Secret Level Season 1 review: Everybody has a story

Blur Studio has spent years bringing video game worlds to life through cutscenes and cinematics. It has also made the jump to streaming entertainment with Love Death + Robots. Secret Level, an anthology series created in conjunction with Amazon MGM Studios, blends those two ideas together and allows Blur to tell stories in nearly any gaming world imaginable. The result is an outstanding series of short stories and a sense that this is an anthology that can thrive for years to come.

Hello worlds

The magic of Secret Level is less about sticking to a given game's core narrative. After all, games themselves are perfectly capable of telling those particular tales. The magic of this series is about telling ancillary stories within a game's specific universe. It's also about getting experimental in one short's case, but I'll get to that one shortly.

With individual runtimes that last no longer than 20 minutes, a Secret Level short has enough time to establish its world, introduce a handful of characters, and tell a cohesive narrative without overstaying its welcome. Because of its abbreviated format, it also means there's no downtime. Viewers are thrown right into the action in many cases. There isn't enough time for individual character development, which can sometimes be to Secret Level's detriment. That's true of shorts like Mega Man, Spelunky, and Armored Core where the episodes wrap up and there's a desire to learn more about those characters. Although part of that might be because the former two were the two shortest episodes by a fair margin and it felt like there was more room to explore there.

Ultimately, individual character development isn't really the objective. The idea is to get people attached to these settings, these worlds, these games, and give viewers the urge to experience more stories or create their own by picking up the source material. From that lens, Secret Level feels like a tremendous success. I certainly didn't give a hoot about something like New World: Aeternum prior to watching this, but its Secret Level short gave me a fresh perspective of its core premise. The same can be said of Crossfire, which takes its objective-based multiplayer formula and crafts a political action thriller around it

Open to interpretation

One of my lasting impressions of Secret Level is that while there's room to tell stories across hundreds of different game worlds, there's also room to experiment with stories that people may already know. One of the most divisive episodes will likely be the one based on classic arcade staple Pac-Man. What does one think of upon hearing that name? They likely think of a yellow cartoon mascot eating dots, running across a maze, and chomping on ghosts. Secret Level does something wildly different. Let me emphasize this point: This is not the Pac-Man that anybody is expecting.

Without giving specific spoilers, the Pac-Man episode does away with any notion of a fun and kid-friendly adventure. Instead, this episode interprets Pac-Man as an unsettling tale of psychological horror. It takes Pac-Man's core idea of always eating and turns it into a harrowing tale of survival. On the surface, it's nothing like Pac-Man, but it also manages to be a clever deconstruction of Pac-Man's whole core premise.

There will be people who hate this. People will wonder why they can't get a colorful, whimsical Blur Studio take on a beloved hero. However, Pac-Man's episode also takes the boldest leap, not content to play things safe. In doing so, it also shows the potential of what Secret Level can be. It can push boundaries and give people stories they may have never known they wanted.

Well-kept 'Secret'

The saying "There's something for everybody" is a trite cliche, but it's one that rings true for Secret Level. The first season features gripping tales of comradery and heroism (Dungeons & Dragons), high-octane action (Crossfire), and even comedy (New World: Aeternum, thanks largely to a very game Arnold Schwarzenegger). The expansive voice cast puts its all into this, especially Keanu Reeves in the Armored Core short, a performance that will have people wondering what a full-blown game with him in the lead role could look like. With that said, a few performances felt like they could have been better. Ariana Greenblatt, for example, bounces back nicely from a Borderlands outing she'd probably like to forget, but her performance as Ana from Spelunky felt like it was missing something.

This series is also a testament to Blur Studio's computer-generated visual storytelling style. While each episode will look familiar to anybody who has followed Blur's years of work, they also have an individual sense of flare that makes them fit into their subject matter. Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, and The Outer Worlds don't look like one another, but they still look like a Blur-made cinematic, if that makes sense.

One final thing to note about Secret Level is that even Concord's short shows a flash of brilliance and a potential for growth. Concord's episode is an indicator of what could have been if it hadn't been caught in a whirlwind of bad decisions and mismanagement. It also proves that at the end of the day, even the worst games or the games that are abandoned have stories that are worth telling.

This review is based on early screeners of Secret Level provided by Amazon. Fallout Season 1 debuts on Prime Video on Tuesday, December 10.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?