Secret Level (Prime Video animated anthology set in many popular game worlds; December 10th, 15 episodes)

[Julius]

Announced at Gamescom, and might be the highlight. 

This is being headed up by Tim Miller – who directed the first Deadpool film back in 2016, founded Blur Studio (an amazing VFX studio), and also headed up Love, Death & Robots on Netflix. 

It will be premiering on December 10th and there will be a total of 15 episodes. 

Here's the full list of games the series will be covering:

Quote

● Armored Core
● Concord
● Crossfire
● Dungeons & Dragons
● Exodus
● Honor of Kings
● Mega Man
● New World: Aeternum
● PAC-MAN
● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities)
● Sifu
● Spelunky
● The Outer Worlds
● Unreal Tournament
● Warhammer 40,000

A whole lot of big IP there, curious to see which PlayStation IPs get some love – got to imagine Astro is in there, right? Pick of the bunch for me though has to be Armored Core! 

Edited August 20 by Julius

[WackerJr]

Wow that looks great.  It’ll be interesting to see whether there’s an interlocking story or whether they’re 15 standalone episodes.

I wondered how they’ll cover Pac-Man, but that teaser certainly gives a hint (one I wouldn’t have guessed!).

Excited to see how this turns out! 😁

[bob]

I got quite excited for the title, but I haven't actually played any of those games.

[Cube]

I might check out the Pac-Man and Mega Man out of curiosity (even though I've only played one Mega Man game). Perhaps The Outer Worlds to see if they capture the Firefly feel (at first, I thought he worked on Firefly, but that was someone with a similar name, this guy apparently worked on Shadow the Hedgehog). A few of them I only know by name and nothing else and a some (Crossfire, Exodus, Honor of Kings, New World: Aeternum) I've never heard of before.

Concord seems like it's only there so they can use other PlayStation properties. 

[Glen-i]

2 hours ago, bob said:

I got quite excited for the title, but I haven't actually played any of those games.

How in the world have you not played Pac-Man?

[bob]

16 hours ago, Glen-i said:

How in the world have you not played Pac-Man?

It's not the sort of game that interests me, so I've never sought it out. 

I feel like I've got the gist of it from watching a video. 

[Julius]

Yikes, a lot has happened with this while I've been away. It's trailer time! Wanted to put these in order but, uh, the internet has done a very poor job of making it clear what the order of release was. But roughly...

November 13th - Official Trailer: 

Spelunky:

Sifu:

Dungeons & Dragons:

Warhammer 40,000: 

Armored Core:

Concord:

Mega Man:

The Outer Worlds 2: 

Exodus:

Pac-Man (?!)

So, by my count, we're still waiting on trailers for five more episodes: Crossfire, Honor of Kings, New World: Aeternum, PlayStation, and Unreal Tournament. 

Looks great from the trailers, obviously I'm especially excited for the Armored Core episode – and they got Keanu for it?! What the hell?!?! Super hyped for it. Hopefully it's a sign that we're not too far from the next installment being announced (at TGAs next week, ahem). 

[Glen-i]

Will the Concord episode abruptly end halfway through the runtime?

Yeah, cheap shot, but I have to imagine the directors are not exactly pleased with having to do one on that game now.

[Cube]

7 hours ago, Glen-i said:

Will the Concord episode abruptly end halfway through the runtime?

Yeah, cheap shot, but I have to imagine the directors are not exactly pleased with having to do one on that game now.

One interesting thing about the Concord one is that none of these characters were in the game. 

So either they came up with more characters, or these characters were planned future content (which is the more likely option).

 

I think it would be the icing on the cake if people end up really liking the characters in this episode.

[Cube]

I watched the first batch of episodes. Many of them are so short that you don't know the characters well enough to care about what they're going on. The 40K one is the worst example of this, just mindless, boring action. 

Dungeons & Dragons feels like a "sneak peak" at another project. The characters seem like they could be interesting, but the short focuses on the most boring one. Armoured Core is similar, it feels like part of a longer journey, the episode just tells you what's happening as it gets revealed. They really don't work as shorts at all. The same stands for Sifu, it has a great style, but the message it is trying to convey doesn't work in such a short thing.

Unreal Tournament has enjoyable action and manages to create the most emotional character in the series (kind of ironic), and it works as its own standalone story. 

Pac-Man is just strange, and it's even stranger that this one was an actual teaser for a game.

The best one of the first bunch is, strangely, New Words. It's light-hearted, entertaining and quite funny. It also works really well as a short, you don't need to know anything of the world to understand what is going on. That said, it works so well as just a short that I still have zero interest in the game.

 

Overall, though, it's kind of fine. 

[Julius]

@Cube I've slowly been chipping away at them myself and for the four that I've seen so far - those being the first four: D&D, Sifu, New World: Aeternum and Unreal Tournament - I totally agree. 

D&D absolutely seems like it's supposed to be setting something up. I can't help but wonder if it originally started out as a Baldur's Gate project or something and changed when Larian bailed, because otherwise it does just feel out of place and feels like a generic advert for absolutely anything D&D, and I think its story it blunted because of that. 

The weakest of the ones I've watched so far is probably Sifu, having no experience with the game it didn't really make me want to check the game out more than I already do? Even if it has some cool stuff going on visually. 

New World definitely had the more complex arc, hilarious for an MMO, because it just feels like such a throwback in the least epic way visually, but is actually more interesting to me than a good number of the MMO trailers doing the rounds over the last decade. Arnie voicing King Aelstrom was also just kind of hilarious, too  my favourite episode of the four I've watched so far. 

And yeah, Unreal Tournament: Xan was similarly great, even if it was much more predictable. As someone who hasn't played an Unreal Tournament game it's by far the most anything has done to convince me that I should at some point. 

Going to get through a few more today I think, with the next batch dropping tomorrow it means I don't need to wait around so much, because my original plan was just to binge them all 

[Dcubed]

Everything in this series is probably a sneaky advert/teaser for unannounced games/DLC content in these respective series.

That’s probably the whole reason why this show even exists.

Edited 2 hours ago by Dcubed