Shadow Labyrinth

My first thought when Shadow Labyrinth was announced at The Game Awards 2024 was roughly the same as everyone else's: this has to be a joke. A dark, sci-fi Metroidvania built around Pac-Man, released for the franchise's 45th anniversary? The premise sounds like a corporate dare. But the game that shipped on July 17, 2025 is a real, committed piece of work - uneven in places, but never cynical, and occasionally excellent. You play as Swordsman No. 8, a silent, cloaked figure awakened by PUCK, a floating robotic orb that is clearly the ghost of Pac-Man translated into something far stranger. The two of you navigate the ruins of the planet Xevious, a setting pulled from Bandai Namco's own UGSF sci-fi timeline - so yes, Galaga, Xevious, Dig Dug, and Splatterhouse all show up here, not as cheap cameos but as actual structural pieces of the world. The storytelling is deliberately cryptic and starts very slowly, but if you're patient there's a genuinely interesting sci-fi war story buried in the lore. The core combat loop gives you a three-hit sword combo, a timing-based parry that staggers enemies into devastating counters, an aerial dodge that burns your shared ESP meter, and the GAIA transformation - a brief mech-berserk mode that flips the power dynamic in tough fights. Defeating enemies lets PUCK devour their corpses for crafting materials and stat upgrades, translating the eat-everything philosophy of the arcade original into something that actually feels earned. Wall-riding sections fuse you and PUCK into a Mini Puck form that lets you skate rails and ceilings at speed, which sounds like a gimmick but produces some of the game's best platforming moments when it clicks. Tucked throughout the map are hidden Pac-Man maze rooms where you guide PUCK through pellet-filled corridors while dodging G-Hosts - they come with their own mechanics like block-kicking and boss fights, and serve as smart palate cleansers rather than forced fan service. Where Shadow Labyrinth earns its rougher reviews: the opening ten hours are linear to a fault, parrying and blocking arrive several boss fights in rather than at the start, and the map opens up dramatically mid-game into a sprawling labyrinth that can genuinely disorient without offering enough navigational signposting. The Pac-Man maze sections, while charming in concept, have controls some players will find slippery and time limits that punish rather than challenge. The final stretch also front-loads difficulty in ways that feel less like a satisfying climax and more like a systems stress test. Steam user scores currently sit in mixed territory, which tracks: this is a game that rewards patience and punishes anyone who bounces off slow openers. On its own terms, though, Shadow Labyrinth does one thing exceptionally well: it makes Bandai Namco's arcade history feel like mythology. The moment a Splatterhouse-themed area bleeds into a Dig Dug maze section, and you realize the developers treated all of it with actual respect, is genuinely surprising. Boss fights are inventive skill checks with good telegraphing, the moody cell-shaded art holds up throughout, and once your movement and combat toolkit fills out around the midpoint, the rhythm of exploring, consuming, and upgrading becomes compulsive. It is not the tightest Metroidvania on the market - Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread both outclass it on precision - but it is one of the more ambitious ones in years.

Alex · Scout Team

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