Revisiting games you loved as a kid isn't always a pleasant homecoming. The nostalgia might propel you to the end, but it's always possible you'll set the controller down with the realization that one of your favorite games hasn't aged all that gracefully. Rather than being a truly timeless classic, it becomes more of a had-to-be-there experience that's maybe even been rendered somewhat obsolete by newer games that took everything you loved about it and made it better. Thankfully, Metroid Prime isn't one of those games.

Instead, Metroid Prime Remastered remains as fresh and inventive today as it did at launch. Despite releasing more than 20 years ago on GameCube, Metroid Prime still has a novel aura about it. Granted, every touchstone in gaming has been subject to imitations, iterative improvements, or spiritual successors. But to this day, I'd argue that not a single game has meaningfully restructured the foundation laid by the Metroid Prime series.

Certain similarities can be found in first-person immersive sims such as Prey and Dishonored. The interconnected 3D levels of Control, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and the Batman Arkham games have world designs that are somewhat Metroid Prime-like. And BioShock's underwater world of Rapture offers its own take on environmental storytelling inside a perilous world. But none of these games fit cleanly into the Metroid mold.