Secret Level, Amazon’s exquisitely animated video game anthology tribute, can be seen as either a visually stunning and impactful medium for storytelling or a hollow piece of capital C Content, depending on the episode you're viewing.
The series is primarily crafted by Blur Studio, with assistance from Amazon’s MGM Studios. If you're acquainted with Blur’s work on some of the most acclaimed cinematic trailers of the past decade, you won’t be shocked to find that the animation throughout all 15 episodes is remarkably beautiful. However, the series falters in several episodes due to a notable lack of depth and soul in its storytelling, which aspires for grand emotional impact. If some episodes were removed, the series could have been more impressive. Instead, what we have are essentially 15 trailers, each with a similar emotional tone, with only a few successfully telling a story that doesn’t feel like an extravagant advertisement.
When examining the 15 games featured in Secret Level’s anthology episodes, it’s still unclear why these particular stories were chosen. However, I have a theory: An Amazon series releasing an episode based on the company’s MMO New World under the guise of artistic pursuit offers easy promotion. Concord, a short-lived hero shooter that Sony no longer intends to promote but once hoped would be its next major live-service success, has an entire episode that feels like an extended cinematic trailer, dedicated to its “we have Guardians of the Galaxy at home” world. In essence, while some games featured in Secret Level are massive properties with the cultural capital to make them obvious choices for a tribute to video games, most episodes feel like extensions of marketing.
Secret Level airs on December 10, meaning some of the games it highlights are either not released yet or were in development alongside the show. Concord is, undoubtedly, the most peculiar and awkward inclusion given the game’s fate, but it’s Exodus: Odyssey—the forthcoming sci-fi game from Wizards of the Coast’s Archetype Entertainment—that receives one of the most exhaustingly self-indulgent episodes. Announced less than a year ago, we haven’t even seen it in motion. Wizards of the Coast’s properties also appear in a Dungeons & Dragons episode. Again, Secret Level makes more sense as a business transaction than as 15 stories being told because someone genuinely believed they were worth sharing.
Concord isn’t the only episode featuring PlayStation. The worst and least self-aware episode of the series follows a young woman who works as a delivery courier for a company that rewards workers for their personal best delivery times with focus-tested cosmetic upgrades. She escapes her monotonous corporate life by spending time with a blue slime monster and evading virtual reality (or perhaps real? It’s unclear) versions of PlayStation characters like a colossus from Shadow of the Colossus and Kratos from God of War as she bikes through the city. The narrative suggests that while you strive each day to earn the best cosmetics, working tirelessly for uncaring corporate owners, the truly cool individuals reject this system and instead play PlayStation games. Corporations are depicted as manipulative entities that exploit you with poor rewards, yet returning to your PlayStation is portrayed as a safe haven. The brand is shown as harmless—unless, perhaps, you’re a developer under its umbrella. This episode sacrifices any coherent storytelling for cameos of PlayStation characters, aiming to make fans cheer, and could easily be condensed into a Super Bowl TV spot.
Several episodes are oddly nondescript. Crossfire’s episode resembles a generic military shooter cutscene, characterized almost solely by the edgy bleakness typical of early 2000s. The Exodus episode is visually stunning, but I doubt I could identify which game it was from if asked under duress. The moments when Secret Level’s episodes truly stand out occur when the show embraces stylistic animation that doesn’t blend into the rest of the series. These are 15 unique games, so why do half of them appear similar? It makes a significant difference when they look distinct, such as the episode based on Sifu, which encapsulates the game’s roguelike martial arts structure, and the one for Spelunky, which abandons the photorealism employed by most of Secret Level and captures the adventurous spirit of Mossmouth’s cave-exploring adventure.
Some adaptations are less faithful. The Pac-Man episode takes a psychological body horror approach to the early arcade mega-hit, a concept intriguing in isolation that results in some of the show’s most memorable sequences. However, in the context of Pac-Man’s typically family-friendly history, it feels like the officially licensed equivalent of a Disney character being thrust into a horror property once it enters the public domain. Mega Man doesn’t venture quite as far in that direction, but it still turns the colorful series of action platformers into a somewhat dark coming-of-age story, merging Secret Level’s prestige storytelling tendencies with the father/son dynamic of the titular robot hero and his creator. It stands out as one of the series’ highlights, yet even episodes like this one, Sifu, and Spelunky can’t completely rid the show of the lingering scent of cynical advertising.
Secret Level is, in a word, inconsistent. Its animation is breathtaking, but it seems Blur Studio relied too heavily on its experience creating trailers with emotional arcs designed to entice customers to their nearest game store. When creator Tim Miller announced the show back at Gamescom in August, he tearfully described it as a “love letter” to video games. However, the outcome feels more like a collection of costly commercials, one of which promotes a game you can no longer play.
