The first trailer for Amazon's video game smash-up series looks very strange

Last week we wrote about an upcoming television project that caught our attention mainly because it sounded incredibly strange to our “not actively involved in the production of television shows or video games” ears: Secret levela new animated anthology series from Love, Death + Robots' Tim Miller, and set in the world of a number of existing video games. (Including The outer worlds, Unreal, Armored coreand more.) This struck us as extremely odd, especially since it meant squashing together video game brands from a whole bunch of different studios, something developers are usually pretty leery of. At the very least, we thought, it would make for a weird trailer when it launched at the Gamescom conference the following week.

Well, it is now next week, and, who would have thought: We have a very strange teaser trailer for Secret levelthat promises stories set in 15 different best-selling games (including Amazon's own MMORPG), all of which look kind of… ugh?

And you see: We know that animators are not Only want to recreate various famous video game worlds in game-accurate art styles, although that would probably be a more visually interesting approach for a project like this. But if you look at the trailer – which features recognizable parts from game titles like Warhammer, Dungeons & Dragonsand the upcoming Unityas well as stranger picks like a few shots of God of War And Mega Man– we are amazed at how monotonous it all looks like that. The only parts that stand out at all from an animation perspective are the ones that try to adapt the more painterly vibes of Sloclap (extremely well). Sifu; even the Mega Man Material that should be vivid as hell by any standards looks like one piece with all the other recordings of light year-like character models that look badass in various fantastical locations.

To be fair, the most explicit cartoon properties that the show promises to tackle didn't seem to have made it into the selection. (At least to our old eyes, which struggled to capture every moment of this extremely hyperactive trailer.) We would really like to see what professional animators can do with Speleologyand even Pac Manbut we assume that the goal here was to give a lot of shock and awe and not much humor. Also, the writing style is barely noticeable, which will be more interesting to us than the animation, because there are many very Different tones and attitudes come into play here. (And why is Kratos in the modern day with cars? Did Kratos travel through time?) We'll find out more about that Secret level as the premiere date on December 10th approaches.