Ever since Super Metroid, Samus Aran’s games have been a prevalent part of the speedrunning community, and Dread is no exception. The newest game has a few baked-in tricks you can use to skip large portions of the game, and the first one comes right at the beginning.
As you make your way through the opening caves, you’ll be funneled off into a fight against the first EMMI. While it’s more broken-down than its counterparts, you’ll still have to kill it using an Omega Cannon – unless you skip the battle altogether. Here’s how.
Proceed until you spot a cracked red rock. The game intends for you to slide through the narrow opening to shoot it, trapping yourself on the other side until later. But you can actually shoot it from the left side of the rock using a quick trick. By sliding, jumping, and firing your beam in rapid succession, it’s possible to actually fire through the rock to the crack. You want to get right up in the top right corner to pull this off – it may take a few tries, but it’s doable. Shoot the explosive rock three times to get it fully primed, but don’t let it explode yet. The falling rocks will kill you if you do.
For the final shot, you want to shoot through the upper corner, aiming to the right and slightly down to explode the rock and open the path forward. With this, you’ve totally skipped the initial EMMI fight and can move right up to the nearby Save Station.
If you want to skip some other bosses, that’s also possible. There are methods to insta-kill Kraid as well as Experiment Z-57. All of these tricks are sure to make Metroid Dread speedrunning an engaging activity.
