Following the success of Fallout, Amazon is rapidly expanding its slate of small-screen video game adaptations for Prime Video. Its live-action Tomb Raider and God of War series are in production, and shows based on hit gaming properties like Mass Effect, Life is Strange, and Wolfenstein are being developed. It seems clear that Amazon wants Prime Video to become the go-to streaming home for video game adaptations.

However, its first forays into this increasingly competitive arena were never limited to Fallout. In December 2024, the same year Fallout made its hugely successful debut, Prime Video launched a very different gaming adaptation. Secret Level is an ambitious animated anthology that did not adapt one established property, but instead opened the door to fifteen separate gaming worlds.

Created by Deadpool director Tim Miller, Secret Level explores a different gaming franchise in each episode, ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000 to Pac-Man, Armored Core, Mega Man, and The Outer Worlds, and others. The result is a collection of bite-sized adaptations, with different settings and tones sharing one anthology banner. Secret Level never became the wider pop-culture phenomenon that Fallout is, but its importance to Amazon’s gaming strategy is becoming clear.

Prime Video’s Secret Level Feels Like 15 Bite-Sized Movies

Sci-fi anthology TV series are built around telling disconnected stories, but they usually maintain a thematic and/or atmospheric throughline that makes them feel like parts of the same show. For example, Black Mirror repeatedly examines humanity’s relationship with technology, while The Twilight Zone builds itself around unsettling stories with twist endings. Secret Level is considerably less interested in creating that kind of consistency.

The only fundamental connection between the fifteen Secret Level episodes is that they are adaptations of games. Even with this common ground, however, there’s enormous variation. “Dungeons & Dragons: The Queen’s Cradle” is traditional fantasy, “Sifu: It Takes a Life” is a martial arts revenge story, and “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear” is grimdark military science fiction. “PAC-MAN: Circle,” meanwhile, transforms one of gaming’s most colorful properties into a straight-up sci-fi horror.

Watching Secret Level feels less like progressing through a conventional anthology and more like watching fifteen bite-sized movies. Each installment establishes its own universe, characters, rules, aesthetic, and genre before disappearing and handing the screen to something completely different. Even the animation in Secret Level changes considerably in presentation depending on the specific game being adapted.

That freedom gives the Prime Video sci-fi show a degree of variety few competitors can genuinely match. An episode can deliver fantasy adventuring before the next pivots into brutal science fiction, eccentric comedy, or dystopian action. The lack of a unifying atmosphere could have made Secret Level feel disjointed. Instead, unpredictability becomes the entire point.

Secret Level Is Getting Its First Spinoff

The clearest evidence that Secret Level essentially contains fifteen miniature worlds is what Amazon is doing with one of them. The anthology’s Warhammer 40,000 installment, “And They Shall Know No Fear,” is being expanded into its own animated series. The new project will focus on the Deathwatch, an elite Space Marine force dedicated to combating alien threats, with the original episode’s director, Dave Wilson, returning at the helm.

It’s an unusually ambitious evolution for a science-fiction anthology. Shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone are defined by constantly abandoning their worlds and beginning again. Secret Level, on the other hand, seems to be treating its episodes as proof-of-concepts for potential adaptations. It’s an interesting strategy, but one that makes sense. A short can introduce the tone, visual language, and potential of a gaming universe before Amazon commits to a full series.

If the animated Warhammer 40,000 series succeeds and other episodes eventually receive similar treatment, Secret Level could become something much bigger than an intriguing animated experiment. It would effectively give Prime Video a built-in laboratory for video game adaptations, capable of testing properties through spectacular shorts before expanding the strongest candidates. In that scenario, Secret Level would not simply sit alongside Amazon’s growing collection of gaming shows. It could become the foundation for an entire branch of them.

Release Date

December 10, 2024

Network

Amazon Prime Video