There’s an old joke about Pac-Man and video games. Everybody knows that video games don’t really influence kids’ behavior. After all, if they were imitating Pac-Man, they’d just be chasing each other around dark mazes, popping pills and listening to repetitive music. Any sort of teleplay that tries to adapt Pac-Man, of course, runs into this same basic problem. What is Pac-Man about, anyway? Everybody knows that Pac-Man is supposed to resemble a partially eaten pizza. The original version of the character doesn’t even have eyes, he’s just bright yellow.
Pac-Man purists will no doubt be offended by the Amazon Prime Secret Level rendition of Pac-Man for not even having that, the animated monstrosity representing the character first introduced to the viewer by falling out of some sort of amniotic sac. The perpetually panicked, weary Pac-Man (technically Swordsman, according to the credits, voiced by Alexs Le) takes instruction from a bossy, monotone power pellet (technically Puck, again according to the credits, voiced by Emily Swallow) to eat, or be eaten, in a biome that quickly looks far more like an open-world game than Pac-Man’s rave-like lights in the darkness.
These creative choices actually work better than they really have any right to. Episode 106 of Secret Level is only ten minutes long, and mostly plays out as a fairly standard short horror animation. Honestly, short of some of the more explicit Pac-Man references, you could probably run this as a short movie at a film festival and no one would necessarily notice the difference. In that regard, it’s hard for me to really hate Episode 106 of Secret Level. Short horror films are actually pretty neat! People should watch more of them!
But the script has some obvious misses in regard to the Pac-Man lore, loathe as I am to call it that. Like, is it really lore that Pac-Man eats power pellets to give himself the power to eat ghosts, while he tries to eat all the regular pellets in the level? That’s just a basic description of the game. Even the stupid joke I opened this review with follows those basic rules. Given that, it’s a little odd that Swordsman even has a sword at all, let alone that he kills alien beasts with it. I’d never really thought of Pac-Man as a vegetarian before. Shoot, technically he’s a pacifist too, since he can’t kill ghosts and it’s not clear he’s even hurting them so much as temporarily inconveniencing them in their quest to destroy him.
Of all the Secret Level shorts, Pac-Man had by far the best excuse not to engage in stereotypical video game violence, or even genre staples like boss fights, to instead just be a ghost story about a maze that demands to be completed simply because it’s there. That’s plenty scary on its own- but the short barely even uses the ghosts! This is especially odd, since the fairly obvious twist ending both implies where the ghosts came from and also why they have any interest in trying to stop Pac-Man from finishing the maze at all. Episode 106 of Secret Level isn’t really bad so much as it could have been a whole lot better.
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