So here's my ranking

from worst to best

15 epsidoes

15: New World

I'll be honest we just

it says something about the second batch of episodes that this is the takeaway because I feel like we came out of it semi-begrudgingly going "Secret Level is kinda good" last night

yeah

were collectively SO disinterested in a short based on Amazon's disastrous MMO

that we just didn't watch it

fuck it

14: Playstation

That's right, there's one short that's just

for Playstation, as a concept

It was the most cringe thing I have ever seen

I was furious with this one

Like, you know how sometimes games will have trailers for the co-op experience where the players are talking to each other in ways that are supposed to sound natural but its' the most awkward and stilted conversation you have had in your LIFE?

Morally repellent

The entire thing sounded like that

I hated this

13: Exodus

This is an episode for a game that isn't coming out until 2026 that I have never heard of

Conceptually it's solid, I guess?

A father is chasing after his daughter across space but because of relativity she is aging faster than he is

I have never heard of the game but I guess it's made by ex Bioware employees

It was boring and like 2/3rds of the plot were dumped on us by a narrator

Didn't have time to breathe. Boring

12: Crossfire

We actually had to look this up because none of us had heard of it

Apparently it's a super popular military multiplayer FPS

The short was just like

A Tom Clancy adventure

two teams of shady mercenaries fighting over a Package in the modern day

They had a kind of fun thing going on where both sides kept saying shit like "Hey, we're the good guys, right?'

"Let's go stop the bad guys"

"It's fine, we're the good guys"

Which added an almost interesting vibe to the whole thing

11: Megaman

This could have scored a LOT higher

if it wasn't the shortest short in the whole collection

it was like 3-4 minutes long

What we saw was reasonably entertaining but it just had no substance to it

It felt like not a small amount of cowardice that the most cartoony ones were so short

Megaman wants to fight but Dr Light won't let him but then Megaman reveals he can resist Dr. Wily's infection

So he goes off to have ADVENTURES

the end

10: Concord

Okay so like

if you had just showed me this short as it's own thing

I wouldn't have hated it

Some goofy space outlaws have an adventure with betrayals and gunfights

There's some legit good moment

but UNFORTUNATELY

As a certified Megahead I'm like, genuinely kinda floored that the entire short is just "the backstory of megaman, as a franchise"

like that is just literally The Setup

I know that it's based on a game that got canceled like 2 weeks after it came out so it will never happen

svensational: IT WAS SO NOTHING

and this is probably fanon mixing with canon but if I remember right it's not that Megaman can RESIST the infection, it's literally that Wily DIDN'T BOTHER infecting him

because he's a lab assistant!

He has no weapons!

No Wily had like

little bug bots that could infect things

That is a weird diversion

it infected...bomb man?

I'll allow it

some robot in Light's lab

Megaman had to fight it

was he really big or did he throw explosives

both

that feels like they combined Guts and Bomb then which is a wild take

anyway point is, terrible, awful

9: Dungeons and Dragons

I did, not knowing Bomb Man,

This is the first one that I wasn't disappointed by

think it was Guts Man until they said the name

A group of adventurers have an adventure

It's exactly what it needed to be

I wanted to type Gutsman SO BAD

because of the cartoon

the old cartoon I mean

There's a paladin that's a seven foot goliath lady with scars all over her face

There's a halfling wizard who fights al ich

there's a dragon

was there a dungeon?

8: Honor of Kings

quinn2win: sort of

The dragon lives in a big cave that they had to cast a spell to get into

but most of the action took place outside

It was tough for me not to look at that short like "but the movie exists"

belatedly: yeah sven is right. wily didn't bother because rock was just a lab assistant so who cares. light had to totally remodel rock.

which isn't the short's fault

anyway I had never heard of Honor of Kings before but apparently it's a Chinese MOBA?

I think they break the main kid out of a dungeon?

yurisoldier: it wasn't a dungeon they found him in a cage at a camp outdoors

ANYWAY Honor of Kings was about a city that is controlled by like a fantasy AI thing

but the AI is going crazy so a guy goes in to the core to have a battle of wits with the AI

And they talk about predestination a bunch

Visually it was fuckin' nuts

I liked it reasonably well despite not knowing the source material

7: Sifu

This was a short one

but like

it did what it needed to do really well

Kung Fu guy fights a bunch of badguys and dies several times, getting up older each time

But it had a really good set of bookends

where at the start he's eating snacks from a little old chinese lady at a food stand who says that her food is so good because she put 60 years of experience in it

Then at the end he comes back as an old man

and is like

"My..."grandson" said that your food is the best because you put 60 years of experience in it"

And he's aged about 60 years

It was a real poignant moment

6: Armored Core

Keanu Reeves was in this one

As a fucking disaster of a man who's an unstoppable AC pilot

it was cool

I don't really have a lot to say about this one

5: Warhammer 40,000

As a story this one was kinda nothing

The heroic space marines need to go to a place and kill some guys

but then evil chaos cultists try to stop them

But like

the vibes were immaculate

The whole thing had an almost dreamlike quality to it that got stronger and strong as the marines marched further and further into magic bullshit

At the start they were obliterating everything effortlessly

by the end they were having screaming vision quests as daemons ripped at their brains

Especially after we had so many shorts with narration, I really appreciated how much of the Warhammer one was dead quiet

Yeah

No conversation, just spectacular visual language

I want to watch it again

4: Outer Worlds

This was

SO bleak

As, I understand, is the game

A boy is in love with a girl, but he works at a shit job as a garbage inspector or something while the girl got a job as a scientist

So he gets a new job as a test subject just to be with her again

While being tested over and over again until he's lost all his limbs and is like 80% cyborg

Only to find out that she's got ambitions beyond him

I recognize that it was really good but after it was done I just sat there for a minute going "fuck..."

3: Spelunky

It was cute

A mother daughter pair have been challenging the temple over and over again

and dying over and over again

after a while the deaths start to get to them, but then the mom reminds her that it's not just deaths but also ADVENTURES

The whole speech is like

a heartfelt tribute to the entire roguelike genre

she was the daughter

it was really delightful, even not knowing spelunky

I actually really loved how that episode let its bleakness sit rather than just make a joke about it like the game often does

yeah

*The Outer Worlds episode

yeah

2: Unreal Tournament

This one took me by surprise

I did NOT expect to give half a fuck about Unreal Tournament

But what I got was like

the story of a mining robot taking so much abuse from its human handlers that it develops free will

And it leads a bloody uprising

It involves arena fights

Where an announcer says shit like "FIRST BLOOD"

"MULTI KILL"

"UNSTOPPABLE"

"DOMINATION"

It REALLY swung for the fences

AND NUMBER ONE

1: PAC-MAN

HUMANITY'S GREATEST VILLAIN

Survival Horror Pac-Man

You must be hungry

There is strength in repetition

There is strength in repetition

I think so much of it is carried by Puck's vocal delivery

Word ONE you're like

"Oh this yellow circle is UP to some shit"

Anyway my opinion

is that everything 9 and up on this list

is something you could watch without hating yourself

I think my favorite small moment in the WH40k one was when they started getting into the magic shit

and all the purity seals

those little paper prayers affixed to their armor with wax

just

caught fire

a quiet moment of "oh this is gonna get fucked"

The Outer Worlds one is interesting since it's a riff on one of your party member's parents' backstory from the game.

Parvati's dad did not follow his scientist wife on her promotion path and wound up dying penniless of malnutrition in the starting town, but he did at least get to raise his daughter.

Belatedly but yeah, the Outer Worlds is pretty much Black Comedy about the nature of unrestrained capitalism

The fact this let it sit is in fact really neat

I have a theory that secret levels is actively better if you know less about some of the canons involved, bcuz I actively felt my enjoyment of king failson ahnold dry up the more I learned about the origin game

I can believe that