Shadow Labyrinthis far fromPac-Man’sfirst reinvention. In the 45 years since his 1980 debut, Pac-Man has starred in both side-scrollers and 3D platformers. He has his own Tetris-style block game, a quiz game, a point-and click-adventure, party game, pinball, kart racing, and three battle royales. We’ve seen multiple redesigns of Pac-Man over the years in his journey from the arcade to 3D (including some I’d like to forget). The original Pac-Man will always be the most iconic, but Bandai Namco has never stopped trying to stretch him in new directions.
As a sci-fi horrorMetroidvaniaset in Bandai Namco’s connected USGF universe, Shadow Labyrinth is easily the biggest stretch for Pac-Man yet. But what you may not know is that Shadow Labyrinth is actuallytworeimaginings of Pac-Man. The first is the Metroidvania as advertised, but the other is one much closer to the original Pac-Man. With a little fine-tuning, this version of Pac-Man could very well be the future of the franchise.
Engage Puck Mode
At the very start of Shadow Labyrinth, you gain the ability to switch to mini puck mode. This is Shadow Labyrinth’s version of Samus’ morph ball, which you’ll use to fit in small spaces and travel quickly through zones. Whenever you see a metal rail (called the D-line), you can simply touch it to swap to mini puck mode. As a tiny Pac-Man, you’ll automatically travel along the D-line, munching dots and dodging baddies along the way.
You have a couple of abilities while in this mode. You can launch yourself perpendicularly off the D-line to perform a spinning attack on airborne enemies. You can also perform a jump while on the line, which is useful for speeding up, dodging enemies, and swapping to other D-lines. The arcing trajectory of the jump is a little unintuitive and takes some practice, but once you get the hang of it you have a lot of control while traveling on D-lines.
you’re able to turn on a guideline that shows the trajectory of your jump to better estimate where Puck will land.
Many, many hours later, you’ll encounter the first maze. These mini-games are a puzzle platforming reimagining of the classic Pac-Man arcade game, and they’re completely optional. In fact, you won’t even discover what the point of doing them is until the very end of the game. There are eight mazes hidden throughout the world, and another four you have to complete before facing the final boss, and each one builds on the skills you’ll develop from using mini puck mode while experimenting with the format and structure of classic Pac-Man. If Bandai Namco ever wants to take Pac-Man back to his roots, this is how it should be done.
The New Old Pac-Man
Shadow Labyrinth’s maze mini-games are multi-stage puzzles in which you will race against the clock to collect dots and fruit and then battle a boss ghost. It uses the mini puck mode mechanics and adds in a few new ones to add variety and difficulty to each new maze you discover.
The first two stages typically require you to eat a certain number of ghosts to complete. You travel along gravity-defying D-lines collecting dots and dodging the ghosts that chase you around the stage, until you have collected all the dots and made the ghosts vulnerable - at which point the stage turns into a big spooky buffet - or otherwise find a way to eat the right number of ghosts. You then collect the fruit in the middle of the stage (or not, if you took too long) and move on to the next stage.
Unlike classic Pac-Man, there’s typically a perfect line you can follow to complete each stage in the shortest amount of time possible. Only a few dots are on screen at a time, and by following the path they create as they appear, you can quickly complete the stage. This is easier said than done, though, since the path you’re on will take you across jump pads, between different D-lines, and through hordes of dangerous ghosts. The game actually recommends you take as many practice runs as you need before committing to finishing the entire maze in one go, and there were at least a few that took me several attempts to complete.
Each maze has a perfect score reward, and I’ve yet to collect any of them.
The mechanics get more complicated as you progress to harder mazes. There are a few power-ups you’ll utilize, such as a decoy you can drop to distract ghosts and a power-up that lets you eat dots and ghosts in a bigger radius, but it also introduces new environmental elements periodically that further complicate the mazes. There are platforms that fall or can be launched by jumping on/off them, which you can use to damage ghosts and make them edible. The mazes are constantly adding new mechanics, but there’s almost always a perfect path through them.
After the first two stages, the next two are the boss fight. They’re all a little different, but typically they begin with a giant ghost that you have to make vulnerable by eating dots and smaller ghosts while avoiding his attacks. Once you’ve drained his health bar, you’ll go into the fourth and final stage where the now-vulnerable ghost flees from you and you have to attack him repeatedly using jump pads and moving platforms to catch him.
The boss fights, and arguably the entire maze mini-game, are adapted from a game mode in 2018’s Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus. That two-player game mode featured similar boss fights with giant ghosts. Shadow Labyrinth adds a lot of new mechanics and puts more of a focus on precision gameplay, but it’s clear this is something Bandai Namco has been experimenting with for a long time.
I previewed Shadow Labyrinth multiple timesthis year, and these mini-games were never mentioned in any of those previews. I’m shocked, considering how much fun they are, and after the hijinx Bandai Namco pulled with the Shadow Labyrinth reveal, I’m wondering if it already has plans to spin-off these mazes into their own game. Maybe they could even hide a mini-game that shows off another new Pac-Man concept insidethatgame. After Shadow Labyrinth, anything is possible.
