Prime Video's 15-Part Sci-Fi Series Makes Even Fallout Look Small

Published Aug 29, 2026, 8:04 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Going back to the weirdo Bob Hoskins Mario movie and the FPS-styled Dwayne Johnson Doom movie, video game adaptations have always been notoriously terrible. Video games are a rich, immersive experience, so the best-case scenario for a filmed adaptation is basically to be a less visceral and exciting version of the original. The Alicia Vikander Tomb Raider movie had plenty of over-the-shoulder stealth action, but it’s not as much fun when you’re not holding the controller and doing the sneaking yourself. Over the past couple of years, the video game adaptation curse has finally been broken. Arcane has brought the world of League of Legends to television with the quintessential dystopian saga of the underworld revolting against the ruling class. Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have used the freedom of cross-cutting and multi-perspective storytelling to expand the characters of The Last of Us on HBO. One of the best video game adaptations to come along during this renaissance period has been Fallout on Prime Video. Westworld duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have managed to turn a series of very loose, malleable roleplaying games, whose stories and characters usually depend entirely on the individual player’s choices, into a single, serialized, cohesive drama. Fallout is one of the biggest, most ambitious shows on television. The costumers and set designers and visual effects artists have brought the world of the games to life in live-action, complete with barren wastelands and hideous mutant monstrosities and familiar locations like New Vegas and the Vaults. Much like Band of Brothers, it’s TV worthy of being shown on the big screen. But, at the end of the day, it’s confined to just one world, and just one video game mythology. Amazon has an even more ambitious video game show that isn’t confined to a single universe. Secret Level Is Amazon's Most Ambitious Sci-Fi Show Secret Level is an animated show, so you could say that Fallout is more ambitious by default because it’s doing the same crazy things in live-action. But despite being animated, which is basically the same medium used for the cutscenes of the original games, Secret Level is still a much more ambitious video game adaptation than Fallout. Fallout is just an adaptation of Fallout, but Secret Level tackles multiple beloved I.P.s, each with their own dedicated fan base and complicated mythos, with just a few minutes available to tell each story. After bursting onto the scene as the director of the first Deadpool movie, Tim Miller went on to co-spearhead Netflix’s animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots with David Fincher. Miller created Secret Level on his own, and while Love, Death & Robots told original stories, Secret Level plays in the existing sandboxes of a bunch of different gaming franchises. The first season of Secret Level consists of 15 standalone shorts based on a smattering of different video games and franchises, ranging from Pac-Man to Mega Man to Dungeons & Dragons to a mishmash of various PlayStation titles (that last one — the season 1 finale, “Playtime: Fulfillment” — puts Kratos, Helldivers, and a Colossus all in the same episode). Miller assembled a stacked voice cast, including the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his son Patrick Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart and his daughter Heaven Hart, video game voice acting royalty Laura Bailey, Keanu Reeves, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and The Boys’ Claudia Doumit. In a streaming age where no new show’s fate is certain, Secret Level was renewed for season 2 just a couple of weeks after season 1 dropped on Prime — and there’s a spinoff based on the Warhammer 40,000 episode in development. Fallout is certainly an impressive show, with a cinematic scale and a dazzling sense of spectacle, but Secret Level is even more impressive. Secret Level Release Date December 10, 2024 Network Amazon Prime Video