Metroid Dread Guide – How to skip cutscenes

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While it’s a fantastic new game in the series, Metroid Dread commits one of the cardinal sins of video games and has unskippable cutscenes… or does it? As it turns out, you can skip cutscenes, it’s just not immediately obvious how to do so.

How to skip cutscenes in Metroid Dread

Skipping cutscenes is actually pretty simple, but far from obvious. You can’t skip on the first viewing, but if you die and have to pass through a cutscene moment a second time, you can. Through intensive button mashing to see if it was possible, we cracked the code of how to do so. It’s only when you press the + button that the message pops up in the top right of the screen to tell you to press the – button to skip the cutscene.

That’s all it takes: press the + button then the – button to skip.

How to skip Metroid Dread cutscenes

Why not let you mash other buttons to trigger the ‘press – to skip’ message? I’ve no idea. Best ask Nintendo about that one.

Why would you want to skip cutscenes?

Well, now we come to Metroid Dread’s true sin: always playing the cutscenes before boss battles, even if you’ve seen it, died and have to respawn to try again. In some ways that’s fair enough, but at the same time, some of these cutscenes can be pretty long!

All of the boss battles and your first encounters with each of the super creepy EMMI robots are preceded by a cutscene. If you then die in battle with them or before the next save or checkpoint, then you’ll go through that trigger point and cutscene again.

Thankfully Metroid Dread is pretty forgiving in that regard. While there are manual save points throughout the game world and you can lose progress back to those points, it will also make a checkpoint before a boss battle or entering an EMMI zone and respawn you there.


Even with this glaring flaw, Metroid Dread is still a fantastic new entry in the long-running, genre-defining series. In our Metroid Dread review, I wrote:

“Metroid Dread sees the galaxy’s best bounty hunter return in fine form. It takes the terror of being hunted from Metroid Fusion, the more modern direction of Samus Returns, and the freedom to add to the series’ decades of lore to create something that’s nigh on essential for Metroid fans.”

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