Best Ever
Action Adventure Game?

The opening of Super Metroid is silence. “The last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.” Then the space station explodes, and you’re alone on planet Zebes, no map, no guidance, just corridors leading deeper into the dark. Most games of 1994 were trying to be louder, brighter, more. Super Metroid went the other direction, into atmosphere and dread. It invented a genre by trusting players to feel lost.

The structure is open in a way that still feels radical. There’s a critical path, technically, but the game never tells you what it is. You explore, you hit walls, you find items that let you pass the walls, you backtrack with new capabilities and discover the world has changed. The grappling beam opens up vertical space. The speed booster reveals secrets in floors you ran across hours ago. Each upgrade recontextualizes everything you’ve seen.

The map design is the real achievement. Zebes feels like a place — not a series of levels but an interconnected ecosystem of regions, each with its own visual identity and enemy ecology. Brinstar’s overgrown caverns. Norfair’s volcanic depths. The sunken ghost ship. Maridia’s underwater labyrinths. You learn these spaces through repetition, through failure, through the accumulating sense that you know where you are even when you’re not sure where to go.

Samus herself is a miracle of wordless characterization. She never speaks. The game never shows her face until the ending. But the way she moves — that purposeful run, the elegant somersault of the space jump, the desperation of the shinespark — conveys something about who she is. A professional. A survivor. Someone who’s been here before and will do whatever it takes to finish the job.

The boss fights are tests of everything you’ve learned. Kraid rises from the floor, mouth gaping, and you have to figure out the pattern before he overwhelms you. Ridley demands mobility and aggression in equal measure. And the final encounter with Mother Brain — the one where the baby Metroid saves you, sacrificing itself, giving you the power to end the fight — is as emotionally effective as any story beat in any medium. All without a single line of dialogue.

The speedrunning community has kept this game alive for thirty years. Sequence breaks, wall jumps, mockball techniques — players have found ways to complete Super Metroid in under an hour, in under forty minutes, in ways the developers never intended but somehow accommodated. The game is robust enough to support both the first-time explorer and the frame-perfect optimizer. That’s not an accident. That’s design so deep it contains multitudes.

The influence is a genre now: Metroidvania. Hollow Knight, Ori, Axiom Verge, Dead Cells — all of them trace their DNA back to this game and Symphony of the Night. But none of them quite capture the loneliness of Super Metroid, the sense that you’re a single figure in an indifferent alien world, that survival depends on attention and patience and the gradual acquisition of power.

The escape sequence at the end — Zebes exploding around you, the timer counting down, the music screaming — is one of gaming’s great adrenaline rushes. You’ve spent hours in this world. You know its passages. Now you have to prove it, or die trying.

Run.

Nintendo R&D1: The Best Ever is solitude as gameplay. Is Super Metroid the Best Ever Exploration Game? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The original SNES cartridge is the purest experience — seek out a working copy.
• Nintendo Switch Online includes it for subscribers with SNES access.