![]() This isn’t just because air space is inevitably intruded on by aircraft, satellites and ambient light in the night sky, and the land is corrupted by inevitable if accidental pollutants like plastic and paper. Natural spaces - from the dinkiest town park to the 9 million acre Wrangell–Saint Elias Wilderness in Alaska - are not pristine in the way we imagine the pre-human world. That sensation of timelessness, of being somewhere unmolested by humanity, is stupefying.īut it’s just a sensation. Red spruce reach to the sky like ecstatic sentinels protecting the needle duff below. The smell of wild onions simmers beneath the metallic tang of the creeks. Simultaneously hypnotic in scale and solid as a concrete wall, it’s a sky you could crash into as much float out of. When you pass through a wall of trunks and cutting foliage, a wide open sky awaits. ![]() Their permeable, threaded surface stretches to the horizon. Sods - the elevated grassy plains the territory’s named for - and cranberry bogs can erupt on the other side of an innocuous tree line that you think will just lead to impenetrable brush. But it’s the places off the trails that are the most arresting. Trails cut through the woods up forbidding ravines, giving way to stunning vistas. ![]() It’s a gorgeous, accessible place that hides unyielding pockets of land. Those spiny bugs scuttling left and right are there entirely for my benefit, but they don’t feel like it. Every time I walk into that first cave west of Samus’ spaceship on the planet’s stormy surface, I’m totally convinced of the threshold. Its greatest accomplishment is that it reflects the intoxicating indifference of nature while simultaneously funneling you through an entirely sculpted, intentional path without breaking that agrestal impression. But first and foremost, the game is a wild, incongruous space. Nothing else moves like Samus Aran in Super Metroid, even Samus Aran in the dozen or so other games she’s appeared in since. Super Metroid is many things: a remarkable puzzle box a rousing story whose beats have survived thanks to their emotional clarity and universality a snappy exercise in kineticism and fantasy weight. When I’ve felt the warm rush of the Narrows in Springdale, Utah’s Zion National Park, when I’ve felt my ankles buckle hopping between river stones in West Virginia’s Dolly Sods expanse its outside in the light that Yoshio Sakamoto’s enduring, shadowy masterpiece is still at its most powerful. Zebes, the Space Pirates, and Samus’ hazy form taking heavy slow breaths as she idles in a super heated lava shaft far from home bubble to the surface over and over when I’m in the wilderness. Nor do I find myself regularly thinking about Super Metroid specifically when I’m playing one of the dozens of its descendants that have become so prominent, creatively potent, and profitable over the past half decade. Over the 25 years since it was released, Samus’ searching dive into Zebes doesn’t crop back up when I’m staring at the greening copper pipes below my house or when I’m relishing lonely science fiction about people solving impossible problems in improbable places. Super Metroid haunts me at unexpected moments.
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