Secret Level reimagines Pac-Man through a grisly Black Mirror lens

Prime Video’s Secret Level does mostly by-the-numbers, brand-friendly adaptations of gaming properties like Unreal Tournament, Dungeons & Dragons, and Warhammer 40,000 across its 15 animated short films. Not so for its take on Pac-Man, a game which the show’s creators have reimagined in the most gruesome way possible. That episode, “Circle,” is maybe Secret Level’s most viscerally violent take on a beloved game franchise.

It’s also the Secret Level episode that strays furthest from its source material: an abstract, story-free, 40-year-old arcade game. In doing so, it’s one of the most intriguing animated shorts to come out of the anthology.

“Circle” interprets the concepts of Pac-Man — eating, ghosts, endless series of mazes — very liberally. The episode focuses on a reluctant warrior who’s been pulled out of hibernation, instructed to eat (and eat and eat) his prey to become stronger so that he can survive a strange alien planet’s deadly flora and fauna. Guiding that warrior to consume, and to find a way out of a figurative maze, is a golden sphere named Puck.

Puck, played by The Mandalorian’s Emily Swallow, is clearly telegraphed as a cold, mercenary aide to the episode’s swordsman. But it’s not clear the extreme lengths she’s willing to go in the name of survival, and what the maze’s struggle truly means until the episode’s final moments. Like many episodes of Netflix’s bleak Black Mirror, “Circle” will leave viewers feeling like they’ve been punched in the gut by its end. And any children who might tune in looking for a cute Pac-Man TV show will likely be traumatized by Secret Level’s choices.

But “Circle” does stay true to the themes of Pac-Man in broad strokes. The Swordsman, dropped into a dark world with seemingly no clear exit, chomps his way through his enemies, hoping to slake an unquenchable thirst. It’s just not his hunger driving the action, it’s Puck’s.

With survival games and roguelikes still very much in fashion, perhaps the people who make Pac-Man will find an all-new audience thanks to Secret Level. As game-to-TV adaptations go, this one feels like pretty good inspiration for a new take on Pac-Man for an audience with a taste for blood. At the very least, it’s the one episode of Secret Level that will start the most conversations, if only for how wild the swing was in adapting a beloved and family-friendly mascot like Pac-Man.

The first eight episodes of Secret Level are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes release Dec. 17.