One of Nintendo’s big surprises at this year’s E3 trade show was Splatoon, its colorful, imaginative take on the third-person shooter. Instead of covering city streets and warehouses with the blood of your bullet-riddled enemies, Splatoon has teams competing for turf by splattering its maps with ink of their squad’s color. Also, your character can turn into a squid and swim through your team’s ink. Nintendo showed off the multiplayer portion of the game earlier this year (and I loved what I played of it), but during yesterday’s Nintendo Direct livestream, it debuted footage of the game’s previously unannounced single-player mode.
Apparently, Splatoon will visit one theater of war that has somehow escaped the eye of video games up to this point: the violent, inky conflict between squids and octopuses. In this case, it’s squids who are also humans with ink guns battling for turf against sentient, googly-eyed octopus tentacles that ride a variety of high-tech vehicles—or as Nintendo President Satoru Iwata put it, “nature’s epic battle for supremacy.”