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The creative connective tissue between animation studio THE LINE (last seen impressing us with its Gorillaz animation) and Warframe game developer Digital Extremes is a shared desire to take risks, flex creativity, and remain authentic to art and voice. Jade Shadows: Constellations, the new animated short designed to introduce players to Warframe’s next big update, just as the team did with Warframe 1999's The Hex, does exactly that, and it’s quite unexpected in the best way possible.

What they’ve made here – driven by the riffs of progressive metalcore band ERRA – doesn’t really behave like a conventional trailer. It doesn’t quite sit as a traditional short film either. It lands somewhere between an anime battle scene, a music video, and the kind of fan-made edit that thrived on YouTube in the 2000s, except now it’s been scaled up, sharpened, and finessed to within an inch of its beautifully animated life, then dropped right at the centre of Warframe itself.

How this Warframe animation started is the strangest part. Usually, it’s the other way around. You build the film, then you score it. But here, the song came first, defining much of the feel, the pacing, and those punchy cuts that give Jade Shadows: Constellations its intensity.

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