In the Metroid games, you play as bounty hunter Samus Aran, going through a series of environments collecting new items which will help you progress through the game. Since the series follows a linear continuity, there is a trope that at the start of each game, Samus inexplicably loses all of the items she gained from her previous mission, allowing the developers to build a fair and reasonable difficulty curve. In this piece, we try to illustrate this meta-narrative by leveraging illusory contours. As Samus descends to the "start" of the game, she is reduced from her full appearance to just her visor. Then, as she goes through each area, she regains more of her original form until she reaches the "end" of the game. The perceptual illusion is leveraged in this case to give Samus a sense of shape, even through she doesn't explicitly have one until she reaches the end of the game.

The work is somewhat similar to other animations which render the same scene in different styles. These typically invoke a sense of nostalgia and progress, as seen in this demonstration of a feature in Super Mario Maker.