Splatoon Just Shipped Its First Ever Spinoff, and It Wants You to Play Alone

You play a mechanic, an Inkling or an Octoling of your own design, exploring a region called the Spirhalite Islands. The hook is treasure hunting: you customize your look and your arsenal, mixing mechanical gadgets with the series' familiar ink-based weapons, and raid the islands for what they are hiding. The enemies you fight along the way are the Salmonids, the same salmon-like foes the series already used in its Salmon Run mode, now promoted into the backbone of a full adventure.

You do not go in alone in spirit, even if you can play solo. Deep Cut, the idol trio of Frye, Shiver, and Big Man introduced in Splatoon 3, ride along on the expeditions, with one member able to join as a controllable bot during raids. There is amiibo support tied in as well. The overview trailer Nintendo released ahead of launch leans on all of this: the islands, the raiding loop, and a structure that looks closer to an action-adventure than to a ranked lobby.

Spinoffs are how a long-running series tests ideas it cannot risk in a mainline game. Nintendo does this constantly across its other franchises, but Splatoon has spent its entire life as a live, competitive, multiplayer-first property, which made a solo spinoff feel unlikely. Raiders is the studio checking whether the world, the weapons, and the tone can carry a game when the turf war is switched off. If it works, it widens what Splatoon is allowed to be. If it does not, it is a low-stakes experiment on a fresh Switch 2 that the numbered games can quietly learn from.

We have not played it, so this is not a verdict on whether the solo loop holds up over its full length. What is confirmed is the pitch: a Splatoon you play mostly by yourself, out now, only on Switch 2. For a series that taught a generation to think of it as the online paint game, that alone reframes the summer's most interesting Nintendo release.