“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” That quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest is how the debut trailer for hack-and-slash adventure game Fallen begins. It was accurate if you count among those devils the scourge of AI slop. The trailer, an IGN exclusive, was flamed on social media for appearing to showcase gen AI work, and the developer of the game later confirmed it.
The Fallen trailer appeared on X on Monday where it immediately made a splash far beyond what you might have expected from its otherwise generic-looking, demon-slaying gameplay. “Introducing Fallen, a new Xbox 360-era inspired character action game where you play as Astra, a fallen angel who must battle through Hell and its demonic forces. It’s in development for console and PC,” read the marketing copy.
But what stood out to people immediately was the now familiar whiff of slick but lifeless gen AI-produced art that was peppered throughout the trailer. “It looks nauseatingly bad, genAI isn’t just walking back gaming hardware, it’s trying to make the games themselves awful too,” wrote cosplayer Kitty Bit. “This is the most AI ass AI video game I ever did see lmao,” wrote Twitch streamer Ms5000watts. “Looks like a weird amalgamation of AI and jank,” read one of the top YouTube comments.
They aren’t even trying to hide it brah😭😭AI slop content is off the charts now https://t.co/uWFQdopCy8 pic.twitter.com/b0B9Jnm8aq
— Oshbard (@Ludvicus) January 19, 2026
Was this another example of people being paranoid about gen AI and jumping the gun with the accusations of slop? Nope! Superboo Studios founder, director, producer, and writer Brooke Burgess admitted as much after the backlash, but claimed the gameplay was real and in-engine UE5.4 work. Burgess blamed “context” collapse for the controversy.
“What ended up being shared as an ‘official trailer’ was actually our early dev ‘tone pitch’, i.e., a work-in-progress UE5 teaser designed for funding discussions,” he told TheGamer. “There are [AI-Generated] placeholders in there, specifically some 2D test assets used to explore mood and presentation (for example, how ‘lost souls’ and fallen angels in the game might react when spoken to and judged, along w/ WIP HUD elements). That material was never intended as final content, nor as a statement on how the shipped game would be made.”
To go back to referencing Shakespeare for a moment, Burgess seems to be suggesting that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our ‘tone pitch AI placeholders,’ but in ourselves.” He makes it sound like IGN posted the wrong trailer, or jumped the gun. In actuality, Burgess has had no qualms about using AI slop to pitch the game to potential investors.
In fact, he recently complained about just how hard it is to raise money for making a game right now. Burgess said every publisher he’s spoken to is asking how he’ll us AI to streamline development. He’s open to using it for QA and localization, but claims he’s not “waving the flag of AI by any stretch.” but claims he’s not “waving the flag of AI by any stretch.”
“I’m not going to sell my soul and be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it by myself, let me prompt this whole game into existence,’” he recently told GamesIndustry.Biz. “No, I want to work with really talented people and make something cool. But if integrating it in a way that doesn’t affect creativity, but helps to save a little bit of money and gets the game out there to people, and gives us a chance to make something cool and memorable, and then make something else after that–it’s something I have to factor in.”
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