A neon maze. Disembodied eyeballs floating in darkness. A ghost-consuming ball that never says a word. Few video games are as mysterious as Pac-Man.
On its surface, the ’80s arcade hit is an uncomplicated high-score chase. Eat the dots, avoid the ghosts, don’t think about it much beyond that. But as someone who has sunk more quarters than I can count into Pac-Man cabinets, I have thought about it. Like so many other games of its era, Pac-Man is so abstract that it invites us to imagine what exactly we’re seeing on screen. Is there a world outside the maze? Why are ghosts patrolling it? What even is Pac-Man? They weren’t questions to be answered so much as negative space to be filled in by cassette tapes and animated specials of the era that dared to reinterpret all those shapes and colors.
Now, 45 years later, Shadow Labyrinth is taking the mystery to its logical conclusion. Bandai Namco’s oddest use of yellow puck transforms the arcade classic into a sprawling 2D action-adventure game filled with twisted corridors, horrifying monsters, and a buffet of lore. It’s an ’80s novelization turned video game, adapting an LSD enthusiast’s psychedelic book cover into an interactive fever dream. The mutation is natural in some ways, but the high-effort approach shows just how difficult it is for today’s large-scale productions to capture the intrinsic aura of gaming’s long-lost minimalist era.
Image: Bandai Namco
Shadow Labyrinth is a swan dive into a safety net. It’s both a radical departure for one of gaming’s most iconic series and a retreat into marketable modernity. Cut from the same cloth as recent indie hits like Hollow Knight and Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, it’s a moody sci-fi Metroidvania that’s both grim and whimsical. It follows the nameless Swordsman No. 8 who finds themself lost in an eerie world that alternates between dark caves and techno ruins. The hero quickly finds a companion in Puck, a robotic creature made in Pac-Man’s cheese wheel image. Puck ropes the swordsman into an intergalactic conflict built out of retro gaming Easter eggs.
The story can be inscrutable with its endless wave of proper nouns and forced references (there are a series of mech bosses dubbed G.HOSTs and enemies that call back to Splatterhouse, of all things), but that’s by design. Shadow Labyrinth wants players to feel lost. Despite being in a genre that’s worlds apart from the original Pac-Man, the adventure is squarely focused on turning that game’s central maze into something bigger. It isn’t just represented as a tangle of 2D corridors loaded with both secret passageways and dead ends. Even the story itself is structured like a twisted puzzle, one divvied out across cryptic conversations with local aliens and poetic lore logs.
Everything here works towards building the kind of mysterious atmosphere that makes modern games like Elden Ring so appealing. The approach largely works on an aesthetic level. Though the busy visual design can feel gaudy in moments, even the narrowest biomes feel hauntingly cavernous. You feel like you could toss a stone into the darkness and hear its impact on the ground echo for miles. Grotesque Dig Dug monsters stalk the swordsman to the tune of unsettling piano ambiance. It’s like Namco directly pulled from an arcade-loving kid’s nightmares circa 1985.
But the more Shadow Labyrinth actively tries to be cryptic, the less it actually is. There isn’t much room for imagination between constant lore dumps that go in one ear and out the other. All that neon negative space that defines classic Pac-Man games is filled in at every turn, replaced with a fan service bedtime story cobbled together from nods to Namco history. It’s a misguided approach, but one that’s just learning from its peers. Some of today’s biggest hits cloak their stories in tantalizing obscurity, but that’s an illusion. They lay as many cards down as possible, explaining the world in exhaustive detail through hollow lore. These are games built for the age of YouTube explainers that rake in millions of views by putting the scattered pieces in order rather than interpreting them. I can feel Bandai Namco trying to engineer a similar reaction here, one that will just so happen to reenter franchises like Bosconian back into mainstream consciousness.
The irony is that it’s at its best when it’s just Pac-Man.
Shadow Labyrinth sometimes feels like it’s trying a little too hard to fit in with today’s scene. That’s even apparent in its trendy genre swing. Metroidvanias are hot right now, and I can practically see the brainstorming meeting that began with a producer writing “Hollow Knight?” on a whiteboard. Biomes are dense and filled with the kind of non-linear pathways that you can get lost in for hours. There are no mission markers on the map. Freeform exploration is placed front and center, which often left me completely unsure of what I needed to do next once I was tired of hunting down health upgrades, tradable stones, and the yellow dots used to upgrade my skills. It can be frustrating, but Shadow Labyrinth asks us to enjoy it like a hedge maze. Embrace the pleasure of getting lost and stumbling into an exit eventually rather than following a map.
I appreciate the sentiment, and Shadow Labyrinth does back it up with some rewarding exploration that carefully hides secrets behind winding navigation puzzles, but that idea sometimes butts up against imprecise movement. Trying to launch myself at the right angle when grappling (a primary means of movement here) resulted in countless accidental deaths. I ran into similar trouble when tackling rail interludes, where Puck has to navigate along familiar neon rails and avoid obstacles along the way. I often found myself flinging the poor orb into spiked walls and other obstacles, even when using an on-screen trajectory tool to see where a jump between rails would land me. At least Shadow Labyrinth ditches Hollow Knight’s corpse run system, so I never drop my collected spoils after a sloppy death.
Combat is more so the focus over platforming, and it feels more satisfying because there are a lot of layers to it. Biomes are filled with fierce bosses (including lots of optional foes) that put up a serious challenge. Taking them down isn’t just about slashing them until they’re stunned, but also managing an ESP gauge that’s a stamina bar and MP system in one. Both dodges and collectible special attacks that can be equipped on the fly expend energy, so I always need to weigh the benefits of getting extra damage in or leaving myself room to escape.
That’s not all. The Swordsman can activate a giant mech form after accumulating enough power. Puck can ingest enemy corpses to turn them into crafting materials, giving players a good reason to defeat your average dregs that doesn’t just amount to experience point accumulation. Less exciting is an unreliable parry system that I abandoned altogether after failing to grasp the timing. Why put a parry in a Pac-Man game anyways? Well, that’s what modern audiences want, right?
Image: Bandai Namco
Shadow Labyrinth tries its best to read the room with little touches like this in an attempt to introduce an old mascot to a new generation of players, but the irony is that it’s at its best when it’s just Pac-Man. My favorite moments were the ones that tossed me into a familiar neon grid and asked me to gobble up dots and ghosts like the old days. These are variations on the classic maze game that are all about quickly handling a series of puzzle-like navigation challenges before time runs out. They’re energetic jolts of arcade action that feel entirely separate from the brooding action game they’re nestled into.
These side-challenges don’t just stand out on the merits of nostalgia; they have such a defined tone and identity, whereas the rest of Shadow Labyrinth feels like it’s the product of thorough notetaking. They are abstracted to the point of otherworldliness. Colors and shapes dance to club beats in the digital abyss. It’s evocative without explanation. It doesn’t matter who the ghosts are or why they want to kill our round hero so badly. I just feel the urgency in my bones as I duck and dodge a swarm of angry specters. 45 years later, there’s still a power in those minimal chase sequences that giant games can’t dream of emulating.
Shadow Labyrinth doesn’t feel like it exists to replace that experience, though. It’s best enjoyed as a rare act of reinterpretation, flawed as it is, in a medium that’s so tightly wound about brand guidelines nowadays. In that way, it’s truer to the series’ ’80s roots than any nostalgia-focused Pac-Man game in the past few decades, a gonzo game destined to be remembered as a piece of weird video game trivia. There’s no shame in that if it winds up being its ultimate legacy. It’s better to be memorable than boring, and Shadow Labyrinth certainly isn’t the latter.
Shadow Labyrinth will be released July 18 on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S. The game was reviewed on Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Bandai Namco. Valnet Inc. has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Valnet Inc. may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
