Metroid Prime 4 it’s something mysterious. So much so, that fans of the series will jump at any announcement, tease, or speck of information about Samus’s upcoming 3D adventure in an instant. The last tip that comes our way is from developer Retro Studios themselves, in the form of a new Twitter banner.
Detected by the prolific gaming tweeter levelRetro Studios has updated their Twitter banner for brand new, never-before-seen concept art that looks to give us our first visual tease of Metroid Prime 4.
The artwork features what appears to be a silhouette of Samus standing in the middle of an atmospheric hallway. The architecture around it looks quite alien, and the blue filter gives the impression that it is underground or inside a spaceship’s catwalk. The border added at the top and bottom of the image might suggest that we are also looking through another character’s visor.
Social media banners usually don’t stir up much emotion, but considering how little we’ve seen of the game since it was first announced in 2017 and then handed over to Retro Studios in 2019, fans are making the most of the opportunity at some pretty good times. wild. speculation topics.
One Twitter user thought the image could be the first-person view through the viewfinder of bounty hunter and longtime Samus antagonist Sylux. “I’ve been waiting for the triple return of Sylux from Hunters, Prime 3 and Federation Force for so long,” wrote Biotanker.
Others pointed the blue tone of the image is similar in color to the Fazon energy which emerged over the course of the original Metroid Prime trilogy before being destroyed at its climax. Phazon played a major role in the second game, creating its main antagonist, Dark Samus, and appeared in the third to create a new generation of mutant Metroids.
a poster in reset era suggested that the image looked like an abandoned pipeline and may suggest “that the game will be darker and more desolate than previous titles. Maybe they’ll go back to the scary nature of the original Metroid.”
Others have been a little more conservative in their speculations, with a Reddit User Note that the design of Samus’ bulky armor doesn’t appear to have changed significantly from previous Metroid Prime Games. And, of course, others treated the revelation a little more lightly, pointing joking It’s been five years since the game’s initial reveal, and all they have to see is a single piece of concept art.
Analysis: more to come?
A five-year wait for just a single piece of cryptic concept art will likely leave some Metroid Prime fans underwhelmed, but the mere appearance of the art suggests that Retro Studios is gearing up for a bigger reveal. Up until this point, news about the game has been extremely sparse.
Aside from an original reveal trailer, the list of odd jobs, and the shocking announcement in January 2019 that Nintendo had scrapped Bandai Namco’s original design to hand the project over to series creator Retro Studios, we’ve seen nothing concrete.
During February’s Nintendo Direct, the publisher announced a number of upcoming games for the Nintendo Switch, including Mario Strikers: Battle League, Nintendo Switch Sportsand a new one Fire Emblem Warriors. Metroid Prime 4 wasn’t among them, but with several presentations held throughout the year, it’s not unlikely that we’ll see Samus Aran appear in a new trailer sometime in the next 12 months.
In the meantime, though, you can grab a copy of the excellent fear of metroid.