Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it had ordered an animated series full of shorts based on video games like Spelunky and Mega Man, called Secret Level. Now we’ve gotten our first look at the teaser trailer for the series, and it certainly looks like there’s a short based on Armored Core, the FromSoftware mech games, the stars none other than Keanu Reeves.
Secret Level, out December 10, is being made by Tim Miller and CGI house Blur Studio, who were behind the first Deadpool movie and Amazon’s earlier Love, Death & Robots sci-fi anthology. The new trailer showed slices of a bunch of different shorts from the new series, and one of them definitely looks like three seconds of Reeves sliding his head forward in the sweaty cockpit of a robot.
Here’s the trailer:
Here’s the part that looks like Reeves:
And here’s FromSoftware confirming that it’s an Armored Core story:
Now there are two reasons this is blowing fans minds. First, Reeves is awesome, and in addition to starring in timeless classics like The Matrix, John Wick, and Point Break, also delivered an incredible performance as Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077, showing you could bring A-list Hollywood talent to a blockbuster video game in a way that felt elegant and earned rather than as a cheap cash-in (Idris Elba demonstrated the same in the game’s Phantom Liberty expansion last year).
But second, Armored Core is a beloved but relatively obscure video game IP to mine for an Amazon Prime adaptation. It’s a series known for tense mech fights, brutal post-apocalyptic sci-fi settings, and effective but extremely austere writing and storytelling. And of course its red robot eyes, which you can see in the teaser.
Pilots for these mechs are usually drugged up and spliced with all kinds of weird body-horror cyber-junk, and tasked with keeping their existential crises at bay by blowing stuff up with giant guns. Reeves seems perfect for the part.
Last year’s Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon demonstrated each of those virtues and was excellent, but not exactly the type of phenomenon you’d expect to jumpstart a trans-media cameo, even a relatively small one like representation in an anthology series. FromSoftware’s other games, including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and the mega-seller Elden Ring all seemed like much more likely candidates.
What Armored Core fans lack in numbers, they make up for with diehard devotion. If you doubt that, consider this five-and-a-half hour YouTube explainer on Armored Core VI’s story which has over one million views. I assume the one for Secret Level’s Armored Core entry will be shorter, but not by much.