Sonic Frontier's First Trailer Channels Zelda and the Horizon Franchise

Ahead of Geoff Keighley's not-E3, but just like next week's E3 Summer Games Fest, the Sonic team has released a pretty 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 is shown and the gaming press calls it "Breathe of the Wild Meets X," so I don't. . Instead, I'm going to say that 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 breaks free into a light-filled, flower-filled landscape filled with futuristic-looking ruins. Even though many games depict Sonic roaming a borderless world, the aesthetic in Frontiers is very different from previous 3D Sonic games. It looks more realistic than Sonic Adventure, Sonic '06, or Sonic Unleashed. At a brief glimpse of the gameplay, it appears that Blue Blur is a bit less constrained than the forced 3D and 2D approaches of earlier games. It looks like he actually runs in the open world, collecting rings, grinding rails, and wielding monstrous robots that are reminiscent of the mechanical beasts in the Horizon franchise.

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