Amazon’s anthological series Secret Level is pretty unprecedented as far as such things go – a collection of animated video-game-inspired short films released in two batches, blurring the lines between genuine artistic output and cynical IP plundering. Across 15 episodes – Week 1 features the first 8, Week 2 the remaining 7 – brand mascots from mega-franchises like Dungeons & Dragons to indie darlings like Spelunky, of all things, go on publisher-endorsed adventures in what is, when you break it down, very expensive advertising.
Given the usual problems with anthologies and their expectedly mixed-bag nature, I’ve collected my takes on every episode right here, all in the same place. As ever, there are a couple of standouts, some clear disappointments, and a good amount in between.
Episode 1 – “Dungeons & Dragons: The Queen’s Cradle”
Given the live-action film was better than it had any right to be, Dungeons & Dragons certainly makes sense as an opening salvo for a series like this. Unfortunately, “The Queen’s Cradle” misses what made that movie work; an acknowledgment of the franchise’s underlying ridiculousness.
As enduring as D&D is, high fantasy is not a genre that has been neglected by mainstream entertainment, so it feels old hat here. We’ve seen dwarves and dragons and magic represented in big-budget form loads of times, and without the space to dig into the lore, this short ends up just feeling like the cut-scene that’d lead into a cool quest with reams of dialogue and moral quandaries that, ultimately, aren’t here.
The adventurers we meet feel like a cross-section of cool D&D fixtures – an orc druid, a dwarf, a Paladin, etc. – that’s the sample platter before a main meal that never comes. But if that palatable party make-up is aimed at non-fans or casual ones, which it seems to be, the last-minute Tiamat reveal is a deep-cut that targets a completely different audience. It’s a worrying start.
Episode 2 – “Sifu: It Takes a Life”
Sifu doesn’t have the curb appeal of an IP like D&D. Sloclap’s kung-fu fighter was a fantastic game with a unique roguelike conceit whereby every time the player-character died he (or she!) was revived on the spot thanks to a magical medallion, albeit it a few years older. “It Takes a Life”, which is basically just a long action sequence bookended by two dialogue scenes, is built around this conceit.
What I found myself wondering was how quickly someone who hasn’t played the game would realize what was going on. I have and I loved it and I thought this short – which is basically a condensed version of the second level, with the same neon-drenched nightclub setting and bo staff-wielding boss – was cool, but I have to acknowledge I’m coming from a more knowledgeable starting position. Mileage may vary.
But the action is very good and appropriately brutal, and the short evokes the aesthetic and tone of the game really well. I’d still rather be playing it, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Keanu Reeves in Secret Level’s Armored Core Episode | Image via Prime Video
Episode 3 – “New World: The Once and Future King”
New World is an MMORPG from Amazon itself, so it’s no surprise that they pushed the boat out a little bit with this one, hiring Arnold Schwarzenegger (FUBAR, Skyscraper) to play an arrogant king with a crazy physique and a lot of video game contrivance behind him.
I know nothing about this franchise, so I can only judge it on its quality as an episode of television. And on that level, at least, it’s pretty damn good. It’s much lighter in tone than the previous two, and while some stuff is obviously riffing on game mechanics, the fact it worked for me means it’s clearly broad enough to be appealing to non-fans. Schwarzenegger’s vocal performance is perfectly suited to the character, there’s a sweet payoff, and the idea of beating your head against the same wall in exchange for minor improvements and ultimately a meaningless trinket will resonate with anyone who plays games a lot.
It also recreates the Predator handshake meme. What else do you want?
Episode 4 – “Unreal Tournament: Xan”
Unreal Tournament doesn’t have a great deal of plot, so it’s perhaps just as well that this episode seeks entirely to evoke the game by recreating its iconic deathmatches with callbacks to the weapons and maps that everyone loves. There really isn’t much more to it.
Like the Sifu episode, this is one that I’d much rather be playing than watching, but also like that episode, it’s hard to argue that the on-point visuals don’t do a great job of evoking the franchise’s high points and mining the right kind of nostalgia. From a visual design and action choreography perspective, which is the only perspective that needs to be considered in this case, it’s a fine episode (and one of the longer ones), but it’s probably not going to appeal to anyone who isn’t going to get a pang of excitement from seeing the Ripjack on-screen.
Episode 5 – “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear”
This has the advantage of feeling like it’s part of a currently ongoing story since it features Titus, the protagonist of the two Warhammer 40K: Space Marine games, and briefly flashes back to his backstory to give him a little more depth.
You could argue this is a bit pointless since Ultramarines don’t need depth and Titus’s whole thing – his connection and immunity to Chaos – has been established in both games to decent effect already. This short doesn’t answer any of the games’ unsolved mysteries, but it still benefits from the association for anyone who’s invested in that story.
And the action! Unlike Sifu and Unreal, Warhammer has a ton of lore and wider worldbuilding, so there’s a meatier undertone to everything here than in those episodes, but even if there wasn’t the violence is top-notch. It’s very much on-brand with the gore, the weapons, and the large-scale battles, and the design of the mutated Chaos sorceress is absolutely great.
Secret Level’s Warhammer 40,000 Episode Still | Image via Prime Video
Episode 6 – “PAC-MAN: Circle”
Unlike the previous episodes, which have all tried to upsell their respective brands by adhering to their aesthetics and tones as closely as possible, “Circle” has very little to do with PAC-MAN as we understand it. Instead, it takes its essential concepts of escaping a maze by eating everything in sight while avoiding hungry ghosts and uses it to tell a very weird, gory, and bleak story that is as much fantasy-adjacent horror as anything else.
This is really strange and singular in the context of Secret Level and it’s worth checking out solely for that reason. By recasting PAC-MAN – or a version of PAC-MAN, anyway – essentially as the bad guy, it’s playing a riskier game with the IP than the other episodes have dared to, which is worthy of a bit more respect. I can’t pretend I made a great deal of sense out of the whole thing, but I definitely enjoyed the novelty.
Episode 7 – “Crossfire: Good Conflict”
I suspected going in that Crossfire wasn’t going to be a fruitful base for a short film, and, well, I was right. As it turns out, there isn’t much point in adapting a video game with no real plot, characters, worldbuilding, aesthetic, or history. You might as well watch an action B-movie as this, which amounts to 18 minutes – one of the longest episodes in the anthology – of sodden, miserable military fluff.
Is the animation good? Yeah, sure. But a lot of rubbish actioners are in live-action, which is even more detailed than that. I just can’t see a point to this existing. Even gamers don’t care about Crossfire.
Episode 8 – “Armored Core: Asset Management”
“Asset Management” stands in stark contrast to the previous episode since Armored Core has all of the things that Crossfire doesn’t – a storied history, lore, and sense of design that is instantly recognizable to fans and effortlessly malleable from a storytelling perspective. Giant mech fights also aren’t something you can knock together on a set with a bunch of B-tier actors. It’s the right franchise for this kind of adaptation.
This is also the much talked-about Keanu Reeves episode, rendered in startlingly lifelike CGI to best approximate his familiar visage. As much as I respect Keanu’s clearly enthusiastic support for the games industry, we have, to be fair, seen him in similar circumstances before, so I’m not sure the novelty holds up.
Still, it doesn’t really matter. “Asset Management” follows his cliched character through a bit of terrestrial drama, but as soon as he’s mech-bound, everything kicks into gear. A great-looking action sequence, a late bit of gore, and lots of ominous back and forth with the Core – nice.
Episode 9 – “The Outer Worlds: The Company We Keep”
Obsidian’s satirical sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds is a good basis for any number of stories riffing on corporate hegemony, so it’s no surprise to see an episode based around it in a collection like Secret Level.
“The Company We Keep” – oh, ha ha – puts its best foot forward. The story’s about a naïve young lad who signs up to get maimed in experimental product testing to get a bit closer to a scientist he has a thing for. It works because it captures the game’s daft but quietly grim tone and the protagonist is exactly the type who’d be swayed by this kind of exploitative corporate culture.
But it attempts to get a bit too sincere for its own good. That’s where the brevity of the shorts rears its head again. There’s no time to develop that angle appropriately so the pivot falls flat. As a dark comedy about an idiot being exploited, though, it works well enough.
Episode 10 – “Mega Man: Start”
This is basically the opposite of the PAC-MAN episode. Whereas that took a legacy brand and delivered an extremely weird and experimental spin on it, “Start” adheres so closely to the established aesthetic, story, and tone of Mega Man that it can’t help but feel like an advertisement more than an original story.
The particularly weird part about this is that Mega Man isn’t an especially relevant IP anymore, and this is framed as a kind of origin story that cuts out and ends right at the point when we’re about to get some real Mega Man action, so in that respect nobody’s happy – the old-school fans barely get to see Mega Man, and the newer audience don’t get enough of a sense of what’s going on to care.
Still from the Mega Man episode of Secret Level | Image via Prime Video
Episode 11 – “Exodus: Odyssey”
I’m really quite interested in Exodus, a sci-fi RPG with heavy Mass Effect vibes which is fitting since it was developed by ex-BioWare developers. But the problem is that it isn’t out yet, so nobody has played it or knows much about it.
So, why is it here? The best of these shorts have benefitted from existing brand associations; that way, audiences can have fun with the accuracy or experimentalism of the adaptation. There’s none of that here, by definition. “Odyssey” is instead intended to function as our first foray into this new game world, which comprises, it seems, an entire universe with a ton of lore.
I can’t think of a worse format to do this in than a ten-minute short. “Odyssey” is very nicely animated, using that hyper-realistic style we’ve seen in some of the others, but the story requires constant low-effort narration to explain what’s happening and relies on that Interstellar relativity of time gimmick to build emotion around characters we’ve never met and don’t care about. Weird.
Episode 12 – “Spelunky: Tally”
Death and rebirth are endlessly relevant concepts in video games, and they’re at the center of this episode set in the ruthless world of Spelunky, a beloved procedurally-generated platformer that is idolized in certain circles but never quite cracked the mainstream.
I like Spelunky, but I wouldn’t have chosen this element of it to base an adaptation around – death isn’t really the point, it’s the inevitable consequence of how all the game’s other systems interact with the player. Focus here makes the characterful setting feel nonspecific; “Tally” – so-called because of a literal log of deaths scratched into a wall – could be about any game that forces you to beat your head against its walls.
I do like the art style, though.
Episode 13 – “Concord: Tale of the Implacable”
Well, this is awkward, isn’t it? Concord was one of Sony’s most expensive and widely-publicized failures, a hero shooter that was many millions of dollars and years in development before debuting to a totally apathetic audience who didn’t care about it at best and were actively hostile to it at worst.
Much of what people didn’t like about Concord was the tone, the worldbuilding, and the character designs. It was doing a riff on Guardians of the Galaxy after those films had ceased to be all that relevant. It felt dated and try-hard and people hated it so much that the game was forced to completely close down a couple of weeks after launch and the studio that developed it was shuttered.
“Tale of the Implacable” contains all the things that people hated with none of the upsides (the grim irony was that mechanically Concord was a very solid hero shooter – it just wasn’t Overwatch.) I never had much antipathy towards it so I wasn’t totally turned off by this, but it’s just difficult to care at all given the circumstances. It’s aimed explicitly at existing fans when all available evidence seems to suggest there are none.
A still from the Concord episode of Secret Level | Image via Prime Video
Episode 14 – “Honor of Kings: The Way of All Things”
Honor of Kings isn’t just a mobile MOBA, it’s the most popular one in the world, so the chances are this is going to appeal to some people more than it appeals to me. I don’t play mobile games for the most part and know nothing about the setting, so I felt a little lost. On that level the exposition is useful but in a short film, you still shouldn’t need this much of it.
I’m thoroughly confused by Part 2 of Secret Level, and this episode is symbolic of why. The choices of games to adapt here have been very odd, and really don’t provide the kind of payoff that would justify waiting an additional week to be able to watch the final chapters. All the good stuff was in the first batch.
Maybe it’s just me but there’s also something a bit off about a mega-popular mobile game getting penultimate placement in an anthology like this. It’s just weird.
Episode 15 – “Playtime: Fulfilment”
Ugh. This is the worst episode of the bunch by a margin because it’s the most cynical, the one that really does feel like a brand advertisement above and beyond anything else. And it can’t even be bothered to really do much with the iconic mascots it wheels out other than expect us to just get all giddy at the mere sight of them.
There’s nothing here beyond very recognizable PlayStation characters showing up in really artless ways just for the sake of it. The fact it’s positioned as the grand, operatic payoff to the whole collection is even more insulting. This would have worked better as a private behind-closed-doors proof of concept than the season finale.
