Sonic Team teases new 3D Sonic game coming in 2022

Developer Sonic Team revealed its next mainline game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series on Thursday. It’s a new 3D adventure — Sega did not announce the game’s title — and it’s coming in 2022.

A cinematic teaser for the next Sonic game that debuted during Sega’s Sonic Central livestream shows our heroic hedgehog running through a forest, blasting forward with a burst of speed that implies some sort of digital effect. Sonic sprints in a loop and disappears, forming what appears to be a stylized rune shape (or maybe it’s the word “zap”?). Regardless, it appears that Sonic will continue to go fast in the coming year.

Beyond that, Sega and Sonic Team revealed little about Sonic’s next adventure, but we do know that the game is coming to a wide variety of platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

Sonic Team’s most recent 3D Sonic the Hedgehog titles were 2017’s Sonic Forces, 2013’s Sonic Lost World, and 2011’s Sonic Generations. In Polygon’s review of Sonic Forces, we criticized the game as unremarkable and noted that “the line between the series’ canon and its fan fiction has ceased to exist.”

Sega also announced the (re)release of another Sonic 3D adventure on Thursday, a remaster of 2010 Wii game Sonic Colors.