Splatoon Raiders Is a Roguelite Treasure Hunt Out July 23

Nintendo just dropped the Splatoon Raiders Direct, a full presentation handed to a single spinoff, and it came packed with more detail than some mainline reveals get. The pitch is blunt: you play as The Mechanic, and you go treasure hunting. Loot is scattered across a set of islands, each with its own biome and theme, and it is guarded by enemies who swarm whatever shiny thing you came for. Clear the swarm, claim the loot, repeat. That is the whole premise, and Nintendo is not pretending otherwise. If that loop sounds like a dungeon roguelite wearing a Splatoon coat of paint, that is because it more or less is.

The economy runs on the series' usual currency of color and viscera. Every enemy here is a salmonid, and beaten salmonids cough up Power Eggs, with the tougher ones dropping Mega Power Eggs worth 100 Power Eggs apiece. You dive into the ink on the ground to refill your weapon, exactly as you always have, and you hoard the eggs to fund whatever comes next. Where the mainline games send two teams of squid kids to fight over turf, Raiders drops player-versus-player entirely and aims all that ink at a treasure pile instead. Call it Salmon Run's energy, stretched into a full game rather than a side mode.

Salmonids, sorted by saltiness

There are three tiers of enemy, and Nintendo has arranged them along an axis I did not expect to type today: salt. The lesser salmonids are the cannon fodder you mow through in groups. Above them sit the boss salmonids, the mid-tier threats that ask for a bit of stunning and a plan. At the top are the seasoned salmonids, bigger and meaner than the bosses below them. The governing rule, stated plainly in the Direct, is that the saltier the salmonid, the stronger it is. Each type also scales, so the same creature can show up as a light snack or a genuine wall depending on how seasoned it happens to be. I am choosing to respect the commitment to the bit.

Weapons are where the roguelite hooks really sink in. There are over 100 to unlock across the game, and they arrive from everywhere: salmonids drop them, treasure hauls include them, and rare ones turn up out in the wild if you go poking around for them. You level them up as you go, and the smart wrinkle is that you can scrap any weapon you do not want for XP. That means picking up a weapon type you will never actually fire is still worth the bend, which quietly solves the oldest problem in loot games: the pile of duplicate junk you normally walk straight past.

Gadgets bolted to your ink tank

Gadgets are the customization layer, and this is the part that looks like it will actually generate builds. You equip two at a time, and they bolt onto your ink tank, of which there are three flavors: Speed, Power, and Tactical. Each tank leans the kit a different direction, from mobility tools that fling you across a room to area-control pieces that lock down a chunk of the floor, and you can pour parts and XP into the gadgets to push them further for harder raids. I will spare you the full menu of them, but the short version is that the tank you pick and the two gadgets you strap to it are the closest thing Raiders has to a class system, and it looks deep enough to argue about.

Fail, keep everything, try again

The roguelite thesis lands in full here. Lose a raid and you keep all of it: the XP, the weapons, the gadgets you clawed together on the way down. Your tanks grow stronger the more you lean on them, your gadgets climb with every part you feed them, and a character named Big Man catalogs everything you have run into so you can go back and check your own notes later. Keeping your gear after a failed raid is generous. Suspiciously generous, even, the precise flavor of generous that exists so you queue one more run instead of putting the controller down. As a soft on-ramp it works, and there is a difficulty slider waiting to match whatever appetite for punishment you bring to it.

Stages, difficulty, and a panic button

Rather than dumping a sprawling map list, the Direct showed four distinct stage types: wide-open dig sites, cramped salmonid dens, facilities that force specific gadgets, and ruins that burrow down into deeper sublevels. The difficulty options are labeled with refreshing honesty, running from tourist for easy to raider for normal to survivalist for the people who really want to suffer. Amiibo from the Splatoon line are supported, there are collectible salmonid relics to chase across the islands, and outfits unlock as you play, so the cosmetic treadmill is accounted for too.

It is built as a single-player game first, but it is not strictly solo. Up to four players can raid together, locally or online, and there is a 'call for help' option tucked into the tougher ruins and dungeons. Get stuck, hit the button, and someone can drop in to bail you out, or you can be the one answering the flare. It runs on a cooldown, so it stays a rescue signal rather than a crutch you mash every time a boss looks at you funny, which is a nicer balance than most co-op panic buttons manage to strike.

Splatoon Raiders lands on July 23, 2026, at $49.99, with pre-orders already open. A treasure-hunt roguelite spun out of a turf-war shooter is a strange thing for Nintendo to build an entire Direct around, and yet the more of it they showed, the more coherent the whole thing looked. Whether 100-plus weapons and a salt-graded bestiary add up to something with staying power is a July problem, not a today problem. For now the Direct did its job. I walked in expecting a Salmon Run side dish and walked out mildly convinced it might be a full meal. Source: Nintendo's official Splatoon Raiders Direct page.