In a vale surrounded by alien butterflies, there is a woman everyone knows by her first name: Samus. What's under her robotic Power Suit – ponytail sleeker than a sports car, blue eyes overfamiliar with blue sadness – doesn't matter as much as the unstoppable force she represents with it on. And in the long anticipated Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, this symbol of intergalactic justice seems more potent than ever.
Though, it's not in the way the nearly 40-year-old Metroid franchise usually presents Samus. Based on the 80 minutes of Metroid Prime 4 I got to play on the Nintendo Switch 2 at a recent demo session in Manhattan, ahead of the game's December 4 launch, I think the first-person action game is much less austere than its predecessors. It might now be better to think of the secret heroine Samus Aran as Alice in Wonderland.
