Secret Level boils the rich universe of gaming down to guns and sludge
Despite a few standouts (and the strangest take on Pac-Man you'll ever see), Prime Video's anthology series suffers a serious lack of imagination.
Image: Prime Video
Two minutes into the fifth episode of Secret Level, Prime Video’s anthology series that tells short stories set in the world of existing gaming properties, a text splash pops up, repeating one of gaming’s most famous mantras: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” Warhammer 40K‘s iconic introduction holds true for Love, Death + Robots creator Tim Miller’s new animation project, too—at least, if you add “sludgy graphics, lazy cynicism, and a pathological obsession with violence and repetition” into the future’s pantheon of sins.
To watch the vast majority of Secret Level‘s episodes is to see the bright, brilliant universe of gaming boiled down to its basest metals, as most of its entries do little more than render different flavors of combat, grunting, and rote cartoon badassery into the glossy house style of animation studio Blur, best known for making video-game trailers that all look pretty much alike (good-looking machines, weirdly shiny people, lots of smoke and fog). There are splashes of color here out on the margins—and even, god forbid, a little comedy, including a surprisingly great voice turn from a slumming-it Arnold Schwarzenegger—but for the most part, the series takes gaming brands, both well-known and not, and renders them as little more than different kinds of dudes pointing different kinds of guns at each other, repeated unto infinity. Despite a few outliers, it’s a shocking (and presumably expensive) squandering of potential.
With episodes arriving at varying lengths that range from seven to seventeen minutes, Secret Level is, invariably, at its best when it moves fastest, with quick-burst installments like “Sifu” and “Spelunky” projecting the most life into the virtual proceedings. (It doesn’t hurt that these are some of the only episodes that try for more distinctive visual flair, aiming to recapture at least part of the look of their source material.) For longer episodes, like those centered on Dungeons & Dragons, Armored Core, and Warhammer, the results are much more mixed: The series gets some juice out of recreating iconic combat concepts in glossy CGI. (This is the coolest the Dungeons & Dragons Monk class has ever looked in motion, to pick one example out of several.) But with so many stories focused on the same themes of mayhem, repetition, and redemption, there is only so much that gloss and celebrity cameos can do. (Keanu Reeves, starring in the Armored Core sequence, is utterly wasted in a pseudo-Matrix riff that offers up none of the life of his surprisingly good game turn in Cyberpunk 2077.)