I was just thinking again about your comments above, and it struck me as funny:
I've only ever played one Metroid game. Not sure what it was called any more, but I would have been playing on a Wii circa 2009, if that helps? Anyway, I played through what I would have guessed was half the game, and wound up loading into a section where I absolutely could not determine what to do. (Nor turn back.) Stared at every pixel, over the course of several sittings, for what must have been over an hour, and literally could not find any way to leave the area or do anything at all. So I had to quit the game cold.
To this day, I don't know whether that was a bug, or whether Metroid Prime just all of a sudden got way smarter than me LOL. So basically the polar opposite of your MP4 experience. I vote for a happy medium.