There are some standouts among the 15 animated shorts in Amazon's new videogame-themed anthology series—the New World episode is pretty darn good—but on the whole, Secret Level has all the flaws you might expect to find in a bunch of publisher-approved odes to iconic (and some not-so-iconic) brand mascots. Some of the episodes feel like ads, others like cutscenes that would be fine if we got to take control when they were over, but don't impress as standalone stories.
The episodes are fairly short, running around 10-12 minutes each. It feels like brevity should be a virtue here—who wants an hour-long Pac-Man joke?—but they actually wind up feeling too slight in many cases.
