(This post was originally written for a planned "nostalgia about the classics" series for another website, where multiple writers would all write a short piece on why a game was important or memorable, that was scrapped.)
When I was a kid, our neighbors were on vacation without their daughter Kristen, and my parents were charged with taking care of her for the few days they were going to be out. I was playing Super Metroid, running around lower Norfair, putting up attempts against Ridley (who was giving me hell at the time), and Kristen was watching intently. Being a nice kid (the jaded asshole Cynical that you all know and love wouldn't be a thing for many years still), I offered her the controller, and she turned it down, saying "I don't want to play it, it looks scary."
Funny how a seven year old girl understood Super Metroid's appeal better than twenty-five years of supposed "professional" game critics.
While one segment of the fanbase goes on about speedruns and sequence-breaks and another goes on about the silly "mommy to the metroid" story, everyone ignores the fact that Super Metroid was appealing entirely because it did the most credible job of creating a consistent 2D world of any videogame in 1992, and even today is only rivaled by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in that regard. Yes, it handles the "lock and key" mechanics better than any later entries in the "Metroidvania" subgenre by making its keys inherently interesting to use; yes, it controls like a dream; but it's still dull-as-dishwater as an action game taken on its own. The key to the game is that it's just barely threatening enough to keep the thrill of plowing into the unknown alive, while designing its world so that adjacent areas remain coherent. The underground fungus-forest is adjacent to an ocean boring deep into the planet's surface; as you go further and further underground, the tunnels get hotter and hotter, with magma flowing through gaps in the rock. Level design is frequently sacrificed for this world verisimilitude, and this hasn't always worked out well for videogames (it made the previously-mentioned Symphony of the Night something that no right-thinking person ever wants to play a second time), but it works out reasonably well here, thanks to a combination of general openness and particularly powerful jump abilities that let you quickly speed past any "squidgy" bits. It's notable that most of the game's transversal from area to area is vertical, while traversal within an area is generally horizontal (the major exception to this being the aforementioned forest-to-ocean transition), furthering the feeling of travelling through the stratas, away from the safe surface. The art direction finishes the dish, with most everything being recognizable as "natural terrain", "plant of some sort", "lava", "weird acid stuff", "Praying Mantis alien monster", etc., but while everything is recognizable in broad terms, none of it looks quite like anything that exists in the real world, which creates an unsettling "uncanny valley" effect that makes sure the alien world stays alien.
Super Metroid's enemies are mostly speedbumps (Ridley aside), and its action game elements are about as perfunctory of a "give the player some buttons to hit while they explore our cool world" exercise as exists within the medium. But, with a world like this, who cares?
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