Zexion
On Cypher-X72, Pink Slime eats YOU!
Zexion is, very openly, a game designed to evoke the tangled memories of the early Metroid franchise. You play as Natu, a little guy in a spacesuit of minimal detail, sent to a barren planet to retrieve the recently detected remnants of an ancient superweapon – Zexion. Along the way, you’ll shoot anything that crawls, hops, or flies at you, unlock new abilities that improve your movement and combat capabilities, and discover the value of friendship and camaraderie – all those things you remember from Metroid, with the details a bit blurred.
Early on, you’re relatively constrained, and funneled into a series of encounters that teach you the basics of movement and combat, which are slightly but importantly different from the games it’s inspired by. For one thing, although you certainly can play through the game with the control scheme you’re used to for 2D platformers, you should probably get used to the game’s additional options, making use of modern controller formats. Specifically, jump being controlled by the left bumper, and the right stick controlling 8 directional aiming. It sounds a little off-putting at first, but relieving yourself of having to rub your thumb all over the face buttons to do 90% of the game’s inputs is a big deal, and the end result is surprisingly fluid, responsive platforming and shooting.
After a bit, the game opens up, and you can strike out in a few directions with your end goal being four keys that open the way to the Zexion in the planet’s core. Some routes are gated with future abilities, some are initially one-way only, and there are save points and Nav consoles sprinkled around pretty liberally. The Nav consoles reveal big swathes of the map, including previews of where nearby major upgrades are. You’ll also start to get a sense for the overall layout of the game world, which is one of the most impressive parts.
Zexion’s map is made up of many distinct, named regions, each with their own tileset and enemies and so on, but unlike even true Metroid games, they aren’t self-contained chunks separated by transport lines. Instead, it’s built like a single coherent map with the named areas smoothly transitioning between each other. As your powers expand, rather than just unlocking whole new areas, you’ll also have easier access between neighboring zones, with new shortcuts and passages available. Plus, the single large map design means that the areas feel much more dense and meaningful, and the game isn’t a huge pain to backtrack through even with the ‘fast travel’ mechanic locked to the endgame.
The combat is also host to major improvements. Your beam weapons auto-fire so long as you hold either the face button or any direction on the right stick, but also charge up a strong initial shot automatically whenever you don’t shoot, letting you run-n-gun through normal gauntlets, fight a bit more tactically against minibosses, or hose down bosses while focusing on dodging, all made that much better by simply inverting the traditional control paradigm. Because it’s relatively fluid and comfortable, Zexion ramps up the difficulty a bit over what you’d expect from a bog-standard Metroid clone – regular areas and enemies can give you a bit of trouble if you’re sloppy, bosses will almost all require multiple attempts on your first playthrough [made much less frustrating by the option to respawn at the start of the encounter rather than getting forced back to a save point] and every upgrade, especially near the start, feels like a significant edge.
Speaking of bosses, they are probably the single most spectacular part of the game. Each one is unique1, nearly all of them have multiple phases, sometimes going far beyond what you are initially prepared for, and they are nearly all incredibly cleverly designed. Since you don’t have to worry about doing run-backs from a save point [unless you burn through your ammo] you can focus wholly on learning how to fight each boss, and they’re all balanced so that, when you are expected to first encounter them, they provide stiff enough resistance that you genuinely have to grasp every move, without ever totally stone-walling you. But, if you explore the world thoroughly, come into a fight with gear that’s technically optional, and do difficult fights earlier, you absolutely can show up ready to stomp them in seconds, or skip them entirely. Most of that won’t really be possible or likely until you’re replaying the game, but the balance is almost perfect for providing a satisfying level of challenge without precluding the possibility of powergaming.
And speaking of replayability, after beating the game [including the absolute sickest final boss gauntlet I’ve seen since, like, Kirby’s Adventure] you unlock the Feats system, a set of optional challenges to complete, and the randomizer. The Feats are divided into two tiers, and doing at least one of each tier is how you unlock the extra ending cutscenes, fleshing out the story and teasing a sequel. For the most part, they’re standard stuff – complete the game in under 5 hours [and then under 3], complete the game with 100% completion, or finish the game while having collected a bare minimum of upgrades. The last option is to play through the game again with the Randomizer on, and that is what I would recommend.
The randomizer is not a full map shuffle, nor does it even move enemy and boss placements – most of the bosses in Zexion would be all but broken if not in their standard arena, and the developers wisely intuited that random enemy placement is also mostly a gimmick and doesn’t really add variety so much as arbitrary annoyance. Instead, you start at a random Save location, and every item is shuffled – major upgrades can be found in secret missile pack locations, you might kill a boss just to get an energy tank, you might start with an end-game mobility item but need to go across half the map just to get the basic slide ability. But the mode includes significant quality of life features, making it perfectly playable even for someone who’s never done a randomizer in their lives, and in my opinion, is therefore the best possible way to learn more about the base game.
For one thing, the randomizer mode adds pings on your map, showing you the location of every item check you can currently logically reach. Early on, most of these are pretty obvious, but it’s nice to take a glance and know for sure either that there’s no reason to explore in one direction yet, or that you can get to an area you otherwise might think is inaccessible. It also includes item checks that are secrets, and things you probably missed on your first playthrough, even if you were trying to be thorough – I even found a whole boss or two I’d missed while on my Rando run. It does a good job teaching you new things about the layout of the world and the capabilities of each upgrade in general, again, without being a huge pain.
The randomizer has a ton of options, with you being able to toggle particular starting gear, turn off any equipment you want, to do a run where they aren’t needed, or toggle Easy mode which gives you extra ammo and health from powerups. In fact, the game in general has a pretty robust selection of accessibility options – I think if you could beat, say, Sekiro without mods, Zexion should be perfectly doable for you and provide a respectable and satisfying challenge, but if you need it, you can crank damage values down to nothing, give yourself regenerating or infinite ammo, hell, you can even enable emulator-style savestates and slo-mo.
What’s awesome is that this isn’t just great for Gaming Journalist-style ‘I lack the spoons to attempt a boss more than twice and I have a vague disability that makes me physically incapable of playing a game once my review deadline is 24 hours away.’ It’s also amazing for practicing bosses, movement tricks, and everything else you’ll need to get good at to finish a speedrun or challenge.
The game’s presentation is outstanding, with great music, fantastic sound effects, a rich but authentic feeling graphic style, and some of the most epic scenes I’ve seen in a game in a long while. About half the boss introductions had me hollering at my screen in glee, the environmental and character designs are incredible, and I’ve had songs from it stuck in my head all week. The intro and outro are both extremely hype, and yet, within the game, all the story is presented [outside of the Database entries] entirely in action and environmental details, without a single word needed.
It’s an unbelievably good game, and hits far above its weight class in almost every way, and so, while I have some minor nitpicks, they’re only barely worth mentioning. Though the map is relatively open and interconnected in interesting ways, you can find yourself bumping into slightly unclear gating and one-way passages occasionally, especially early on, before you get gear that would open those things up more generally.
While the proper bosses are one of the highlights of the game, there are also a few minibosses, in the form of Space Pirate-esque enemies, who generally patrol a single room or cluster of rooms, and usually drop a single missile pack if you take the time to defeat them. I do like the idea, and the fact that you can usually ‘stealth’ past them if you are careful and take a little bit of time [which also leaves going past them a logical option in randomizers where you wouldn’t have the firepower to kill them] but I don’t like that getting seen usually locks you in with them, and I don’t like the fights with any of that class of miniboss in general. They’re a little too fast and erratic, and it feels like they’re the one thing in the game that really comes down to you spamming missiles and hoping you win the damage race, because it’s really hard to actually dodge their attacks properly. They also just visually aren’t that interesting or unique compared to most other stuff.
But, slightly less-cool-than-everything-else-which-is-VERY-cool minibosses aside, Zexion is, no qualification needed, a must-play no matter who you are. It’s easily the best directly Metroid-inspired game I’ve ever played, but much more than that, it’s genuinely one of the best games I’ve played in years, period. It’s one of those few games I finished and immediately started playing again, and then immediately played AGAIN after finishing the first randomizer run, and it’s so much fun I’m still going to be playing it once I finish writing this. It just kept finding ways to surprise me long after I was already enthralled. I can’t picture a person not enjoying Zexion, and it’s going to be rough times for every game of its sort I play afterwards, which will have to be compared to Zexion.
Zexion can be purchased on Steam.
Technically there is a refight gauntlet with several early game bosses represented but altered enough to technically be different enemies, even with their own entries in the in-game Database
Half way through your article I had to go get this game. I cannot wait to play Zexion even having never played any game in the Metroid series. Your reviews are always such an engaging read, and your incredible writing makes it so hard to not pick up every game you recommend!!