Secret Level premieres on Prime Video with eight episodes on December 10, followed by additional episodes debuting on December 17.
For a few episodes at least, the animated anthology series Secret Level seems to depict a respectable range of video games and genres. The Dungeons & Dragons episode goes for a fantasy adventure, while the one for Unreal Tournament does sci-fi carnage. The art style used to adapt the martial arts of Sifu is more stylized and cartoonish than the realism favored by the episodes that follow. But it’s not long before the monotony kicks in. The kind you feel when you’re watching too many video game trailers and noticing all the common threads, dreading the inevitable next appearance of a crafting menu, a skill tree, or a floating companion character.
A good half of the shorts in the latest project from Love, Death and Robots creator and Deadpool director Tim Miller include a montage of characters dying. A full fourth of them feature some cheeky nod to a video game protagonist’s life cycle of repetition and/or resurrection. They’re almost all focused on action, going for lifelike animation, and reaching for drama that struggles to be fleshed out within a 5-to-15 minute timeframe. Someone is always firing a gun, swinging a sword, or spurting blood.
The realistic style isn’t a total wash. The D&D episode takes advantage of the animated medium by focusing on a surprising diversity of fantasy races, a stark contrast to the mostly human protagonists of Honor Among Thieves or even your uniformly gorgeous, runway-ready companions in Baldur’s Gate III. The ultra-grim exaggeration of Warhammer 40,000, too, is pleasingly distinct from Secret Level’s other sci-fi offerings, with bulky Space Marines staining their armor in luminescent blood while they drag a coffin behind them. And the episode for multiplayer shooter Crossfire, if nothing else, offers a change of pace for featuring a modern-day conflict in a series heavily tilted toward far-off futures and fantasy realms.
But on the whole, the more potentially distinct games receive the shortest episodes, some clocking in at under 10 minutes. Sifu, Spelunky, and Mega Man at least look and feel different from the rest of Secret Level, but they offer only a brief distraction from the series’ dull affinity for realism and sci-fi firearms. You might, as I did, assume the Pac-Man episode will provide some badly needed variety, but don’t hold your breath. In the single worst episode of Secret Level, the iconic character is crammed into a maze of generic, gritty, sci-fi adventure gore. It’s the only story to wholly reinterpret the source material, which the series could use more of. But adding a sword and some bloody entrails to dangle from Pac-Man only makes it feel like everything else in Secret Level.
At its best, Secret Level succinctly conveys the appeal of its characters and the worlds they inhabit. The evil corporation and oppressed robots in the Unreal Tournament episode may not be particularly inventive, but they quickly and cleanly distinguish who we’re supposed to root for. The Outer Worlds fuels one of the few action-free episodes, with the charming story of a scrapper who signs himself up as a test subject in pursuit of the girlboss he loves. Sure, it features one of those previously mentioned death montages, but it’s also the only episode anchored by characters who feel flawed and human rather than bland functions of the plot.
Such small triumphs, though, are few and far between. As I watched one floundering episode after another, I wondered if the selection of games was the problem. One look at what’s being adapted here and it’s hard not to wonder how much of Secret Level is meant to double as a marketing ploy. One episode is set in the starfaring future world of Exodus, a game that’s not even out yet (though after watching what amounts to an extended promo on Prime Video, perhaps you’d be interested in a tie-in novel you can purchase from Amazon?). There’s a heavy representation of live-service games – among them Sony’s ill-fated Concord, which, in a truly unfortunate flub of cross-media synergy, is no longer playable. The finale, which breaks the format to drop several PlayStation franchises into an original setting, feels enough like a commercial that it might as well end with the platform’s logo and signature sign-off voice.
It’s hard not to wonder how much of Secret Level is meant to double as a marketing ploy.
But to Secret Level’s credit, I didn’t always feel like I was being sold something. New World is, yes, an Amazon-developed game that just saw its console release a few months ago, but I don’t have a much clearer idea of how it plays or why I should want to play it than I did before. All the episode tells me is that there’s a magical island where everyone who dies gets resurrected again on the beach, and from that point we watch the comedic misfortune of a blowhard noble voiced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. These do seem like earnest attempts to tell “real” stories within each game’s world, even when they don’t play to a franchise’s strengths: The Armored Core episode has more to do with a CGI Keanu Reeves in a cockpit than the granular mech customization that is the cornerstone of the series.
The larger problem is that most of the stories aren’t very good, to the point that the very idea behind Secret Level begins to feel faulty. Putting so many recognizable brands front and center restricts an already restrictive setup. Not only must Miller and company overcome the usual anthology-TV struggle to tell a satisfying, self-contained story, but they must do so in settings that are more often built to serve game mechanics than efficient, original storytelling (to say nothing of doing so through animation). The philosophical Honor of Kings episode, for example, has a decent script, but it’s full of distracting fantasy flourishes that I can only assume are references to the game’s setting; the Sifu episode spends most of its time establishing the premise of Sifu. Others never shake off their derivative roots: The Concord episode largely apes Guardians of the Galaxy, but it’s a much better imitation than the attempt to replicate Interstellar’s emotional core within Exodus.
A video game anthology series isn’t doomed to fail. The acclaimed adaptations of Fallout and The Last of Us clearly show that games can translate into stories that resonate beyond their original audiences. But to create a successful anthology along these lines would require more confident storytelling and a more varied, judicious selection than the one on display for Secret Level.
