Secret Level boils the rich universe of gaming down to guns and sludge

Two minutes into the fifth episode of Secret Level, Prime Video’s anthology series that tells short stories set in the world of existing gaming properties, a text splash pops up, repeating one of gaming’s most famous mantras: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” Warhammer 40K‘s iconic introduction holds true for Love, Death + Robots creator Tim Miller’s new animation project, too—at least, if you add “sludgy graphics, lazy cynicism, and a pathological obsession with violence and repetition” into the future’s pantheon of sins.

To watch the vast majority of Secret Level‘s episodes is to see the bright, brilliant universe of gaming boiled down to its basest metals, as most of its entries do little more than render different flavors of combat, grunting, and rote cartoon badassery into the glossy house style of animation studio Blur, best known for making video-game trailers that all look pretty much alike (good-looking machines, weirdly shiny people, lots of smoke and fog). There are splashes of color here out on the margins—and even, god forbid, a little comedy, including a surprisingly great voice turn from a slumming-it Arnold Schwarzenegger—but for the most part, the series takes gaming brands, both well-known and not, and renders them as little more than different kinds of dudes pointing different kinds of guns at each other, repeated unto infinity. Despite a few outliers, it’s a shocking (and presumably expensive) squandering of potential.

With episodes arriving at varying lengths that range from seven to seventeen minutes, Secret Level is, invariably, at its best when it moves fastest, with quick-burst installments like “Sifu” and “Spelunky” projecting the most life into the virtual proceedings. (It doesn’t hurt that these are some of the only episodes that try for more distinctive visual flair, aiming to recapture at least part of the look of their source material.) For longer episodes, like those centered on Dungeons & Dragons, Armored Core, and Warhammer, the results are much more mixed: The series gets some juice out of recreating iconic combat concepts in glossy CGI. (This is the coolest the Dungeons & Dragons Monk class has ever looked in motion, to pick one example out of several.) But with so many stories focused on the same themes of mayhem, repetition, and redemption, there is only so much that gloss and celebrity cameos can do. (Keanu Reeves, starring in the Armored Core sequence, is utterly wasted in a pseudo-Matrix riff that offers up none of the life of his surprisingly good game turn in Cyberpunk 2077.)

There are standouts here, undeniably, and not always where you might expect them: If you are unfamiliar with the Chinese strategy game Honor Of Kings, you might come away genuinely impressed with the way the short (directed by Csaba Vicze from a teleplay by JT Petty) abstracted out ideas about leadership and destiny in visually inventive ways. (Honestly, it also helps that the episodes isn’t about buff people pointing assault rifles at each other.) The aforementioned Schwarzenegger showcase, adapted from Amazon’s own MMORPG New World, at least has something lively and clever to say about the inevitable repetition of gaming. And you can’t help but have a bit of admiration for “Pac-Man: Circle,” an over-the-top example of “What’s the darkest we can make a thing and still have it recognizably be Pac-Man?” that at least seems to know it’s being absurd.

The fact is, though, that when presented with the ultimate toy box to create in, the writers and directors of Secret Level have frequently opted to do little more than smash their action figures together in brutish fashion, rarely reaching beyond the most first-level understanding of what a gaming universe could be. (Some of the blame here is on the producers, too, who lined up the brands in question, favoring universes already inclined toward gun-based sludge.) Gaming is huge, vast, joyful—something Secret Level at least tries to play lip service to with its final installment, “Playtime,” the only episode with an overt interest in commenting on play itself. It’s a pity, however, that it does so with a glorified Sony commercial voiced by Kevin Hart. (That final episode is the spot where the corporate synergy of it all looms largest, but the idea that you’re watching extremely pricey spon-con here is never far from top of mind.)

The nice thing about an anthology show, of course, is that you can take it in à la carte, so if you just want to see a CGI Mega Man pose while an orchestral cover of the title screen theme from Mega Man 2 plays, you’re in luck. (Or if you’re an enthusiast for Sony’s already-canceled online shooter Concord and crave seeing it get one last gasp of weird, “everybody talks too fast” life, well, that’s here, too.) Taken individually, few of these shorts are bad, even if some of them are ugly. (The Outer Worlds installment, despite having one of the best scripts of the lot, is also the one that puts the most focus on human faces—completely to its detriment.) Taken as a whole, though, they represent an inability to look at gaming and see much more than a grim, dark present.

Secret Level premieres December 10 on Prime Video