Exhausted by Silksong? This breezier twin-stick spin on old school Metroid might just be the genre’s second best this year
Before booting up Zexion on my Steam Deck last weekend, I made a grievous error: I looked it up on YouTube and saw that someone had finished the game in three hours. Did I immediately intuit, as someone well-versed in the sicko behavior of gaming speedrunners, that three hours was probably a really fast clear time for this indie game with its throwback 8-bit graphics that includes its own built-in randomizer? Of course not.
“Three hours!” I thought. “What a breezy, compact adventure this will be. A perfect little snack while I take a short break from dying over and over in Silksong.” Well, I’ve now spent almost three hours dying over and over in Zexion instead, and I’m nowhere near finished with it. Apparently Silksong had beaten the ability to spot a speedrun right out of me.
Zexion is not a mini Metroid like I first thought: judging by HowLongToBeat, it’s likely a bit longer than Super Metroid and a good bit longer than several of the other games in the series. But that still makes it compact in comparison to Silksong or Hollow Knight—and the dozens of deaths haven’t gotten under my skin thanks to generous checkpoints and boss fights that take all of 23 seconds to finish.
Because Zexion looks so much like a lost ’80s game, I was caught off guard by just how many cool ideas it dished out in its opening minutes:
- It’s a twin stick shooter, with the right stick letting you aim freely in eight directions while moving
- Jump is wisely bound to both A and left bumper on a controller, optionally freeing up the left thumb for aiming
- Dying to a boss gives you the option to start from right before the boss room or from your last save point. OPTIONAL RUNBACKS ONLY!!
- The initial movement power-ups, a wall jump and slide move, arrive incredibly quickly, granting access to multiple possible routes
- Terminals in map rooms fill in a new portion of the map for you and let you view everything you’ve revealed so far, but otherwise you can only view a minimap of the nearby area
- While I’ve held out on using any yet, the Assist menu offers some welcome options: adjustments to damage taken, ammo refills, a full map reveal, save states and even speeding up or slowing down the game
- It’s not as solitary as most Metroid-likes: From the start you regularly see (and then fight) other explorers who are on the planet Cypher-X72 looking for the same resource as you
One of the comments on that three hour YouTube video described Zexion as “basically Metroid 1 If they Locked tf in” and that really does capture the essence of it. Zexion may be a bit too high tech for actual NES hardware—and Nintendo would’ve needed analog sticks to be able to make a twin-stick shooter—but it does effectively feel like a game that could’ve been designed by the same team years later with more experience under their belts.
I’d find some of Zexion’s crueler old school tendencies, like the amount of damage you take from spike traps and enemies bumping into you more annoying without the frequent save points and boss fight restart options. I also more than doubled my health bar by finding energy tanks in the first couple hours, while in more than 15 hours of time spent in Silksong I’ve gotten one measly extra pip of health.
Zexion does seem stingy with health and missile refills at first, but it’s more generous and more clever than it looks. Spend enough time shooting random walls and empty spaces and you’ll start finding hidden blocks that drop ammo, while certain types of enemies will always drop health.
It’s simple stuff compared to the environmental storytelling in Silksong, where you can start to see how an entire society fits together, but it still satisfies that basic itch of these types of games: feeling out how the world ticks. It’s also refreshing to play a game so interested in the Metroid and uninterested in the vania—there’s none of the leveling up or looting or more RPG-esque mechanics that now come almost as standard.
At the same price on Steam I’d struggle to recommend anyone play it instead of Silksong, but it’s an excellent chaser. The pace is faster, the boss fights are simpler, and you don’t have to grind any sort of currency to unlock your next save point. I may turn that damage slider down to half, though. Silksong’s already given me enough bruises for the month.
If you discovered Team Cherry’s latest really isn’t for you, you should also check out the nine metroidvanias we recommend instead.
