When I first saw the episode list for Secret Level, it gave me the ick. Amazon’s animated series from Love, Death & Robots creator Blur Studio initially sounds like a great way to bring our favorite video game stories to the small screen, but then it turned out the show wasn’t adapting our favorite video game stories at all.
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Instead of CGI shorts based on The Legend of Zelda, Red Dead Redemption, or Hades, we got episodes based on mobile games, a tie-in to the already-cancelled Concord, and Amazon’s own MMO New World: Aeternum.
Secret Level More Like Secretly A Commercial
Secret Level felt like a Summer Games Fest montage of CGI trailers… because it mostly was. Beyond the timely Concord, New World, and Space Marine 2 episodes, we also got an episode based on Wizard’s of the Coast’s upcoming space RPG Exodus, an episode based on The Outer Worlds 2 perfectly timed for the new TGA trailer, and the worst one, a PlayStation-themed episode that could have been written by Sony’s marketing department. Remember a few years ago when a Sony State of Play opened with that weirdly long commercial for PlayStation that felt like a short film? This is the animated version of that.
The one episode I really appreciate from Secret Level’s first season was Pac-Man: Circle. A gritty horror reimaging of a classic character like Pac-Man feels like a perfect fit for Secret Level, and I was hopeful that a second season would take more big swings like that. In interviews, Secret Level’s producer Dave Wilson talked about the freedom they were given by Bandai Namco to create that episode. While the rest of the season felt like a tightly controlled extension of a publisher’s large-scale marketing plan, Pac-Man was the one episode where the filmmakers had free reign to explore the character and tell a story they were excited to tell, and I admired that.
Just Kidding
Except, as we now know, that wasn’t really true. Just like the others, the Pac-Man episode turned out to be yet another ad for an upcoming game. Shadow Labyrinth was revealed at The Game Awards just a few weeks after the episode debuted. What a stunt! I imagine we were supposed to say, “Oh wowee! That cool Pac-Man episode is getting turned into a video game!” And maybe I would say that, if I was a total mark.
What’s next? The Mega Man episode was teeing up Capcom’s big series reboot? The Armored Core one was the prelude to a live-action Keanu Reeves film? I mean I’ll take it, obviously, but I don’t have to be happy about it.
Why does everything have to be part of some bigger brand campaign? Why can’t anything just be cool for the sake of being cool? I don’t know if the producers of Secret Level even like these games and have their own stories to tell, or if they were just taking bids from whoever had the most cash to burn. I get it’s show business, but this is just shameless.
I’m willing to give the next season of Secret Level a chance, and I sincerely hope it has a clearer point of view and a reason to exist than the first season. We get enough CGI trailers already from the big award shows and publisher showcases – and you don’t have to pay Amazon a subscription fee to watch them.
Secret Level is a computer-animated anthology series that tells bold, unique, and emotive stories set in popular video game franchise worlds.