Abram Buehner Reflects On Reliving Metroid Prime | Winter Spectacular 2025
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has a well-earned reputation for being exhausting: its planet, Aether, is dense and split across Light and Dark versions with discrete yet related areas tethered across planes, rooms upon rooms upon rooms that start to run together and become jumbled… like its Guardian bosses which are as annoying as they are numerous; monstrosities that — even in its rebalanced, easier Wii version — prove frustratingly resilient and taunt Samus with their vitality and broadly telegraphed attacks.
I remembered all that when I booted the game back up. Actually, there was very little about Prime 2 that I’d forgotten since I last played it. I even remembered one of its all-timer details: Samus sighs heavily every time she enters a Save Station. Shoulders drooped and everything. A visual reinforcement of the oasis in just five seconds away from constant hostility.
What I forgot was, instead, how it feels to play. That Samus’s exhale is real as hell. That the tension in my drawn-together shoulder blades diffuses with hers. That I set down the Wii Remote and wipe a little sweat off my clammy hands in time with her exhale.
Even though I died just once on this visit with Echoes, I was stepping into every Save Station worried that certain death and lost progress hid around every corner. I’d duck back in after every single item pickup, major fight, and puzzle solved. I didn’t need to, but I was taxed by Aether. Samus and I were in sync — sharing this fatigue with her made me appreciate the journey a lot more.
It would be so easy to say I replayed it, and the rest of the Metroid Prime trilogy, because I wanted to “get ready” for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. And that’s true! These are among my favorite games, and Prime 4 is my most anticipated game ever.
I didn’t just aim to replay, though, so much as I yearned to relive them. Not just their peaks and troughs, the parts that stay with me years after my last run. No, I was searching for the altitudes that aren't remarkable and the details that get reduced to unsympathetic facts.
I can’t pull revelations like this one, about Echoes, from memory. If I had peered into my recollections of Prime 2 a few months ago, I’d have talking points, not truths. The qualities of Aether that exist outside of my relationship to them, the rehearsed analysis of how these features struck me poorly. I need to relive to recover what slipped away, what wasn't meant to be rehearsed and performed. Because that practice eventually fails.
When it does, I stare off into the distance at my desk, looking through my monitor, through my desk, my bookcase, my wall. To some unfixed point where I grapple with that which I can’t evoke with clarity.
Like that final night out with my friends before I moved away. The pizza-eating challenge we failed and the split-screen afterparty, sprawled on the couch with an over-filled stomach. I don’t remember how the chairs in that pizza parlor felt. The art on its walls is just a smear now. I strain for every joke we told across the night. How close my share of that 42” pepperoni and onion pizza brought me to throwing up. And I struggle with settling for the contours.
I want more. I want to relive that memory.
Just weeks ago, the best night of my year unfolded with cannon-blasts of bass that almost doubled my friend and I over, our hairs on end in a stadium flooded with enough strobing light and fog and chaos to swallow us whole. It was the Antagonist Tour 2.0: ApolloRed1, Homixide Gang, Destroy Lonely, Ken Carson, and Playboi Carti taking turns seeing if they could cave in the stadium’s once-collapsed roof one more time.
I tried to capture the night’s sensory details. I dialled in past the music to feel my ribcage shake like I was lying next to the subway, and my feet ache in the all black Chuck Taylor high-tops I bought just for the show. The way I overheated in my wide-legged UNIQLO black corduroys, the care I had for our plastic cups of water that rested under our seats because the venue wouldn’t let anyone keep the Dasani bottles.
What if I wake up in a few months and can’t remember the sensory truth in that venue? Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with one of my best friends. Listening with a smile so wide it hurt. Lost in a high that had me depressed for days after, reeling in disbelief that I could experience something so important. I will always remember Carti on stage. That I was there. But I don’t want to forget how being that happy felt.
But if I could relive that moment, would I feel so happy again?
I was introduced to Metroid with Prime 3: Corruption at age seven. When I stand aboard the GFS Olympus now, at 24, I can almost hear the gentle static and warm hum of my parents’ long-retired GoldStar CRT and almost touch the rough, long-replaced beige floral cover on the living room couch. Almost. Games can’t send me back through time.
I didn’t just forget that I empathize with the fatiguing design of Metroid Prime 2. I wasn’t ready for it. In making fresh tracks across Aether, I put my past impressions in vivid conversation with present context — I reacquainted myself with the game but more importantly reintroduced myself.
Two years ago, when I first beat Echoes, I was still living with my parents, I had just graduated college, and was weeks away from moving out. I’ve been living independently for almost two years now. My life has changed immeasurably, and I couldn’t possibly truly relive those final weeks of 2023. To try would be a fruitless attempt to regress into a me who no longer exists.
When I revisited the first Metroid Prime, I found an Energy Tank that had always escaped me, in the Phazon Mines Ventilation Shaft. The solution is beautifully simple, you just scan a terminal that triggers a cutscene which clears your path to it. The problem: the room is full of toxins that constantly damage Samus, so you’re discouraged from sticking around to find said terminal. But on this playthrough, I was braver. Comfortable to step out into that noxious haze and resolve this little puzzle that had eluded me, not because I needed another 100 Energy points but because I just felt ready.
I can never be seven playing Prime 3: Corruption again. But do I need to be? Why would I want to be, when I can return to the game and be me at 24. One day, I can come back to it and be me at 28. I can learn something new from each visit to the game. Not just about it, but about myself.
I can’t live governed by nostalgia. Chasing a perspective I no longer embody. I don’t want to be burdened by a fanatical longing for clarity on events gone by that couldn’t mean the same even if I could step back into them right now. I’m someone else.
I have to reconsider my relationship to games, to memory. Not reliving, but living again. Living anew. Living for something new. I can be comfortable with that.
