Shadow Labyrinth review

Bandai Namco have built a massive love letter to the 2D Metroidvania, particularly the Metroid part. They’ve set it on a deadly planet where they want to tell a tragic sci-fi story of doomed soldiers, deadly superweapons, and, er, sibling rivalry. So you may think deciding it should star Pac-Man sounds like a terrible idea. Because it is. Because of course it is.

Not since Bob Hoskins’ Mario shoved his face down a woman’s top have I witnessed such a bizarrely adult reimagining of a family-friendly character. While Shadow Labyrinth never goes that far (perhaps they’re saving that for DLC) this is still a game where Pac-Man helps you slaughter monsters with brains on the wrong sides of their skulls. Then he helpfully swallows their spines afterwards so you can spend them at the shop.

Well, technically it isn’t Pac-Man. Here your companion is called ‘Puck’, a cute nod to what was almost Pac-Man’s name/a helpful distancing of this monster from being considered the real deal.

Because Puck is a manipulative, untrustworthy, Devil on your shoulder who’s unlikely to be fronting any Saturday morning cartoons anytime soon. You actually play as an amnesiac who Puck summoned from another dimension to help with their shady quest, and Puck keeps referring to you as ‘Number Eight’. Brrr.

From the moment you pick up a sword it becomes clear that this is going to be a slightly more routine adventure than the oddball premise suggests. Combat’s a traditional hacky slashy affair, with a three-strike combo, a stun attack, and a lovely enemy-interrupting strike that’ll use up some of the stamina you need for dodging. All fun enough with a satisfying sense of impact, hurt only by Nine Sols and Prince of Persia rudely raising the Metroidvania combat bar unfairly high last year.

Traditionally Pac-Man has chomped on his enemies. Here, Puck prefers to munch down on the corpses after you’ve done all the fighting (someone’s getting lazier in their old age). Chow down on enough fallen foes and you’ll be able to briefly turn into a giant invincible mech with a Pac-Man centre. Good goofy fun, though I’d have liked to have seen munching woven into the combat more. The brutal finisher where a horrifying mega-Puck swallows a boss whole is sadly relegated to the cutscenes.

After an overly linear opening few hours, the planet finally opens up, revealing a solid Metroidvania core. There’s a few too many ‘surprise’ combat arenas with the game’s limited bestiary and industrial zones that look overly similar to the last industrial zone you explored. But otherwise this is full of great navigation puzzles, platforming challenges, and poring over the map for secrets that reminded me why we get so many Metroidvania’s. They’re still great fun to chip away at and Shadow Labyrinth gets the important parts right.

Some of the best areas are pretty far off the beaten path, making exploring worthwhile. A spaceship is a particular highlight, a complex network of locked doors and hidden routes that had me double-checking the map every few seconds. Bliss! And it’s huge too. There’s easily forty hours of game here, even if a lot of that is because the difficulty curve suddenly decides to take inspiration from Pac-Man’s horrible spiky mouth during the brutal climax.

So Shadow Labyrinth is an easy game to enjoy moment-to-moment, albeit with the niggling sense that you’ve played a lot of this before. Hollow Knight’s air-dash makes its obligatory appearance, along with the usual double jump and hookshot. All solidly implemented but there’s long stretches where you could be playing basically any Metroidvania from the last few years.

The game gets more interesting when it leans into the Pac-Man of it all. Find and activate blue rails and suddenly you switch to playing as Puck, munching his way along them. Metroid’s morph ball is an obvious influence, but these bits play more like that series’ much fiddlier spider ball, as you hop from rail to rail munching pellets and trying to avoid obstacles and enemies (or briefly turn back into Number 8 to dispose of them). A novel way to explore, and later sections that constantly have you switching between the two playstyles make for some great platforming.

Mazed & confused

Then there are the maze levels, wherein you're warped into a completely separate stage where you are playing Pac-Man, albeit a version of Pac-Man that’s been through the Jeff Minter machine. They’re essentially inspired remixes of the original game, with smart new ideas like platforms that can be weaponised when you slam into them, and weapons like a decoy Pac-Man that the fine people of 1980 would have killed for. The strict five-minute timer is a blessing and a curse here, as it’s not always obvious what you’re supposed to be doing. But the briefness of these stages usually makes the pull of one more go when you mess up hard to resist.

These sections also have terrific energy. The dance music thumps merrily, with the colorful visuals and sound effects practically cheering you on as you gobble up ghosts. And then you return to Shadow Labyrinth proper, with its mournful, forgettable tunes (wait… was there music?) and uninspired art style. It’s hard not to feel a little deflated that more of the all-singing all-dancing tone of the mazes couldn’t have seeped into the tone of the main adventure.

While the game isn’t completely humor-free, the self-seriousness of the majority of it is as baffling as it is boring. An overly-talky technobabble festival, rife with cliches and dull stock characters. Even the Steam achievements have text like ‘in war, the size of the hand wielding the sword matters not’. You start longing for the days this guy stuck to saying ‘wakka wakka wakka’ instead of horrible Sun Tzu fan-fiction.

It’s tough getting dramatic range out of a character who’s essentially a melon with a slice missing. And while Puck’s tendency to constantly gasp at plot revelations is pretty funny (I mean, what else can they physically do?) there's nothing in here as emotionally moving as Pac-Man meeting his one true love in the first cutscene of Ms Pac-Man. The fact that Shadow Labyrinth hopelessly tries just reminds you what a silly idea a dark, sombre reimagining was in the first place.

Look past that rubbish and you’ll find a fun Metroidvania suffering from an amusing identity crisis. A perfectly playable Hollow Knight-lite one moment, an updating of classic Pac-Man gobbling the next, with a mediocre sci-fi yarn sprinkled on top. Short of Hello Kitty developing a taste for crystal meth, it’s likely the oddest official rebrand you’ll see this year. An interesting mess rather than a surprise triumph, then, but I’ll take it over another bloody Pac-Man World any day.