One of the very first things I learned in my Creative Writing 101 class in college was a very simple rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. As a storyteller, the responsibility is on you to draw in the audience and paint a picture for them – let them understand what is going on through their own observations rather than simply explaining things to them. Showing a character’s irrational lashing out at someone is far more engrossing than simply saying “Dave was angry.”

The designers of Metroid: Other M must have missed this class, because they sure love to tell us pretty much everything.

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Manuals, as I’ve mentioned before, have been in steep decline for many years.  Now, as manuals generally serve the purpose to telling the player how to play the game, it’s pretty clear that something needed to take their place.  By and large, the in-game tutorial has stepped up to the plate to fill this void.

In-game tutorials have taken many forms in my experience – some are as plain as a big ol’ “Tutorial” button ala Civilization IV, where a guide takes you step by step through the various concepts you need to understand to play the game.  Some take the form of introductory levels that aren’t called tutorials per se, but introduce game concepts one step at a time, such as in the Advance Wars series.  Sometimes the tutorials are even more ingrained in the game, popping up only when needed to introduce a new mechanic to the player (Shadow Complex takes this approach).

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