Secret Level

Secret Level is a passion project, but it's also a bit unseemly. There's no questioning the talent involved. This is an audiovisual treat of the highest level. Yet it's also an expensive advertisement, often for products that don't exist anymore, or are struggling to maintain customers.

It's an anthology, so there's no connective tissue here apart from the fact that all source material is from games. Even that is tenuous at best, as the titles are all over the place. On one hand, you've got recognizable classics like Warhammer 40k and Dungeons & Dragons. It gets weirder when they're sat next to the already defunct Concord or the Chinese MOBA Honor of Kings. Naturally, Amazon's own MMO, New World: Aeternum gets a big showcase featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The stories range from a sparse 8 minutes to pointless long 20-plus minutes in length. Some, like Mega Man, feel like announcement trailers for upcoming games. Others (Crossfire, Unreal Tournament) feel like school projects. Incredibly advanced and well-told school projects, but oddly inconsequential nonetheless. They surely capture the game mechanics and sprinkle Easter eggs for the fans. But I didn't get them. I don't play the games, so it was like watching a bunch of kids playing cops and robbers.

There's also the underlying sense that we're paying for ads now. Especially when it comes to games that aren't even out yet.

Luckily, a few standouts are so good, they make the entire series worth watching. The Outer Worlds, in particular, is a short that puts all the rest to shame. It captures the grim humor and desperate romanticism of the game, and builds a powerful tale of unrequited love around it. This was the short that came closest in reminding me of the exquisite Animatrix and its groundbreaking Final Flight of the Osiris animation, which saw a brief theatrical run in the mid-2000s.

Elsewhere, Keanu Reeves is surprisingly good as a washed-up mech pilot in Armored Core, while Concord proves that the ill-destined shooter should have been a story-driven adventure all along. It's not anything new – in fact, you can easily see the lifts from The Expanse and Firefly – but it's so breezy and fun that it doesn't matter. I wish Concorde had got a better deal than it did if only to get more stories featuring these characters.

And Arnold? Bless him for such a game and energetic performance, but a voice actor he is not. It's a good thing the sweet and funny story of Aeternum makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Secret Level is a fine distraction, but it's only for fans of the franchises that it's here to promote. It won't reveal anything new about the material, and most of these stories coast by on IP alone. If you can't tell a Tiamat from a Mechwarrior, you probably won't get much out of this.