Ever since Castlevania became a hit on Netflix, game studios have had their titles optioned out to any streamer looking for a potential multi-season hit of their own. Prime Video’s already got Fallout and eventually Mass Effect in its deck, and Secret Level is aiming to offer something different by being an anthology covering titles across multiple decades instead of a singular series. The end result is akin to the first games in what clearly aspires to start a larger franchise: solid and showing tons of promise, but also in need of some refinement and sharper focus.
Despite a lack of genuine connective tissue, Secret Level’s 15-episode season can be divided into three slices of video game history: the games that were, games that are, and games that will be. Most of the show is made up of current games, which include major mainstream titles like Armored Core and Space Marine II as well as more genre or region-specific darlings. Meanwhile, the former shines a spotlight on franchises whose individual developers haven’t done anything major with them in years, and the latter hypes up games whose creators are hoping become a big hit when they land in the next year or three.
If there’s anything that links Secret Level’s episodes together, it’s that each one really does feel like it belongs to the title it’s attached to, whether it’s just telling a story in that particular universe or pointedly setting up important events that matter in that game’s lore. In that regard, most episodes work well enough as standalones that will hit much harder if you have the proper context for what’s going on. That’s clearly by design, since in the case of many of these, this may be the only chance they have to connect with a larger audience—unless something changes over at Epic Games, for example, this show is giving Unreal Tournament its last hurrah for what may be, if not forever, then a while.
What brings things down is that collectively, a lot of the episodes are too visually similar to one another. Blur Studio’s decision to create most of them in a CG, photorealistic style similar to the game trailers it first cut its teeth on, give much of the show the same energy as watching a long cinematic you’d see at the Game Awards or E3 back in its heyday. Individual episodes for Sifu and Spelunky are the most striking and best of the bunch; they provide a nice change of pace by being stylized and trying to evoke the looks of their respective games.
Your favorite Secret Level episode will ultimately depend on how you feel about a particular game, property, or character. Understandably, the show is mainly made up of current-era games like Armored Core and Amazon Games’ own New World: Aeturnum, and only some of them succeed at drawing enough interest to check out their source material. The episodes are at their strongest when they’re inviting you into their world or offering fun sights to see, as is the case with Spelunky’s playful sense of humor and musings on the appeal of roguelikes, which have really grown into a popular genre over the last decade.
But at its worst, an episode will feel like a brand’s intruding on the proceedings to hype itself up. Despite everyone lining up to see the spectacle of the Concord episode months after the game was shut down and its studio canned, it’s an ultimately Fine endeavor for what was a Fine shooter that got nothing close to a fair shake from players or its own parent company. Not the worst or best of the bunch, but it does an all right enough job of showing off its sci-fi world and providing backstory the game barely hinted at before its plug got pulled. Meanwhile, the singular PlayStation episode is a nakedly corporate affair that feels like a stab at recapturing the magic of old PlayStation 3 and 4 commercials that misses the mark on its own merits, and feels even uglier given how it’s spent the year repeatedly falling on its face.
Those two episodes may sum up the majority of Secret Level: there’s isolated moments where you can see the show reach toward its potential and be worthy of standing alongside the likes of Star Wars Visions. It’s a decent first effort, but for it to have a future and rise above the promotional material that birthed it, it’ll need to dial back its more corporate leanings. Ask anyone who plays games regularly, and they’ll tell you how much things stop being fun when the suits make themselves known.
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