For the past few years, big screen video game adaptations have been a mixed bag. It’s been rare for the films to be quite as bad as Borderlands (2024), which has served as a reminder of just how difficult it is to translate a game into another medium, coming off the back of 2022 adaptations like Uncharted, which never seemed to capture the tonal consistency and intensity of its source material, and Five Nights at Freddy’s which, while leaden with Easter eggs and references to the games, fell flat as an actual horror film. In contrast to this, hype continues to build for the upcoming second season of The Last of Us, and Prime Video is hoping to continue the success of Fallout with the newly announced anthology series Secret Level.
From the team behind the Netflix anthology Love, Death, & Robots, the upcoming Secret Level aims to tell short stories set in the worlds of various acclaimed video games – and game-adjacent properties – with the trailer showcasing Space Marines from the world of Warhammer 40,000; God of War’s Kratos; Mega Man, and more. On paper, this has the potential to be great. Drawing on games that are acclaimed for their storytelling – like God of War and The Outer Wilds – could be the perfect way to remind people not only how good these games are, but to show that they can work well in other forms. That is, if they’re able to sidestep what could potentially be the biggest problem with the nascent series.
The trailer for Secret Level addresses itself to, rather than a viewer, an imagined gamer. Cutting from the moody lighting and neon gore of Space Marines putting down an unseen alien to the voice of a narrator who declares that “this world has waited for your arrival,” does something that could be setting Secret Level up to fall: it treats it like a video game. There’s a tension throughout the trailer of interesting narrative bursts from these stories, and the idea that they’re there for a gamer. As the narrator says “you shall open the door, because you are the chosen,” we’re treated to a propulsive series of cuts between the worlds of Sifu, God of War, and Armored Core. Seeing these worlds in a new context – even in short fragments like this – is thrilling. The problem is that Secret Level doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be: the clips from Sifu recreate the aesthetics of the game, but this isn’t true for other stylized titles like Mega Man. It’s unclear about if this wants to be a kind of recreation of the games, or an attempt to move them into a different medium.
One of the most acclaimed episodes from the first season of The Last of Us was ‘Long, Long Time,’ which expanded on a character from the original game in a way that feels unique to a TV adaptation. Something like ‘Long, Long Time’ would never work in The Last of Us as a video game, but is perfectly at home when adapted. And while there are moments that nod to the source material – the image of Bill and Frank’s open window is reminiscent of the game’s title screen – by avoiding the gamification of the TV series, it can both acknowledge what makes The Last of Us unique as a video game, while also doing something that only works in a different form. If anything, this recent wave of adaptations shows that TV might be the ideal form for adapting video game stories into more traditional narratives. After all, on the other end of the spectrum to The Last of Us and Fallout is the end of the Dwayne Johnson starring Doom adaptation from 2005 which, in its final act, fully embraces the roots of its boomer shooter inspiration, turning into a first-person shooter. This scene, more than anything, serves as a reminder that games are much more interesting to play than they are to observe. Our first look at Secret Level seems to present at that crossroads of distinct narrative, and gamified run of greatest hits; we see visceral combat from Sifu, the gore of Warhammer, and the vast, grimly lit mechs of Armored Core, but nothing that tells us what stories these worlds might be able to tell.
Secret Level is, above all else, full of potential. As contemporary games – whether made by triple-a studios or indie developers – continue to challenge what the medium can do not just in terms of technological specs and graphical fidelity but storytelling and narrative power, this could be the perfect time for a series that can avoid the pitfalls that have plagued video game adaptations both old and new. While it might be tempting to say that avoiding the video game nature of the source material is a mistake – after all, the recent Super Mario Bros. movie was a box office smash and it was full of relentless moments of fanservice and video game style sequences – slavish devotion to the source material could end up doing more harm than good to the stories in Secret Level. For all of the money that Super Mario Bros. made, it always feels slightly half-baked as a film, focusing instead on providing long term fans with a chance to Leo-point at the screen as audio cues, powerups, and visual flourishes turn the film into a kind of lengthy demo reel for the game franchise.
In contrast, the recent successes of shows like The Last of Us, Fallout, and Arcane show that the best way to make a video game adaptation work is to keep its new medium in mind, tailoring the stories that are told so that they could only work on TV, or the big screen. The end of the Doom film is bad because it simply stops being a film, while something like ‘Long, Long Time’ succeeds due to its willingness to embrace something that feels counter-intuitive: the fact that it isn’t a video game. If Secret Level is able to do this, then we might be ending the year with one of the best series of game adaptations yet.
For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming video game adaptations on the way in 2024 and beyond.
