Last week, we wrote about an upcoming TV project that caught our eye mostly on the basis of how incredibly weird it sounded, to our "Not actively involved in making either TV or video games" ears: Secret Level, a new animated anthology series created by Love, Death + Robots' Tim Miller, and set in the world of a number of existing video games. (Including The Outer Worlds, Unreal, Armored Core, and more.) That felt extremely strange to us, especially since it meant video game brands from a whole bunch of different studios would be getting smooshed together, which developers are usually kind of leery about. At the very least, we thought, it'd produce a weird trailer when it hit the Gamescom conference the following week.
Well, it's now the following week, and, wouldn't you know it: We have a very weird teaser trailer for Secret Level, which is promising stories set in 15 different best-selling games (including Amazon's own in-house MMORPG), all looking kind of… bleh?
And, look: We know animators don't just want to recreate various famous video game worlds in game-accurate art styles, even if that would arguably be a more visually interesting approach to take with a project like this. But watching the trailer—which includes recognizable bits from gaming properties like Warhammer, Dungeon & Dragons, and the upcoming Concord, as well as weirder picks like a few shots of God Of War and Mega Man—we can't help be struck by how same-y it all looks. The only bits that stand out at all, from an animation point of view, are the ones attempting to adapt the more painterly vibes of Sloclap's (extremely good) Sifu; even the Mega Man material, which should by any metric be vibrant as hell, looks of a piece with all the other shots of Lightyear-esque character models looking "badass" in various fantastical locales.
Now, to be fair, the most explicitly cartoonish properties that the show is promising to tackle didn't seem to make the cut. (At least, to our old eyes, which struggled to seize every moment of this extremely hyperactive trailer.) We would really like to see what professional animators can do with Spelunky, and even Pac-Man, but we assume the goal here was to go heavy on the shock and awe, light on whimsy. Also, there's very little sense of the writing, which is going to be more interesting to us than the animation, because these are a lot of very disparate tones and settings at play here. (Also, why is Kratos in modern times with cars? Did Kratos do a time travel?) We'll know more about Secret Level as its December 10 premiere date approaches.
