game was inspired by the Alien franchise and borrows much of its imagery and core subjects from it, not least of which the conceit of having the protagonist be one of the first female playable characters in history), it generally finds itself more at home in science fiction or futurist categories.
 
However, all of the games from Super Metroid onwards boast at least one element or encounter that borrows heavily from certain popular horror films and franchises. From the disturbing emergence of the statue-bound Torizo in Super Metroid to the revelation of Meta-Ridley in Metroid: Prime, the games wear their influences on their sleeves, largely serving as a collation of science fiction and horror movie tropes that are all the more impressive given the general technical limitations of the early games.
 
Metroid: Fusion is one of two titles from the Gameboy Advance system that echo the two-dimensional side-scrolling format of the original games but flourish them with superior graphics and story-telling.
 
Fusion in particular is distinct in that it has a much more concerted narrative element than previous games, along with plot arcs for both protagonist Samus Aran and the various characters and creatures she meets along the way.
 
Almost all of the major enemies and encounters are built up and suffused with degrees of atmosphere both through written records and visual cues in the various environments: wandering through a series of subterannean caverns, for example, Samus encounters various forms of alien fungi sprouting all over the walls and spores dancing in the air. Trespassing deeper, she finds that those fungi have an aggressive, predatory quality, ensaring and infesting more complex creatures, rendering them down to empty shells and dust as they drain them of vital matter. However, some creatures aren't merely infested with the fungi, but mutated by them: several boss-creatures emerging from coccoons of the rancid matter or being aided by more complex structures of it.
 
Likewise, when Samus trespasses through an industrial area of the station that most of the game is set on, she finds a condition of absolute devestation, the walls and floors rent open, vital systems destroyed, presaging an encounter with something savage and profoundly violent. It isn't until much later that we learn the culprit is a military-grade security robot that has gone insane under some alien influence and must be stopped before it inflicts critical damage on the station.
 
Another profound horror element derives from a prototype for what would become the Dark Samus antagonist in the Metroid: Prime series: an alien duplicate of Samus that stalks the station, seeking her out in order to destroy her. The sense of being hunted, of the duplicate's potential presence behind any sealed door or barrier, lends an air of tension to proceedings, especially given that the alien has duplicated a much more powerful version of Samus than the one we play as. In such encounters, the only option is to run and hide, placing as many obstacles between Samus and the duplicate as possible.
 

However, perhaps the most tense and disturbing encounter occurs towards the end of the game, foreshadowing layered and layered from its earlier stages, when we are informed by the ship's on board computer that an experimental creature, partially organic, partially machine, that was designed for military application as a bio-mechanical weapon, has escaped its holding cell and come under influence from the alien infestation.
 
Whilst we never truly see the entity until we fight it, we find evidence of its rampages throughout the ship, from entire wings and cloisters that have been reduced to ruin, to areas where the various alien lifeforms have all been slaughtered. In one area, we even catch glimpse of it hurtling around in the background: a titanic silhouette that roars by on occasion, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, which makes it all the more threatening. The fact that this encounter occurs early in the game, when Samus is still under-equipped and still quite vulnerable, enhances the sense of dread by the power of N.
 
Again, given that this is a 2D, side-scrolling adventure game, operating under sincere technical limitations, makes this exercise in escalating atmosphere all the more sophisticated: it would have been easy to just have a text-screed explaining what the Nightmare actually is, but the game instead provides numerous environmental and visual cues as to its presence and nature, emphasising the sense of danger, of potential calamity, as the creature rampages throughout the station, occasionally damaging vital systems that Samus must then rush to repair or risk the destruction of the entire station.
 

​When we finally encounter the Nightmare, it's in an immense holding pen, a black abyss in which the creature floats, a distressing, malformed, bio-mechanical homonculus that, in terms of design, is entirely incongruous with many of the creatures we've already encountered and that transforms into successively more disturbing incarnations as it is damaged:
 
First, the beast reveals a bizarre, organic head beneath its armoured shell, its eyes leaking alien ichor the more damage we do to it. Then, the face itself begins to melt and malform, becoming a mass of eyes and a gaping, fang-lined maw, the creature's structure seeming to grow increasingly unstable the more damage we inflict upon it, until it finally melts from its mechanical super-structure altogether, the creature exploding after an intensely fraught and difficult battle.
 
It's a strange encounter from the very beginning, the design and immensity of the creature incongruous enough to excite a degree of shock and disturbance in the player. That the entity has been built up throughout the game as a nigh-ustoppable engine of lunatic destruction makes it all the more unsettling, before it even begins to cycle through its various transformations.
 
And this is only one of numrous encounters in the game that exercise similar degrees of atmosphere and implied mythology: something that the Metroid games gave excelled at from their very inception.