When a developer chooses to take a long-running franchise and change its gameplay formula, it is a high-risk, high-reward situation. Taking Pac-Man and deciding to create a Metroidvania using the character is the risk Bandai Namco has taken to celebrate 45 years of the icon. Has that high risk come to fruition in Shadow Labyrinth? The answer is no.
Shadow Labyrinth starts off with a huge opening action scene with a galactic war taking place, and ships being ripped apart. The outcome of this leaves Puck (So named because Pac-Man’s original name was Puck-Man), trapped on the planet of its enemy. To complete its mission, Puck summons your character Swordsman No.8 to assist in fighting the enemies and navigating this world to complete its objective. It is a pretty interesting premise, casting Pac-Man as a kind of military intelligence and it provides a good reason to fight enemies, and introduce characters from other Bandai Namco series to develop a shared universe.
As Swordsman No.8 you have, as expected, a sword to fight enemies by putting together combos and abilities. You also have access to a mech known as GAIA who can be summoned for brief spells to clear enemies or deal damage to bosses when you get into a tight spot. Things start off well enough as you get used to the combat, and when you are used to the way to fight you are left waiting to gain new perks and abilities. The progression system is nearly unforgivably slow, with Shadow Labyrinth holding back any interesting new abilities for hours between them.
This means combat become stale fast. You do have the option to level up your sword and ESP bar to make them stronger/last longer, and it helps to make progress through the world. However, using the same attack over and over without having to really change things up is boring. As you venture through the different areas you do come across various enemy types but, aside from a select few and the bosses, you quickly realise these new enemies are reskins of enemies from the first area down to movement and attacks. Not only does combat become stale, so do the enemies.
As a Metroidvania, Shadow Labyrinth needs to have a map worth exploring and the platforming to make that enjoyable. The layout of the map in Shadow Labyrinth is odd, with paths that lead to huge, empty areas in which there is nothing, and looping paths that don’t add anything to the experience. The opening areas look decent but eventually each area kind of blends together, with uninspired artistic design for the backgrounds.
Meanwhile, the platforming is fine when you are No.8 but there are moments where you are going along the rails as Puck. You can choose to move manually or let Puck ride the rails autonomously, and you can attack with a spinning blade attack which helps clear enemies out of the way, but the jumping when on the rails leaves a lot to be desired, proving to be unnecessarily fiddly, often not panning out how you wanted it to. That’s okay in areas where you have time, but there are sections which are timed including the Maze stages, which are more like classic Pac-Man with lots of twists put in. They require absolute precision to complete and a couple of mistakes can lead to running out of time or lives.
You will make mistakes which will lead to No 8 dying, and when this happens you have the option to start from a save point or checkpoint. Save points can be considered checkpoints, but the reverse is not true. When you are at a save point you can spend oras to upgrade No.8’s skills and equip different perks, provided you have bought some from a shop, travel to different save points, and refill your health. Checkpoints are limited and will refill your health to what you had when you activated, but you can only transport to other save points, not checkpoints, and that’s it.
These checkpoints don’t let you upgrade equipment. It is such an annoying system especially since save points and checkpoints are so frugally placed around that if you die you could be sent back pretty far from where you fell. When you progress through levels you will eventually open up shortcuts to reduce the travel time, but even so the sparse save points and checkpoints feed into feeling like progress is slow.
The story of Shadow Labyrinth is not that interesting even with Bandai Namco using other properties to expand it, and make this a cross universe plot. Puck is not a likeable character, coming across as cold and calculating. No.8 is a silent character so you are looking to the side characters to provide some personality to the game, which they do, but you see them so rarely that they don’t have much chance to shine.
