Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that could only exist because one person loved something old enough to rebuild it from scratch. Pampas and Selene: The Maze of Demons is exactly that game. Francisco Téllez de Meneses, the one-person force behind UnEpic, Ghost 1.0, and UnMetal, first built this on actual MSX2 hardware in 2023, constrained to 128kb of RAM, before the Steam port arrived in May 2024 with quality-of-life improvements and a full co-op suite layered on top. The result carries that rare handmade texture you can feel in every room. The structure is a big, open castle with over 200 rooms and ten demon-guarded realms sitting inside it. Your goal is to hunt down those ten demons, gather the runes that summon them, and eventually face the Lich king behind the whole mess. You play as both Pampas and Selene, swapping between them with a shoulder button: Pampas brings fast sword strikes and, later, a bow; Selene wields slower magic wand attacks but holds her breath underwater far longer and has a wider spell toolkit. The rhythm of swapping between them is smooth enough that solo play never feels like a compromise. Bring a second player online or locally and the game adds a picture-in-picture view so each hero can explore separately, with instant teleportation back to each other. The co-op works well in practice, though note that achievements are locked to solo play, which is a genuine irritant for completionists coming in expecting full co-op parity. The exploration itself is the star: open from the first minutes, generous with secrets, and satisfying in the way a good metroidvania always is when the map slowly fills in and your power curve catches up with the castle's ambition. The closest comparisons are La-Mulana and Astalon: Tears of the Earth, but Maze of Demons sits friendlier than the former and stiffer than the latter, at least until your characters start unlocking speed and power upgrades mid-game. Movement begins on the deliberate side and the controls feel slightly clunky on first contact, something multiple players have flagged. Stick with it. By the midpoint the whole thing loosens into something that feels genuinely good to pilot. The soundtrack deserves its own sentence: you can toggle between a modern arrangement and pure 8-bit chiptune at any time, and both versions are worth hearing. The pixel art is meticulous, every sprite making full use of its tiny screen footprint, and the Greek gods who give you quests and boons bring just enough story texture to keep things interesting without ever getting in the way of the exploring. The honest caveat is the bosses. They accelerate as their health drops, which creates genuinely tense moments, but several of them lean hard into repetition or pattern memorization that borders on punishing. A few players have reported 20 to 30 deaths on a single encounter, and the save-point spacing can occasionally force a boss replay after a death in the wrong room. Community frustration around the late-game Lich King is real, and players with slower reaction times have been especially vocal about wanting a difficulty slider. If boss walls bounce you off a game entirely, know that this one has a few. The exploration in between, though, is generous and genuinely fun, and most players who push through find the power progression eventually tips the balance back in their favor. Steam reviews sit at 90% positive, which feels accurate. This is a niche game made with total sincerity for people who know what Maze of Galious is, or who are ready to find out. It is also a fine entry point if you want a co-opvania with real craft behind it rather than one that just uses the genre label as shorthand.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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