Prime’s newest animated series, Secret Level, is a bit of a weird one. I was naively optimistic when it was first announced at Gamescom earlier this year, and it turned out to not be as great as I hoped. That’s an L for me, but I’m fine with that – it’s at least proof that I’m not totally jaded by this industry.
Secret Level Isn’t A Game Changer
Now that reviews are out (ours is here) and its first eight episodes are available to stream, it’s become apparent that the show isn’t as ambitious as many of us expected. Each brief episode of the anthology series offers an interpretation of a video game and not much else.
Consistent across the eight episodes is the animation quality – Blur Studio is well known for its work on video game trailers – which is undeniably beautiful, if a little samey. Each episode also does a fairly good job of telling a cool story within each game’s universe.
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But as with any anthology series, there are episodes that shine, and episodes that aren’t nearly as impressive. Many of the episodes feel like they aren’t doing anything all that new, and could easily be mistaken for extended story trailers within their respective universes. They generally have similar emotional arcs and not much surprise or intrigue to offer.
At the time, Pac-Man’s episode stood out for its bold reinterpretation of a classic arcade game as a gory horror story, making the dullness of the other episodes feel like wasted potential. We know now that its premise was actually predicated on a new Pac-Man game that was announced at The Game Awards, making it yet another trailer in disguise. Many of the other episodes are fairly uncreative uses of interesting settings and mechanics. It’s good storytelling, just not very special.
Most of Sifu’s episode is taken straight from the combat sequence in its second level. Why?
Once Again, IP Ruins The Fun
I have to assume this wasn’t entirely within the showrunners’ hands. In an interview with IGN, creator Tim Miller and executive producer Dave Wilson note that while they did get to “take some wild swings” with certain episodes, “typically video game adaptations are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and with that comes some constraints” – namely, “risk-averse behaviour”. They also raise the point that Bandai Namco gave them a lot of freedom with the Pac-Man and Armored Core episodes, which gave them the opportunity to get creative with what they chose to do. This loses much of its weight when, again, we consider that the former episode was based on a game announced later in the week.
Obviously, corporations are pretty risk-averse with their IP. There’s only so much you can do with a studio that doesn’t want you to create a buckwild reinterpretation of their games. So, sure. A lot of these episodes feel like trailers. It’s not ideal, and it doesn’t make for a particularly interesting or creative show. But as someone who hasn’t played a lot of the games that were covered in the series, the way these stories were told actually did a great job of getting me interested in the stuff I wasn’t familiar with.
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Trailers, But Good Ones
It’s worth saying that each trailer episode was a pretty good trailer. The Sifu episode did a good job of making the central mechanic, where the protagonist is resurrected with every death a bit older, compelling and meaningful. Unreal Tournament’s episode rewrote Xan’s lore to create a story about rebellion, which while not being entirely faithful to the game, made for a surprisingly inspiring story.
Warhammer 40K’s episode taught me a lot about the series – I knew it was a grimdark futuristic franchise, but I didn’t know it had demons. It also produced some incredible stylised action sequences full of gore and mess, which was delightful. Same with Armored Core, which is a series I never got into, but it really gets at the mercenary heart of the games with a great performance from Keanu Reeves.
If you take these episodes as cinematic trailers – not representative of what it feels like to actually play the games, but hinting at their potential – then Secret Level has a lot of pretty good ones. The main issue is that these episodes shouldn’t have been trailers, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to run your ideas past corporate giants. Love, Death and Robots this is not, but it’s serviceable.
Secret Level is a computer-animated anthology series that tells bold, unique, and emotive stories set in popular video game franchise worlds.