Brazilian rating listing hints at unannounced Metroid Ravenous game

A Brazilian ratings entry briefly listed an unannounced Metroid Ravenous before disappearing, and the short-lived filing carried a 2026 production year. Universo Nintendo captured a screenshot before the entry vanished, turning a routine regulatory slip into the latest piece of Metroid speculation.

Brazil’s ClassInd system is the official classification framework for games and other audiovisual works, and the ministry’s own open-data portal says requests are analyzed and later published in the Diário Oficial da União. That is why a listing like this lands differently from a random social post or fan-made logo mockup. It does not confirm a release date, a platform, or even the game’s final structure, but it does show that a title by that name moved through a formal submission process.

That distinction matters. A ratings record can be an early signal that a publisher is preparing to reveal something, but it can also be placeholder paperwork or an internal filing that never becomes a finished product. In this case, the name Metroid Ravenous and the 2026 production year are enough to make the entry more than idle chatter, while still leaving plenty of room for caution.

If Ravenous is a real new Metroid game, it looks more like a 2.5D side-scroller than another first-person Prime entry, unless it turns out to be DLC for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Nintendo had already dated that game for Dec. 4, 2025, and its official store page describes Samus on the planet Viewros, where she gains psychic abilities and faces alien threats alongside the enigmatic bounty hunter Sylux. That makes a separate 2026 Metroid project especially notable, because a new Prime-style release would be hard to square with the company’s current flagship Metroid slot.

The side-scrolling route also fits the franchise’s recent commercial history. Metroid Dread launched on Oct. 8, 2021, on Nintendo Switch and became the series’ best-selling game. In 2023, MercurySteam chief executive Enric Álvarez said Dread had sold more than 3 million copies, which is the kind of number that keeps a 2.5D sequel very much in play.

MercurySteam is part of the wider backdrop here as well. The studio previously worked on Metroid: Samus Returns and Metroid Dread, and in 2023 it said it was developing two large undisclosed titles, one of which later surfaced as Blades of Fire. By March 2025, Vandal had identified Blades of Fire as one of those projects, leaving the other unrevealed. That is exactly the sort of unfinished trail that makes a rating slip worth watching. For now, Metroid Ravenous sits in the narrow gap between paperwork and reveal, where the clue is real even if the game still is not.