Someone’s going to jail again. In advance of a full reveal at Microsoft’s E3 press conference on Monday, Game Informer just announced a new installment in the Gears of War series. The magazine’s cover shows an unidentified character in blue-glowing handcuffs being led away from a city on fire. It seems like a callback to the original Gears of War, which opened with Marcus Fenix being broken out of prison by his C.O.G. comrades.

The original Gears was announced as a trilogy, and last year’s Gears of War 3 certainly seemed to conclude the story of Marcus and his war criminal father. That a new Gears is in-bound only signals the superfluity of such distinctions as trilogy in the first place. The series isn’t really, and never was, a trilogy. It’s an intellectual property simulation space that updates itself in semi-annual increments so as to give players marginally new kill scenarios. 

What are we going to kill this time around? And who are we going to pretend is the murdering hero? In a way, it’s fitting the first image of the game is a man in handcuffs being led into the darkness. I do not want this, the image says. I didn’t want to come back. But here we are, shackled and pushed even deeper into the depths of a series that was supposed to be over by now.

[via Game Informer]