Secret Level premieres on Prime Video with eight episodes on December 10, followed by additional episodes debuting on December 17.
For a few episodes at least, the animated anthology series Secret Level seems to depict a respectable range of video games and genres. The Dungeons & Dragons episode goes for a fantasy adventure, while the one for Unreal Tournament does sci-fi carnage. The art style used to adapt the martial arts of Sifu is more stylized and cartoonish than the realism favored by the episodes that follow. But it’s not long before the monotony kicks in. The kind you feel when you’re watching too many video game trailers and noticing all the common threads, dreading the inevitable next appearance of a crafting menu, a skill tree, or a floating companion character.
A good half of the shorts in the latest project from Love, Death and Robots creator and Deadpool director Tim Miller include a montage of characters dying. A full fourth of them feature some cheeky nod to a video game protagonist’s life cycle of repetition and/or resurrection. They’re almost all focused on action, going for lifelike animation, and reaching for drama that struggles to be fleshed out within a 5-to-15 minute timeframe. Someone is always firing a gun, swinging a sword, or spurting blood.
The realistic style isn’t a total wash. The D&D episode takes advantage of the animated medium by focusing on a surprising diversity of fantasy races, a stark contrast to the mostly human protagonists of Honor Among Thieves or even your uniformly gorgeous, runway-ready companions in Baldur’s Gate III. The ultra-grim exaggeration of Warhammer 40,000, too, is pleasingly distinct from Secret Level’s other sci-fi offerings, with bulky Space Marines staining their armor in luminescent blood while they drag a coffin behind them. And the episode for multiplayer shooter Crossfire, if nothing else, offers a change of pace for featuring a modern-day conflict in a series heavily tilted toward far-off futures and fantasy realms.
But on the whole, the more potentially distinct games receive the shortest episodes, some clocking in at under 10 minutes. Sifu, Spelunky, and Mega Man at least look and feel different from the rest of Secret Level, but they offer only a brief distraction from the series’ dull affinity for realism and sci-fi firearms. You might, as I did, assume the Pac-Man episode will provide some badly needed variety, but don’t hold your breath. In the single worst episode of Secret Level, the iconic character is crammed into a maze of generic, gritty, sci-fi adventure gore. It’s the only story to wholly reinterpret the source material, which the series could use more of. But adding a sword and some bloody entrails to dangle from Pac-Man only makes it feel like everything else in Secret Level.
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