Much of the pre-launch discussion around Amazon’s upcoming video game anthology show Secret Level has been occupied with fact it’ll feature Concord, despite the shooter’s abrupt end; but there’s plenty more to it than that, and Prime Video has now highlighted some of the other games – many radically reimagined – that’ll feature when the show airs on 10th December.
Secret Level, of course, comes from Tim Miller and other creatives behind Netflix’s sci-fi anthology series Love, Death & Robots, and looks to take a similar approach to games. In total, it’ll span 15 episodes, featuring Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, Pac-Man, Sifu
Amazon initial Secret Level trailer, released back in August, featured around 90 seconds of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snippets from the series, getting across the vibes the show is aiming for if not much else. However, its latest trailer (seeming the finalised version of a work-in-progress trailer that leaked last month) extends the runtime to a little under three minutes, offering a bit more context and a few more teases of things to come.
There’s plenty of grit in there (probably a little too much, given half the clips are practically indistinguishable), but things get far more interesting when it comes to Secret Level’s take on the games with considerably more distinct art styles – namely, the indie and retro titles in its line-up. Sifu, for instance, looks gorgeous, gently evolving the source material’s painterly aesthetic, while Spelunky and Mega Man see far more dramatic departures. The latter, for example, has landed somewhere between Pixar and photo-realism in way that’s almost certainly going to be divisive. And as for that glimpse of Pac-Man, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
Elsewhere in Amazon’s trailer, there’s confirmation of Secret Level’s previously leaked cast list. Keanu Reeves (who did actually pop up in the initial teaser, albeit briefly) will be joined by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Temuera Morrison, Heaven Hart, Emily Swallow, Gabriel Luna, Ricky Whittle, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Adele Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Clive Standen, Michael Beach, and Laura Bailey.
Secret Level creator Miller recently explained (in the same interview he said Concord’s episode highlighted its world’s “potential”) the show will be split into two ‘batches’, the first covering the grittier stuff, while the latter is more family friendly. We also recently learned Secret Level’s Warhammer instalment is a sequel to Space Marine 2.