Secret Level
Fifteen animated shorts set in video game worlds.
Secret Level (stylized as SΞCRΞT LΞVΞL) is an adult animated anthology series created by Tim Miller for Amazon Prime Video, consisting of fifteen stories set in the worlds of different video games. Produced by Miller's Blur Studio with Amazon MGM Studios, the series features a voice cast including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Hart, and Laura Bailey. The first eight episodes were released on December 10, 2024, with the remaining seven following on December 17, 2024, and the series was renewed for a second season later that month.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Anthology; Science fiction
- Creative director
- Jerome Denjean
- Music
- Maxime Hervé
- Rob Cairns
- 2WEI
- Danny Bensei
- Saunder Jurriaans
- Kotomi
- Language
- English
- Episodes
- 15
- Executive producers
- Tim Miller
- Dave Wilson
- Jennifer Miller
- Nan Morales
- J. T. Petty
- Producer
- Victoria Howard
- Samantha Brainerd
- Mike Rosemeyer
- Editor
- Matt Mariska; Julian Clarke
Facts from the source article.
Production
Secret Level was developed by Tim Miller, who serves as an executive producer through his company Blur Studio. That studio, alongside Amazon MGM Studios, handled production after Amazon saw how well Love, Death & Robots performed on Netflix and decided to commission the same team to build a similar anthology series, this time centered on video game franchises. Dave Wilson is also an executive producer and the supervising director. Miller and Wilson have said the entire project took three years to complete. During development, Sony was trying to turn its upcoming game Concord into a major multimedia property on the scale of Star Wars, so it hired Blur Studio to create an episode that would advance the game's story and introduce new characters. Production wrapped before the series aired, but Sony released Concord and then pulled it from sale within two weeks because of unexpectedly poor sales and few players. Miller said they never considered cutting the Concord episode despite Sony pulling the game it was based on. He kept it partly to respect the work already done and partly because other episodes also featured games that had not yet come out—for example, the Pac-Man episode turned out to be a preview for Bandai Namco's upcoming game Shadow Labyrinth. On December 17, 2024, Amazon renewed Secret Level for a second season. On August 3, 2026, a spinoff series based on the Warhammer 40,000 episode was announced as being in development.
Promotion
The show was first revealed at Gamescom on August 20, 2024, where a trailer showcasing clips from every episode was also shown. A pilot from the Armored Core episode sparked widespread online chatter because he looked a lot like Keanu Reeves. Prime Video initially refused to confirm who played the character, but ComicBook.com noted that a post from Armored Core’s social media account was flooded with comments about Reeves. IGN’s Wesley Yin-Poole suggested that if the actor wasn’t Reeves, he could still demand royalties because the resemblance was so strong. In October 2024, the studio finally confirmed that Reeves was indeed in the cast, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Heaven Hart, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Michael Beach, Emily Swallow, and Claudia Doumit. A video game called Shadow Labyrinth, which picks up where the Pac-Man episode leaves off, came out in 2025.
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Secret Level has an approval rating of 69% based on 16 reviews, with an average rating of 6.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads, 'Secret Level's melange of video game shorts can't help but feel like a glorified sizzle reel, but these vignettes pack a mean punch in small doses.' Metacritic assigned a score of 53 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating mixed or average reviews. Steven Nguyen Scaife of IGN gave the show a 5/10 review, saying it struggles to find satisfying stories for a short-form anthology, while Aramide Tinubu of Variety wrote that the show acts as poorly written AI summaries of massive tales.
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