Secret levelAmazon's stunningly animated video game anthology homage, is either a beautiful, impressive vehicle for telling some short stories or a soulless piece of C-content, depending on which episode you're watching.
The show was primarily developed by Blur Studio with some help from Amazon's MGM Studios. If you're familiar with Blur's work on some of these best movie trailers from the last decade or so, you won't be surprised to find that the animation in all 15 episodes is truly beautiful. It's the remarkable lack of heart and soul in telling the story, striving for great emotional prestige, that lets down several episodes that, had they been left out, could have made for a more impressive series. Instead, we essentially have 15 trailers, all with roughly the same emotional cadence, and few of them manage to tell a story that doesn't just feel like a really expensive advertisement.
When I look at the 15 games Secret levelI'm still not sure why the show chose these stories to tell the anthology episode cover. But I have a theory: An Amazon series releasing an episode based on the company's MMO New world under the guise of an artistic endeavor facilitates advertising. Concord, a short-lived hero shooter Sony has no intention of promoting it any more, but was clearly hoping it would be its next big live service hit, and has dedicated an entire episode, which feels like an extended theatrical trailer, to “We Got.” Guardians of the Galaxy “home” world. In other words, while several of the games are featured in Secret level Because they're huge properties with cultural potential, making them the obvious choice for a video game homage anthology, most episodes feel like extensions of marketing.
Secret level will air on December 10th, meaning some of the games this show highlights have either not yet been released or were in active development alongside the show. Concord is of course the strangest and most awkward inclusion given the fate of the game, but it is what it is Exodus: Odyssey– Archetype Entertainment's upcoming sci-fi game from Wizards of the Coast – which receives one of the most exhausting episodes. The game was announced less than a year ago and we haven't even seen it in action yet. The Wizards of the Coast properties also appear again in a Dungeons & Dragons Consequence. Again, Secret level makes more sense as a business transaction than as 15 stories told because someone out there genuinely feels they're worth telling.
Concord is not the only episode from PlayStation. By far the worst and least confident episode in the series, it follows a young woman who works as a delivery courier for a company that rewards its employees for their personal best delivery times with tried-and-true cosmetic upgrades. She ditches her monotonous business life by hanging out with a blue slime monster and running like a juggernaut from virtual (or maybe real? It's not entirely clear) versions of PlayStation characters Shadow of the Colossus and Kratos God of war as she cycles through the city. See, you wake up every morning with this ambition, trying to get the best cosmetics while working your life for your careless corporate owners, but the really cool kids don't accept this system with their silly little jobs and play PlayStation games instead ? Corporations are evil and manipulate you into doing their bidding with terrible rewards, but returning to your PlayStation is your safe place? The brand will never hurt you? Or so? Unless you are a developer under their umbrellaI guess. It trades any form of coherent storytelling for cameo appearances from a number of PlayStation characters to get fans clapping and cheering, and could easily be condensed into a Super Bowl TV spot.
Several episodes are strangely unimpressive. CrossfireThe episode is a fairly generic military shooter cutscene, characterized almost entirely by early-2000s edgy bleakness. ExodusThe episode is great to watch, but if a gun had been held to my head I probably wouldn't have been able to tell which game it was from. The times Secret level's episodes arise when the show relies on stylistic animation that doesn't fit with the rest of the series. That's 15 unique games. Why do half of them look the same? It makes a big difference if they look different, like the episode it's based on Sifuwhich summarizes the game's roguelike martial arts structure, and the for Cavingwhich eliminates the need for the photorealism used by most Secret level and captures the adventurous spirit of Mossmouth's spelunking adventures.
Some of the adaptations are less faithful to the original. The Pac Man The episode takes a psychological body horror approach to the early arcade megahit, a concept that's interesting in a vacuum and leads to some of the series' most memorable sequences. However, in the context of Pac ManBecause it's a typical all-ages story, it feels like the officially licensed equivalent of a Disney character being thrust into a horror mansion as soon as it becomes public domain. Mega man doesn't go quite as hard in that direction, but it still turns the colorful action platformer series into a somewhat dark coming-of-age story that gets married Secret levelThe prestigious storytelling follows the father-son dynamic of the titular robot hero and his creator. It's one of the standout episodes of the series, but even better episodes like this, SifuAnd Caving I can't get rid of the stench of cynical advertising that permeates the entire show.
Secret level is, in a word, uneven. The animation is stunning, but Blur Studio seems to rely too heavily on its experience in creating trailers with swelling emotional arcs designed to lure a customer to the nearest game store. When creator Tim Miller announced the show again Gamescom in AugustHe tearfully called it a “love letter” to video games. But the result is more reminiscent of a collection of expensive commercials, one of them for a game that you can no longer play.
