Prime Video's TV-14 Sci-Fi Masterpiece Delivers 15 Genres In One

Published Sep 29, 2026, 11:50 PM EDT Tom is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, with expertise covering everything from hilarious sitcoms to jaw-dropping sci-fi epics. Initially he was an Updates writer, though before long he found his way to the TV and movies team. He now spends his days keeping Screen Rant readers informed about the TV shows of yesteryear, whether it's recommending hidden gems that may have been missed by genre fans or deep diving into ways your favorite shows have (or haven't) stood the test of time. Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check. 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