Prime Video’s Anthology Series Secret Level Could Have Used a Few Extra Lives

By Elijah Gonzalez | December 5, 2024 | 10:00am

Photo courtesy of Prime Video

TV Reviews Amazon Prime Video

Prime Video’s Anthology Series Secret Level Could Have Used a Few Extra Lives

Listen to this article

Episodic anthology series are a tough nut to crack; they have to endear us to a cast of characters in record time, ideally while uniting their one-offs under a common theme. Tim Miller and Blur Studios previously did just that with their sci-fi series Love, Death & Robots, which left an impression thanks to its boisterous animation and provocative turns.

Miller and Blur’s latest project, Secret Level, has some similarities to their previous work in that it’s also an adult animated anthology series defined by explosions of violence. But in this case, instead of realizing original worlds, each of these 8-18 minute episodes is set in a different gaming series. Some of them are household names, like Pac-man or Dungeon & Dragons, while others will have even diehards scratching their heads, like Exodus, an unreleased “AAA science fiction action-adventure role-playing game.” Unfortunately, that’s not the only difference: weak writing and an overly uniform art style make the studio’s latest seem more like a collection of videogame advertisements than a compelling lineup of short stories. There are a few gems across its 15 episodes, but by and large, they fail to upgrade their source code.

A central issue for many of these adventures is that they feel constrained by the games they adapt. A good example is the first episode of the bunch, “Dungeons & Dragons: The Queen’s Cradle,” which offers the kind of boilerplate quest you’d expect as a freebie in the latest D&D rulebook. Its uninteresting cast and bland heroics fall flat, especially next to this franchise’s far more creative and surprisingly hilarious recent film adaptation, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Both “The Queen’s Cradle” and the Blue Bomber-centric episode, “Mega Man: Start,” play things exceedingly straight and end on a cut to black that makes them come across like the opening cinematic of a videogame instead of a self-contained journey.

Most Popular

Beyond these well-known games, quite a few of these shorts adapt series that are strange choices outside the context of marketing synergies. For instance, one episode is dedicated to Amazon’s MMO New World (Secret Level was produced by Amazon for Prime Video), a game that had a sizable player base when it first came out but didn’t leave much broader cultural impact. Additionally, there’s an episode that adapts Crossfire, a somewhat blasé military FPS that’s super popular in South Korea, while another is from Honor of Kings, a MOBA set in a relatively generic fantasy world that logged over 100 million players in China. In short, it feels like these inclusions were made primarily for business reasons instead of artistic ones. While any premise can be elevated given the proper execution—after all, Arcane is based on League of Legends, of all things—these specific episodes fail to distinguish themselves from the broad genre trappings that define their games, as evidenced by barely characterized gun-toting mercs and generic demons.

The Sony-backed episodes don’t fare much better. One is centered on Concord, a fiscal bomb that the company already pulled the plug on, and it does little to beat that game’s “knock-off Guardian of the Galaxy” reputation with its predictable band of misfits who spew flat Whedon-esque one-liners. And then there’s the single worst episode of the bunch, the fan-service fest “Playtime: Fulfillment,” a nonstop assault of PlayStation character cameos that fails to offer anything meaningful.

If there’s an overarching issue to many of the least interesting installments, it’s that they lack any real nuance, acting as a reminder of how uninteresting some videogame stories are once you’ve stripped them away from their gameplay loops. While it’s inherently difficult to establish much beyond broad strokes within such limited runtimes, that doesn’t forgive the fact that most of these episodes do little more than relentlessly hammer home one emotional wavelength over and over again, whether that means being intensely sentimental, like with “New World: The Once and Future King” and its unearned, mawkish conclusion, or if that means committing towards total dreariness.

Mercifully, though, this one-note approach works for some of the more over-the-top shorts, and a few range from audaciously bizarre to genuinely good. As for the former case, the most uncompromisingly bonkers episode is “Pac-Man: Circle,” which is so gory, alien, and unwaveringly self-serious that it loops around from bad to good again. While the trend of taking a relatively kid-friendly mascot and making it “dark” is usually entirely asinine, this implementation of that formula at least feels depraved in a fairly imaginative way.

Tying into this, many of these episodes work best when they’re almost unbearably grim, which is a natural fit for a handful of the adaptations. In particular, “Armored Core: Asset Management” succinctly taps into a misanthropic world of mech-based warfighting, where pilots fuse with their cores to nightmarish effect. Similarly, “Unreal Tournament: Xan” delivers a surprisingly punchy take on another hyper-capitalist dystopia as we witness a robot uprising that mixes Spartacus with the Unreal Tournament series’ cheeky hyperviolence.

And perhaps the most effective riff on its source material is “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know Fear,” which walks the razor-thin line between self-indulgent spectacle and somewhat effective commentary. This one fully transports us to the bleak world of the Imperium as Space Marines carry out their bloody business with terrifying precision, their mechanical motions conveying that they are machine men, weapons stripped of their humanity. This episode is brutal, efficient, and most importantly, it avoids overly glorifying 40K’s golden boy, Titus, whose obsessive drive to punish his enemies is framed as more frightening than inspiring. In classic Warhammer fashion, I’m sure some fans will fawn over how “cool” and “awesome” these Space Marines are, despite their cartoonishly evil glowing red eyes, but this episode just barely lands on the side of framing events more like a horror movie than an action romp. Still, it could probably be argued that it comes a little too close to the fanboy power fantasy of something like the Darth Vader scene in Rogue One, but results will vary.

Through these shorts, Blur Studio tends to rely on a hyper-realistic 3D animation style they’ve previously used for everything from Star Wars: The Old Republic’s cinematic trailers to the cutscenes in Halo Wars. However, while this gritty aesthetic works well when adapting games like Armored Core and Warhammer, it’s disappointing that the studio didn’t opt to switch art styles more throughout this anthology, as they did in Love, Death, & Robots, which distinguished its episodes with varied presentations.

Luckily, there are a few exceptions here, like “Sifu: It Takes A Life,” which utilizes a looser look that pairs perfectly with flashy martial arts action to deliver what’s probably the best installment in the batch. Similarly, while “Spelunky: Tally” doesn’t have quite the same emotional resonance, it also has a colorful aesthetic that matches its source material and grants events a playful tone.

But despite these outliers, the majority use a more realistic style that seems plucked from a videogame cutscene or cinematic trailer—which makes sense given Blur Studios has worked on these in the past— and by the end of the series, I was craving more creative risks. In some cases, this 3D art even slides into the uncanny valley, calling to mind the Zemeckis-directed films Polar Express and Beowulf, which is certainly not a great place to be.

All in all, while a few of these anthology episodes deliver a particular brand of early aughts videogame edge with aplomb, most fail to evolve or elevate their source material. Many of the best game adaptations, like Arcane, take series that have no business being captivating outside their original medium and inject them with loveable characters and an entirely distinct visual identity that captivates. For the most part, Secret Level fails to do this because instead of telling its own affecting stories, it feels too closely bound to many of the series it’s adapting, some of which didn’t offer much narrative meat in the first place. Considering that the videogame industry is constantly barraging players with cinematic trailers and promotional videos for the next big thing, perhaps it’s appropriate that many of these episodes come across more like advertisements for the games they’re adapting rather than compelling one-offs, but that doesn’t make the end result any less disappointing.

Secret Level premieres on Prime Video with eight episodes on December 10, followed by an additional seven episodes on December 17.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.