The best adventure games like Metroid are Super Metroid, Metroid Dread and Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.
Filtering to adventure means the place and the story are what you want back, not the challenge. It is the right filter when the thing you remember is where you were rather than what you did.
What you get: A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.
What made Metroid worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the adventure part of that answer, and only the adventure part.
The one to play instead, and arguably the best-designed game on the SNES.
The modern 2D entry, and it plays better than any of them.
The other half of the genre's name, and where the RPG layer came from.
The same structure, far kinder, and beautiful with it.
Melancholy, slow and combat-led, with the map opening the same way.
The other NES game that handed you a world and refused to explain it.
NES exploration with a vehicle you leave behind to get into the small places.
Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Metroid that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Metroid — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Super Metroid. The one to play instead, and arguably the best-designed game on the SNES.
No. Metroid released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Anywhere the story and the place matter more than the skill ceiling — point-and-click, walking sims, narrative thrillers and most open worlds. The label alone tells you very little, which is why each pick here says what it actually is.
They split hard. Open-world adventures run to a hundred hours; the narrative ones are often finishable in an evening, and the short ones are usually the better written.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Metroid list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is adventure — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the adventure guide for where to start in the genre generally.