Samus gets a blast from her Metroid past in Nintendo’s latest 'Metroid Dread' trailer

With fans sitting around waiting for nothing more than a teeny-tiny update on Metroid Prime 4, Nintendo majorly upped the ante earlier this year with the surprise announcement of Metroid Dread, a completely new 2D adventure that follows the iconic series’ classic, early-days side-scrolling formula.

Now that there's not much more than a month to go before Metroid Dread’s release (and with Nintendo assuring fans that Metroid Prime 4 is definitely in development and still on the way), the Big N is out with a new Metroid Dread trailer that puts Samus Aran face to face with a key piece of her ghost-haunted past: a Chozo warrior — a real, very much alive one, unlike the Chozo shadows Samus encountered on the GameCube in 2012’s incredible 3D adventure Metroid Prime.

Though Metroid lore suggests Samus and the bird-like Chozo race have always been friends, something seems alarmingly amiss in this new encounter.

Check out the trailer here:

Whoa. What’s a Chozo doing with an arm cannon power beam? And why in the world is it pointing that thing at Samus? Die-hard Metroid lovers likely know that the technologically advanced, peace-loving Chozo originally raised an orphaned Samus, and even gifted her with the series' signature Power Suit. But Metroid Dread marks the very first time we’ve encountered a living Chozo Warrior — one, in other words, who isn’t just a faded ghost.

In between the cutscenes, the trailer highlights plenty of new gameplay, with Nintendo teasing new Metroid Dread abilities for Samus like the Flash Shift (which lets her rapidly warp forward or backward) and Pulse Radar (an environmental scanning ability that highlights breakable blocks and other features Samus might find a well-timed use for). In classic Metroid fashion, though, she’ll have to pick up these and other powers after losing most of them right at the start. Just think of it as “ability amnesia,” because that’s exactly how Nintendo puts it.

Set on the mysterious planet ZDR, Metroid Dread launches Samus on a dark new 2D journey when it beams to the Nintendo Switch on Oct. 8.