Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s latest teaser trailer is heavy on analogue horror and creepy mannequins

Black Ops 6, the latest military first-person shooter to roll along the Call of Duty conveyor belt, has graced us with another teaser trailer. Like the first teaser which dropped last week, the video is comprised mostly of live-action footage. But there does appear to be at least one, tiny, snippet of gameplay footage in there, and it suggests that we’re in for a pretty weird time.

Titled “Open Your Eyes”, the trailer is mostly formed from VHS archive clips of various early nineties’ artifacts, including Bill Clinton playing the saxophone, and an advert for the ‘Chia Pet’ terracotta figurines (not to be confused with Tchia, the lovely Breath of the Wild-lite video game that released a couple of years back), all while a distorted male voice talks to the viewer directly. It’s clearly going for an analogue horror vibe, with wilfully grainy footage and rapid cuts to more psychedelic imagery.

It’s in one such cut that we see what looks like proper gameplay footage. It appears at the 1:09 mark in the video, although you’ll still need to be quick on the left mouse button to pause the video at the right moment. If you succeed, you’ll see what appears to be a pinkish mannequin wrestling with the player, viewed from a first person perspective. The footage is so short and grainy it’s hard to be 100% certain, but the way the camera moves looks very video-gamey.

There’s another clip, just before this, of real-life mannequins being burned, so together they suggest inanimate, life-size dolls are going to be something of a theme. The original Black Ops, which was set in the sixties, played heavily on ideas of psychological conditioning and brainwashing, inspired by real-life events like the CIA’s MKUltra program. Clips like this, combined with the general tone of the trailer, suggest Treyarch might be returning to Black Ops’ roots.

This isn’t the only suggestive snippet of Black Ops 6 to appear online recently. YouTuber Noah J received a package from Treyarch which included a longer version of this trailer, which right at the end showed footage of what appears to be a Zombies mode. The clip, which again was less than a second long, showed a character sliding along the ground while a zombie-like monster appears in frame from the right.

Frankly, it would be more surprising if Black Ops 6 didn’t have zombies. It was comfortably the best thing about the deeply mediocre Modern Warfare 3, which was rushed out right after Activision said they’d be taking more time with developing Call of Duty games. That said, Black Ops 6 has been in the pipeline for four years, with Black Ops: Cold War launching back in 2020. So maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than the more recent output from Activision’s cluster of Call of Duty studios. Either way, we’ll find out more at Microsoft’s Xbox Showcase on June 9.

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