Metroid Prime 4 Is Really Coming in 2025

Scan you believe it?

Author

Robert Scarpinito
June 21, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

The summer of game announcements continues, with the big one this past week being Nintendo’s semi-regular Direct. The big news, if the image above didn’t give it away, is that Samus has re-returned again!

Nintendo showed off gameplay footage of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which looks gorgeous. It’s got the eerie atmosphere, slick gunplay, and thoughtful scanning you’d expect from the series, and it’s slated for a 2025 release date.

A new Legend of Zelda game is coming in just a few months too, and it truly lives up to the name, as you get to play as Zelda herself.

And the team behind Danganronpa is making a new project as well, which the studio head calls an “epic indie game.” Financing it put them in debt, so they’re betting big on it.

But there’s a lot more that Nintendo showed off in the direct, including a new Mario & Luigi RPG, a Donkey Kong Country Returns HD port, and more HD-2D treatments of beloved JRPG classics (that we may or may not have seen in LA). You can read all about it on our site!

For better or worse, The Sims has been a singular monolith in the all-encompassing life sim genre. Paradox Tectonic was on the path to release Life By You soon, a would-be competitor to the quintessential delete-the-pool-ladder simulator.

Unfortunately, Paradox Deputy CEO Mattias Lilja posted in forum that Life By You would be canceled. That’s how we found out about it—and how the employees at Tectonic did, too, according to designer Willem Delventhal.

Soon after, the studio was shut down, laying off 24 employees. Delventhal spoke out on LinkedIn about the news, claiming that the game was on track and hitting all internal metrics. Granted, it’s had a lot of public delays too, so clearly something was going on behind the scenes.

That’s not the only studio closure we reported on this week. Pieces Interactive, who put out the recent Alone in the Dark “reimagining,” also shut down. After seeing Embracer’s finances last month, it’s not surprising, but it’s still a shame for the developers who were affected.

Overall, this is just the latest in a general downward trend in the games industry, with a slew of massive layoffs and studio closures becoming a regular event since the middle of the pandemic.

Thankfully, CEOs are doing their part in ensuring the future health of the games industry.

For some lighter news, tomorrow is Free RPG Day! We’ve rounded up a bunch of one-shot adventures and bite-sized experiences that are free to grab for your next tabletop adventure. There’s an X-Men multiversal game preview and something called Garbage & Glory: Trashrun. What more could you want?

And! Look at this cat! Publisher Nacon and developer Tivola have announced Cat Rescue Story, a cat shelter sim where you rescue all the stray kitties. What more could you ask for?

What’s New This Week?

Who would have thought that the devs of our 2022 Game of the Year would cook up another fantastic gaming experience? By the time you’re reading this, Shadow of the Erdtree is out, but if you didn’t beat the right bosses in the base game yet, it might take you a couple hours before you can even start this expansion.

And don’t forget to download the big 1.12 patch that comes with some nice quality-of-life upgrades!

I got to play a round of the upcoming Universes Beyond Magic set, which features Ezio, Eivor, and other iconic characters from the Assassin’s Creed franchise. And honestly? It was a lot of fun. I got lucky with the Blue-Black starter deck, which are the colors I usually gravitate toward in Magic anyway, so that might explain why I enjoyed it so much.

While in LA, Austin and Andrew got some hands-on time with the upcoming Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, and so far, it’s threading that needle between retro and modern, much like other HD-2D games.

Hot off our flights back from LA, we leaned on AI for our latest podcast episode and asked it all sorts of hard-hitting questions about the games industry. Is Xbox better than PlayStation? What’s the most mid video game? Who’s the best video game zaddy? We don’t have the answers—but ChatGPT certainly has some.