Sonic Frontiers

The other day, I went to the movies in a shopping mall near here to watch Amazon’s War of the Worlds (I tend to make bad decisions in life), but I never managed to get inside. For as soon as I saw some rails protecting the sides of the ramp leading to the parking lot, I did what anyone in my place would’ve done: I broke down, fell to the ground, curled up in a fetal position, and started crying, calling for my mom. People were distraught, of course, but a kind old man approached me to ask what was going on. “Not rails, not again,” I said, “I thought I was free.” He wasn’t puzzled; he got it immediately. I could sense both empathy and a deep pain in his saddened green eyes before he turned to the curious onlookers to explain what was happening, “Just another Sonic Frontiers player, people. Someone call an ambulance.” I thanked him, because I don’t live in a country where that would bankrupt me, and he gave me a warm embrace and said, “You’d better get used to it, son. There’s no escaping the rails, I’m sorry.” It was a traumatic experience, but I never got to watch War of the Worlds that day, so silver lining, right?

Sonic Frontiers has tons of rails. You look up, you see rails, you look down, you see rails, you look far ahead, you see nothing, because the game suffers from a severe case of pop-in. But make no mistake, they’re there. The rails are there. They’re everywhere, hanging haphazardly mid-air, taunting you with their bland design. In a way, the pop-in is a blessing in disguise, because if you could see all the rails littering the skies of Sonic Frontier’s landscapes, you’d be instantly repelled by the eldritch visage. You’d be much like H. P. Lovecraft’s characters, paralyzed with terror, unable to utter a word or move the analog stick. A couple more rails and you would be hating immigrants, too.

Grind rails have always been a staple of 3D Sonic games (apparently, that’s the only way they know how to make the character go fast in a 3D space without breaking the level design), but we used to encounter them only occasionally, as part of brief set-pieces, which were exhilarating precisely because they represented a sudden burst of speed. The rails had the decency of fitting the environments, too, looking like something that had a reason to exist in that world, matching its architecture – looking like tubes and construction beams and vines. But here, not only are the rails the main course, the thing we’re on all the time, but they’re also visually detached from the levels’ theme, existing as simple black rails no matter where they are. It’s as if Sonic Frontiers heard about games with art direction and thought they were all cowards.

So, rails. Let’s talk about rails. Sonic, like any good hedgehog, will ride them to gather collectibles that are also floating randomly in the sky. They’re necessary to advance the main story, you see, as Sonic’s friends, Amy, Knuckles, and Tails, will only talk to him if you collect a certain amount – that varies from fifty to a hundred, and that’s a lot of rails. They need these collectibles because they’re memory tokens used to “stabilize their frequency.” I assure you this makes perfect sense.

If you’re someone like Bob, the cynic, you could reduce the whole Sonic Frontiers experience to this gameplay loop: you get on some rails, you follow them to get a memory token, and then you get onto another rail. Rinse and repeat until madness overwhelms your senses and you start to believe America is the greatest country in the world, when it’s actually a continent. Occasionally, you fight a boss, too, but what are those lines coming out of their back? Oh yes, more rails. But here’s another boss: this one is enormous, the size of a tower but with legs and… wait, what’s that circling them? Yes, yes, yes. Yes. More rails. Here’s a third boss, this one a big mechanical caterpillar. Surely, you will fight it on the grou…it just conjured some floating rails out of thin air.

So, you know what? As it pains me to admit, sometimes Bob is right. Sometimes, cynicism is warranted. Too many rails can do that to a fellow.

Speaking of Bob, there’s a meme he couldn’t stop thinking about while he was playing Sonic Frontiers. Picture the Windows XP background, that dull green field with an even duller blue sky. Now, haphazardly draw some floating rails and put some random, empty ruins on the way. This meme says that’s Sonic Frontiers’ level design in a nutshell. And it’s funny because it’s true.

Someone kinder than me, still unbroken, still capable of smiling while eating their breakfast, hoping their day will be a good one, could call Sonic Frontiers an open-world game. Granted, there are huge areas to explore here, but only if that verb is used in the loosest of senses. Because the only things you can find in this “world” are rails, and the only things you can truly engage with here are rails. This world is not a world, then, it’s a background for the rails. It’s empty space you traverse mindlessly to get to what really matters in life: grinding those rails. The geography doesn’t matter. The biomes don’t matter. Not even the few scattered ruined buildings matter. For they’re just like the last Zack Snyder movies: empty, lifeless, purposeless.

Corporate wants you to find the difference between this picture and this picture:

The first one was taken in the game’s first level, themed like the Windows XP background. The other was taken in the second level, which has a desert theme. But here’s the secret: they’re the same level. That’s why Sonic Frontiers doesn’t even try anymore after a certain point, and the fourth and final level all share the same green field landscape as the first one: what matters is the rails. They’re the real level. The rails are the real Sonic Frontiers, the one you only get to know after moving in and discovering the dead body in the closet.

The fourth level is a particular standout because it abandons the general structure of riding hundreds of rails to get random memory tokens in favor of riding just some rails to get to the top of six random towers. This means the rest of the level is empty. There are no other rails, but also no enemies, no NPCs to talk to, no purple coins scattered around to allow you to go fishing. There’s nothing. That’s Sonic Frontiers at its most honest.

Let’s get back to the rails, because they’re just like a broken heart or Thanos: inevitable. You must certainly be wondering, “What do you do while you’re on top of these damn rails?” Well, my friend, I’m glad you asked because that’s the fun part: you do nothing. Well, almost nothing.

First, they render the 3D space meaningless as they automatically carry Sonic forward, allowing you to either jump left and right between rails, or up to get to… another rail above you. So, there’s no freedom of movement, as you’re obviously locked on top of them. Second, there’s little variety in their design: sometimes, rails lead to walls for you to briefly wall jump between them to get to… yes, another rail. Sometimes, you must home attack enemies between rails (which amounts to just pressing the attack button when it appears), and sometimes, you must jump from a rail to some floating rings that boost you to….  (I bet the suspense is killing you) … another rail. As that old adage goes, “All roads lead to a rail.”

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of gameplay in short bursts. That’s why rails worked in previous Sonic games. But they’re now the core of Sonic Frontiers. That body you found in the closet? It’s shaped like a rail. In Sonic Frontiers, you get on top of a hundred rails, and then you arrive at the second level and get on top of even more rails. And then you do that again on the third level. So, maybe that fourth level having nothing besides some towers was to prevent us from totally losing it, but * flashes of me breaking down and screaming in front of a shopping mall * that didn’t work.

Let’s say you want to avoid those rails and make your precious time here on Earth less agonizing. What happens when you try to run free around the world, happy as a hedgehog, fast as God’s judgment when bullying bald guys is concerned, and you pass by those damn rails without interacting with them? Well, what happens is that you inevitably stumble into hidden boost pads that send you in another direction and lock you in a 2D platform section that culminates in, yes, another rail. Or you’ll stumble into bosses with rails that follow you around for a long time. Or maybe you’ll bump into common enemies that rob you of control of the camera, making it lock in on them instead of framing where you were going. This is a game where you jump from a raised bridge, very certain that you’ll get to the other side, but much like Chris Hemsworth in The Cabin in the Woods, you’ll just hit an invisible wall and die. It’s beautiful, really, in all the wrong ways.

Did you know Sonic Frontiers has combat? I bet you’re surprised, thinking it only had rails. But yes, you can do some combos and even parry enemies here. Sounds marvelous, doesn’t it? And it is, during the split second it takes us to realize Sonic Frontiers has decided to innovate the parry mechanic. So, here I must ask: what makes a parry a parry in a video game, instead of, let’s say, a shield? To parry someone, you answer, you must time your button press correctly to match the exact moment your foe is about to land their attack. Yes, you’re goddamn right. But not here. You see, you don’t have to time your parries in Sonic Frontiers; you just need to keep the parry button pressed to parry. So, you can press it anytime you want and, as long as you’re able to keep it pressed (it’s not hard to do that to a button), Sonic will parry anything, including boss attacks. And if Sonic is in the middle of a jump, he’ll just stand there, immovable in mid-air, like a parody of Neo, until someone decides to attack him. It’s quite funny, really. But not exactly fun.

Everywhere you go, you find these little shrines with a brief activity that will unlock/uncover part of the map. They’re simple minigames, like “push this floating ball into a ring,” “jump rope,” but the rope is laser, or “walk over these illuminated tiles,” but without stepping on the same one twice. They’re quite easy, with really generous time limits. And one of these activities is to parry some energy balls. However, since you don’t have to time the parry at all, the activity only amounts to “press the parry button at any time before we throw the first energy ball at you and then just repeat that until we say you won.” Being shredded to pieces by bears because you made fun of a bald guy may be more painful, but at least it’s also more engaging than playing Sonic Frontiers.

You see, Sonic has a skill tree here (with just twelve skills to unlock, so I ended up with a surplus of sixty skill points by the end of the game), and one of them, I kid you not, automates doing combos in fights. You just press the attack button, and the game will do the rest for you. Sonic Frontiers really doesn’t want you to think about what you’re doing while you’re playing it, does it? But if we’re being honest here, that may be for the best. Thinking is overrated.

So, you end up just running around aimlessly here, in a kind of flow state, until a boost pad locks you into some rails that lead to other rails. You do some wall-jumping and home-attacks, and you get to a memory token. You fight some bosses now and then, too, which are either about rails, quick time events, or keeping the parry button pressed until they attack you – and this includes the climactic “Titan fights” at the end of each level, which boast really cool music, and have a great a sense of scale, but, mate, that gameplay… it doesn’t hold up, does it? And then it’s right back to more rails.

In a way, this can be soothing. Playing Sonic Frontiers can be that mindless task you perform while your thoughts drift unwarily and you start to wonder about the mistakes you’ve made, the things you’ve left unsaid, the people you’ve hurt, the damage done and received, which can never be healed. You think about that time you saw some stranger wave at you on the street and you waved back, reluctantly, before realizing they were waving at the person behind you – that unbearable shame, the disgrace. But hey, doing the dishes offers the same kind of transcendental experience, and it’s cheaper than Sonic Frontiers.

Did you know Sonic Frontiers has a story? I bet you’re surprised, thinking it only had rails. It tells that Eggman decided to explore the Starfall Islands to uncover the technology used by an ancient, long-lost civilization, but when he uploaded an AI of his creation, the Sage, into a portal, things went awry, and he was transported to an artificial dimension, the Cyber Space, where Sonic and his friends eventually end up, too. There, Sonic goes looking for the Chaos Emeralds to dispel the barrier between the real and the digital world, following the instructions of a mysterious disembodied voice, while a digital corruption consumes his body. If this plot sounded too convoluted, tense, and ambitious for the kind of game it’s in… it’s because it is. The story is Sonic Frontiers’ most fascinating element, and much like the soundtrack – which, in classic Sonic fashion, is fire – it deserved a much, much better game.

Take, for example, the moment where Sonic and Amy witness one of the islands’ inhabitants, the tiny, cute Koko, basically transcend. As they witness that being’s soul leave their body to get to a higher, more beautiful place, after achieving inner peace, they don’t get what’s happening, but are deeply shaken by the event: Charles, the snob, would have said that this is a Sonic game tapping into the sublime, that overwhelming, inscrutable experience that leaves you without words, dumbfounded by the beauty and solemnity of what’s happening. You can feel something similar in this brilliant scene of Scavengers Reign, for example. But Charles never played Sonic Frontiers. Because he’s smarter than me.

The game’s main story missions, for example – where you help the Koko to gain some Emeralds –, are basically all simple minigames. I can’t stress that enough: the main story missions in this open-world game are minigames. In one, you herd the Koko around as if they were sheep, for example. In another, you play pinball. There’s one where you move giant balls with a forklift. A recurrent one turns everything into a bullet hell, where our ship’s projectiles must match the color of the enemies’, harkening back to the likes of Ikaruga. They’re not particularly well-designed or interesting minigames, but you’re thankful for each one of them nonetheless. Because they’re not putting you on more rails. They may not be that fun, but bless their hearts.

We can’t say the same about the Vaults, however, this game’s version of Breath of the Wild’s shrines. They give very small bursts of classic 3D Sonic levels – lasting about two minutes – but now with more rails and uneven level design. Take the Red Rings, which were introduced in Sonic Colors and mirror the purpose of New Super Mario Bros’ Star Coins, being positioned in hard-to-reach places to encourage us to explore the game’s mechanics and level design: here, most of them are positioned right on the main road, being basically impossible to miss, or even worse, they’re on paths that you only take if you fall down a rail or miss a shining boost ring. In other words, they encourage you to fail on purpose, which is certainly a choice – and one much in the vein of those I make in life. I did end up watching War of the Worlds later, for example.

Maybe you’re a Sonic fan and this review offended you personally, as I’m criticizing something dear to your heart while showcasing a clear lack of respect for the material, making fun of it constantly. But believe me when I say that playing Sonic Frontiers is still a much more distressing experience than what you’re going through right now. Or maybe not. Maybe you love grinding those sexy rails. Maybe you can’t have enough of them. And more power to you if that’s the case. There’s no shame in it. This is a safe place. However, those dishes are not doing themselves, are they?

September 06, 2025.