Remember Secret Level, that Amazon Prime miniseries of short films inspired by popular video games? You know the episode that recast Pac-Man as a marooned warrior abducting strangers to help it fight its way out of a prison planet? Well, Bandai Namco fleshed that idea out into a lengthy metroidvania called Shadow Labyrinth – a rare Street Fighter: The Movie-type beat – and this bizarre reimagining of the industry’s oldest eater is a truly challenging experience. Not necessarily because it’s difficult, as it’s not a cake walk but I’ve thrown myself against the rocks of more tortuous games in the past. No, my biggest struggle with it was staying interested in Shadow Labyrinth’s cryptic, slow, and frankly boring story while also fighting through some gnarly difficulty spikes and brutal checkpointing.
I’m not completely against the idea of a gritty reboot of Pac-Man in theory, but the execution here did not make a great case for it in practice. The story, which drapes you in the rags of Puck’s (read: Pac-Man’s) sword swinging goon, sort of exists around you. That makes some sense given you’ve woken up without any memories or understanding of the wreckage of war you’re being lead through by your scheming yellow companion, but Shadow Labyrinth’s insistence on making you stand around and watch broken, vague, trope-bloated dialogue between the handful of active characters is arduous.
The 10-minute Secret Level episode did a much more effective job of weaving an interesting parable by using the “cycle of survival” story as a parallel of the cyclical nature of Pac-Man’s eat-die-repeat gameplay. As a direct sequel to that short, Shadow Labyrinth expands on the story exponentially, but fills that new space with rote sci-fi lore that has very few compelling plot happenings sprinkled throughout. Even on the occasions where the journey of Puck and the Swordsman took big swerves, those twists came and went without much time spent considering their magnitude or potential consequences. I was always dungeon diving just like I would have been a few minutes later.
Shadow Labyrinth looks pretty good, though. The sort of moving paper doll animation used so well in games like Salt and Sanctuary is mostly solid here, too. There’s a surprising level of detail in many of the monsters, especially the mechanical ones with all of their bits and doodads. Animations can feel a little stilted and floaty, like a marionette on strings, but it doesn’t affect the action in any meaningful way. The levels themselves make good use of color in their fore and backgrounds, though I wouldn’t call its renditions of the depths of a lava filled cavern or the many stories of a high tech tower all that unique. There are disappointingly few locations that aren’t an underground cavern or high-tech base using similar backgrounds with the colors remixed. My favorite zone is the most interesting both in how it looks and how you have to navigate it, a valley filled with sometimes deadly flowers that is a completely optional and can’t be accessed until late.
Unfortunately, the actual task of moving through these expansive areas takes far too long. Platforming never gets too out of hand, the bigger challenges are relegated to side paths occasionally leading to more dangerous mini-puzzles and obstacles that’ll test your timing and reflexes. I was regularly presented with rails that morph you into the round yellow chomp machine we all recognize. These tracks allow you to waka waka waka up designated walls, around corners, and across ceilings, munching on pellets (which is a currency to spend on perks and upgrades) as you go. Hopping from line to line or launching Puck at foes with a spinning sword attack is funny at first, but I can count on one hand the times I encountered sections of this that feels truly clever outside of the fact that the gimmick exists in the first place. They are such isolated experiences that if you removed all of these sections from Shadow Labyrinth, I wouldn’t miss any of them.
While on foot, obscure signposting and an abundance of crossroads often made it unclear where the critical path laid and I regularly stumbled into side paths by accident, which sometimes lead to goodies like bonus health and other times to roadblocks I didn’t have the upgrade to surmount. Sauntering around these corners was oppressively dangerous as death would jettison me back to a checkpoint that almost always felt miles away from where I fell. It was made more stressful because of the two-tiered checkpointing: the larger Miku Sol points that you can upgrade your warrior with and teleport between, and smaller pylons that are checkpoints in the strictest, old school sense of the word. As resources dwindled and the paths splintered and multiplied seemingly endlessly, a little misstep here or there could erase so much of my progress that I felt just as trapped in these places as Puck did. Maybe that's the point, they don’t like it and neither do I.
One thing I did really like were the MAZEs, little pocket dimensions that unlock about midway through the journey that pull you into chaotic versions of Pac-Man levels. You’re doing much more than zooming and eating in these, with various puzzly obstacles like moving walls that you essentially throw at enemy ghosts to make them edible. The flashy colors and arcade music provided a sort of Championship Edition DX energy that was a welcome reprieve from the mostly by-the-numbers dungeon delving I was undoubtedly doing before I approached their glowing headstones, and would return to as soon as they were over.
Combat is full of your standard fare for a game like this. You can dodge around and swing a sword in a basic combo from the start. You unlock a power attack that provides a large amount of ranged damage when used alone or can be linked to the end of your basic combo as a satisfying finisher. There’s an air dash, a grappling hook, a parry, and more all waiting to be found and added to your repertoire as well, each of which cost a little bit of your ESP gauge to use. Running that meter to empty puts you in a Street Fighter 6-style burnout condition, meaning you can’t do anything but attack until it recharges again. This is a heavy and meaningful penalty, one that asks you to really pay attention to how much offense you’re attempting to unload at once.
Meanwhile, perks can alter you in smaller ways, like making your dodge cost less ESP or showing the remaining health of the last enemy you hit. The most effective ones for me were those that make your special abilities stronger or allow Puck to passively gather bits for you. But while those are useful, none of these perks changed combat in significant ways or made the fact that I was just mashing attacks until everything died feel less repetitive.
Puck can get in on the action on occasion, combining with your swordsman to become a sort of mechanical dragon creature that rips and tears until its timed energy bar is done. It was fun to be big enough to ignore enemy damage and adverse terrain for a short period of time, but you are still largely just mashing the basic attack button until you can’t anymore. To recharge this mode, you have to devour fallen foes, which also give you various materials that can be spent at specific vendors for perks. I spent almost no time trying to hunt down specific enemies to farm pieces, and my available perks list was understandably slim because of it. That said, there was nothing sitting on a vendor’s shelf that made me think my odds of beating a nagging boss or a tough jumping puzzle would be greater if I did.
There’s quite a variety of different types of enemies to use all of this offense on, but you spend so much time in large zones that baddies turn from new challenges to nuisances pretty quickly. Enemies that you can’t simply whack to death at first sight are few and far between, and they’re rarely arranged in a way that makes them a real threat to your progress, the occasional archer standing on a platform you need to jump up to hit notwithstanding. Bosses on the whole don’t require much strategy outside of basic pattern recognition, either. A giant rooster mini-boss early on gave me an opportunity to use my air dash optimally just after unlocking it, but it wasn't until much later in the roughly 30-hour campaign that any big enemies forced an extra technical layer out of my combat strategy. And when the challenge did finally ramp up, it was completely over-tuned. The damage output exploded and the time between attacks shrank, turning some late game fights into frustrating walks of shame from the closest checkpoint to the boss.