New Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer features beloved Chao Garden and Keanu’s Shadow

A new trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 film has been released, showing off its version of the Chao Garden.

Of course, it’s not exactly as you remember from the games: it’s some sort of mascot café featuring dancing Chao characters and a group of children who ask Tails if he’s Detective Pikachu.

Then things turn bad and soon we see Keanu Reeves’ Shadow the Hedgehog in the middle of Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing. You can check out the trailer below.

The trailer offers the best look yet at Shadow (with a gun!), as well as Jim Carrey’s two Eggman villains, and Maria Robotnik from Shadow’s past.

Despite its real world setting, then, it seems the film will include plenty of elements familiar to fans of the games.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is due out in cinemas on 20th December, just before Christmas. It’s fitting the trailer ends with a Christmas scene, in something of a callback to Carrey’s performance as The Grinch.

The film will conclude Sega’s Year of Shadow, which also included the excellent Sonic x Shadow Generations.

Sega also shared with Eurogamer some exclusive design sketches of Shadow the Hedgehog from Sonic Team’s Kazuyuki Hoshino.

For the unfamiliar, the Chao Garden allowed Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 players to level up cute Chao critters and then race and battle them against one another. It’s a much-requested feature in a potential Sonic Adventure 3 game, though Sonic Team’s Takashi Iizuka has “no plans” for such a project.