{"id":2717,"date":"2025-07-18T00:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T00:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.satecsite.org\/?p=2717"},"modified":"2025-07-21T10:14:33","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T10:14:33","slug":"shadow-labyrinth-review-pac-man-meets-metroid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.satecsite.org\/index.php\/2025\/07\/18\/shadow-labyrinth-review-pac-man-meets-metroid\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadow Labyrinth review \u2013 Pac-Man meets Metroid"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shadow Labyrinth – Pac-Man doesn’t need this (Bandai Namco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Pac-Man episode of Amazon Prime<\/a> show Secret Level is the inspiration for this strange new Metroidvania and its peculiar mix of influences.<\/p>\n

2025 has so far been a good year for weird games, with plenty of unlikely oddities, including one featuring a boy stuck in a permanent T-pose<\/a> and whose best friend is a singing giraffe, and the latest from Hideo Kojima<\/a> where you take orders from a talking shop mannequin and fight ghosts by flinging a boomerang soaked in your own blood at them.<\/p>\n

It may seem a clich\u00e9 but most of the strangest video games<\/a> are made in Japan<\/a>; those two certainly and so is this: a grim and gritty 2D Metroidvania that\u2019s also a secret Pac-Man game. As bizarre as that idea is it\u2019s worryingly reminiscent of Bomberman: Act Zero on the original Xbox<\/a>, which reimagined the colourful party game as a dystopian nightmare and became infamous as one of the worst video games ever made.<\/p>\n

Shadow Labyrinth is nowhere near that bad, but then it\u2019s not actually that gritty either. It\u2019s inspired by a 10 minute episode of Amazon Prime Video show Secret Level, which reimagined Pac-Man as a sci-fi story about a starfighter pilot crash landing on an alien world and being manipulated by a malign Pac-Man. We haven\u2019t seen it, but we hope it was better than the game tie-in.<\/p>\n

Before we learned of the Amazon connection, we assumed the game had been inspired by the famous The Madness of Mission 6<\/a> fan art for Pac-Man, which you\u2019ve probably seen on a T-shirt or two, if you\u2019ve ever been to any kind of video game convention or similar event. That almost certainly would\u2019ve been a lot more interesting than the vapid, clich\u00e9 ridden sci-fi tale that is Shadow Labyrinth\u2019s actual backstory.<\/p>\n

Right from the start, the plot is filled with nonsensical sounding names and jargon, but the short version is you\u2019re a nameless swordsman who\u2019s been revived by a floating yellow orb called Puck, that anyone else would recognise as Pac-Man. (The name is a reference to the fact that the original arcade game was originally meant to be called Puck Man, until someone realised how easily the first letter of the word could be defaced.)<\/p>\n

After the brief, and very confusing, introduction you\u2019re immediately knee deep in Metroid homages, whacking weird alien bugs with your sword and practicing your 2D platform jumping. All of this is fine, although the bland and clinical-looking art style is immediately unappealing and almost makes it look like an old Flash game.<\/p>\n

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