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Celeste is a truly difficult 2D platformer. VVVVVV follows behind. Metroid Dread is a cruel one.
F-ZERO X and GX are both racers with incredibly high skill ceilings. Which one is harder depends on what you're doing with the game. I'd argue GX has harder base gameplay, but X has harder speedruns.
I'll also mention Final Fantasy IV because it's shockingly difficult compared to the rest of the series. This one gave me a more game over screens than any of the others.
Metroid Dread still kinda ... bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?
I won't go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they've been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you'd either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.
I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there's just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I'm specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn't make me go, "Wow, I need to get there!" but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?
certified Dread disdainer
I agree & I'm old enough to have played all the Metroid games when they were released.
The biggest problem with Dread is there's a million games that have released since the last 2D Metroid that have done so much more with the genre that the name isn't pulling it's weight like it once did, and they forgot to innovate.
They tried to recapture the "oh shit" feeling of encountering X from Fusion in Dread, but the quick-time instakill events just made it tedious and annoying.
The GBA/DS Castlevania games are all 8/10+ if you're a fan of metroidvanias and a collection recently released on Steam/Switch. They all take the same formula and change things to make it feel familiar, but different, and give you plenty of things to go back for after you're "done".
Finishing Dread became a chore about 2/3 through, it just stops being fun.
I'm waiting incredibly impatiently for Hollow Knight: Silksong, as Hollow Knight is pretty much the game all Metroidvanias is compared to at this point and it is top notch.
Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I've played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.
It's hard to properly compare because I've played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, "Oh, this is the room with X!" where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn't really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.
It's best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don't really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.
Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I'm just chased through a very samey looking area.
Oh and finally, it's a small point and I don't want to make too much out of it, but like ... the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That's weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.
I don't know how many times while playing Dread I said to myself "wow, that XXXX in the background looks cool, wish I could go there..."