Sonic Frontier’s first trailer channels Zelda and Horizon franchises

Ahead of Geoff Keighley’s not-E3 but also sorta kinda E3 Summer Games Fest next week, Sonic Team has released an extremely short teaser for Sonic Frontiers.

I know there’s a vocal subset of the gaming community that hates when a new, vaguely open world-looking game gets shown and the gaming press calls it “Breath of the Wild meets X,” so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to say it looks like Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn had a baby with Sonic. (Please don’t Google “X has a baby with Sonic.”)

In it, Sonic freeruns across a light-drenched, flower-strewn landscape dotted with futuristic-looking ruins. Even though several games have featured Sonic roaming in a boundary-less world, the aesthetic in Frontiers is so wildly different from previous 3D Sonic games. It looks more realistic than Sonic Adventure, Sonic ‘06, or Sonic Unleashed. In the briefest glimpses of gameplay, it appears that the Blue Blur is slightly less constrained by the forced 3D and 2D perspectives of earlier games. It looks like he gets to run in a truly open world, collecting rings, rail grinding, and taking down monstrous robots reminiscent of the mechanical beasts in the Horizon franchise.

Sonic Frontiers and more will be shown off next week during Summer Games Fest.