The aims of the animated anthology Secret Level, whose 15 shorts are based on video and tabletop games, are clear enough: As production company Blur Studio puts it on their website, “Secret Level is our love letter to gaming.” But despite the tangible earnestness of that claim, the series fails to shake off the cynicism of its commercial function and blinkered politics. Beneath flashes of beauty and fits of inspiration lies an elaborate branding exercise.
Secret Level features a handful of shorts that conjure impressive moods. The bleak industrial landscapes in “Armored Core: Asset Management” all but subsume the episode’s protagonist (Keanu Reeves)—and the formidable mech he pilots—conveying the extent of his alienation and the stakes of his mission; the economical “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear” spares us unnecessary dialogue, setting its space marines loose with sweltering kineticism; and the martial arts revenge tale of “Sifu: It Takes a Life” is energetic, sweet, and stylish. Elsewhere, the series is charmingly cheeky, as in “Pac-Man: Circle,” which lends Pac-Man a humanoid form, a sword, and a gory quest, riffing on the gritty reboot trend of the aughts.
When it attempts substantial commentary, though, Secret Level proves to be reductive. For one, an episode set in the universe of New World questions the nature of social privilege—and provides Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a himbo king, with some delightfully absurd lines to read—but avoids reckoning with the game’s colonialist streak.
“Unreal Tournament: Xan,” meanwhile, achieves surprising pathos in its depiction of sentient robots forced to participate in arena combat. But when the machines seem to catalyze a class war, it’s hard not to wonder whose interests the uprising’s implications serve. No need to fret about our grotesque social order, I guess—AI will free the proletariat and sort it all out.
Perhaps most dubious is the Amazon anthology’s catalog of source material. New World, a largely unremarkable MMORPG, is developed by Amazon Games. “Exodus: Odyssey,” while often pretty and occasionally stirring, adapts a game that hasn’t even come out yet, giving it the air of a trailer. And most unfortunate is the episode based on Concord, a big-budget hero shooter that was released in late August and went on to become an astounding flop. The short’s cinematography belies its agenda: When a band of interstellar rogues drifts through a cosmic storm, the frame only briefly sits with the gorgeous imagery of the tempest before focusing on the crew’s faces—trying, unsuccessfully, to get us to care about their cookie-cutter personalities.
Secret Level ends with “Playtime: Fulfillment,” which imagines a city where gig workers, equipped with “augmented reality,” risk their lives to deliver packages. The episode gestures at a stance on how gamification exploits labor and corrupts the joy that games offer, but it quickly feels both exploitative and corrupt for the way it turns nuanced characters into hollow advertising fodder. One of the titular giants from Shadow of the Colossus stomps through the street, an achingly tragic being reduced to a rote kaiju. Kratos, the demigod from God of War, shows up, roars, and disappears—an inert bump in the story’s road.
That episode’s cloying, on-the-nose resolution asserts that we’ve strayed from the wonder of gaming, that the magic has curdled. But in an era of ruthless layoffs and studio closures, it’ll take more than nostalgic marketing to make things right.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
