Prime
Side note about the topic title:
Considering the player spends a fair amount of time roaring across a desert wasteland in a motorcycle, I feel like the TC missed an opportunity to go...Beyond Thunderdome? 
I know that Kensuke Tanabe has been hammering the desire to explore time travel in the Prime series into his interviews for ages, and the center tower of Viewros is Chronos Tower, and every Federation Soldier talks about being able to go home perfectly fine. So obviously, Lavos will kill them all and they’ll need to be replaced with Chrono Triggers.
With that said, I wasn’t expecting this discussion to go… the places it has. I have watched some coverage of the preview and I have seen some truly unhinged behavior (weaponized incompetence leading to minutes of poor gameplay, repeated voice prompts, and general inattentive or out-of-character actions), which leads me to believe that, much like every other form of journalism, much of this vitriol is being used for the purpose of outrage engagement.
I mean, I watched someone shoot Mackenzie for like 30 seconds uninterrupted, and willfully ignore the prompts he gave to help him out for a similar amount of time. There’s plenty of solo footage from the game that’s been posted elsewhere, as well. I understand that the quality of the writing is a major sticking point, but Retro/scan files confirm that Mackenzie is “talkative” which implies they are aware of this. Was it the best part of the game to use as a preview? No, but considering it is one of the earliest parts of the game and likely requires the minimal amount of skill from the journalists playing, it was the call they made and I can understand why people would be hesitant about the game afterwards.
I don’t know about the comparisons to Dark Souls- I have only played adjacent Soulslikes (Remnant, Another Crab’s Treasure, Animus, Mortal Shell, etc) and they range in the degree of isolation/interaction they offer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Soulslike have an escort section, which sounds like a level of hell I’d rather not engage with, but I do see the point of density/deliberate interaction that is being raised, here.
Escorting Mackenzie feels like an attempt to emphasize Samus’s hero status and particular traits. She’s much more competent than him, has the skills and talents granted to her by the alien species of the week, and she’s dead quiet. I don’t see a problem with contrasting the two and the example of the actual escort segment feels pretty generous.
I totally understand the sentiment that this may not be the direction people want Metroid to go. On the other hand, I also understand that this has been the direction that the series has been leaning towards, both in 2D and 3D. The ratio of story to gameplay in Dread was perfectly fine to me. Corruption’s narrative, while a lot more talky than I would have expected, had a good balance of isolation and conversation. I guess I understand why people want Samus doing dangerous stuff on her own and I think the investigative element of scanning and beam switching could be applied to a different IP. But until I can get more than a vertical slice, I can’t make the call on this one and I’m not going to argue that Prime should or should no longer exist without the spirit of isolation. What I will say is that I will take the fall for any too hesitant to buy after these previews. I might have too much faith in Retro, but I don’t think a single one of their games has fallen beneath the “good” line- only the first DKCR risked that.
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