Review Shadow Labyrinth

Bandai Namco built a huge love letter to 2D Metroidvania, especially part of Metroid. They set it on a deadly planet, where they want to tell the tragic story of science fiction about soldiers sentenced to destruction, fatal and, eee, siblings. So you may think that making a decision about it should be PAC-man sounds like a terrible idea. Because it is so. Due to course this is.

Not since Mario Bob Hoskins pushed his face down the woman, I witnessed such a strange imagination of a amiable family. While Shadow Labyrinth never goes so far (maybe they save it for DLC), it is still a game in which PAC-man helps murder the monsters with the brain on the wrong sides of their skulls. Then helps swallow their spikes so that you can spend them in the store.

Technically it is not Pac-Man. Here your companion is called “Puck”, a charming nod to what was almost the name of Pac-Man/Helpful distancing this monster from recognizing yourself as a real offer.

Because Puck is a manipulative, unbelievable, devil on your shoulder, which is unlikely that it will not be in the morning morning cartoon in the near future. In fact, you play as amnesia, which Puck called from a different dimension to assist in their shady task, and Puck still calls you “eighth number”. Brrr.

From the moment you choose the sword, it becomes clear that it will be a slightly more routine adventure than the freak suggests. Combat is a conventional hacky, a lovely romance, with a combination of three guards, a stunning attack and a charming enemy hit that will exploit some strength you need to avoid. Fun enough with a satisfactory sense of impact, wounded only by nine salts and Prince of Persia rudely raising the Metroidvania combat bar last year.

Traditionally, Pac-Man threw himself at his enemies. Here, Puck prefers to chew the corpse after you made the whole fight (someone becomes inactive in senior age). Drop the enough number of fallen enemies and you will be able to briefly turn into a gigantic invincible mech from the PAC-Man center. Okay, stupid fun, although I would like to see how Crut is in battle. The brutal finisher, in which the terrifying mega-puppe will swallow the whole boss, is unfortunately transferred to the cutscenes.

After a few linear hours, the planet finally opens, revealing a solid metroidvania core. There are a few too many “unexpected” arena of the fight against restricted beast and industrial zones in the game that look too similar to last You examined the industrial zone. But otherwise it is full of great navigation puzzles, platform challenges and browsing the maps of secrets that reminded me of why we would get so much metroidvania. They are still great fun to lose, and Shadow Labyrinth has the right parts.

Some of the best areas are quite far from the beaten path, thanks to which discovering is profitable. SpaceShip is a special attraction, elaborate network of blocked doors and hidden routes, in which I checked the map twice every few seconds. Delight! And this is also huge. It is effortless here for forty hours of the game, even if a lot happens because the difficulty curve suddenly decides to get inspiration from the terrible PAC-Man earrings during a brutal climax.

So Shadow Labyrinth is an effortless game that can enjoy the moment, although with the blinking feeling that you have already played a lot. Hollow Knight’s Air-Dash seems obligatory, along with a regular double jump and hook. All solidly implemented, but there are long sections in which you can play basically in every metroidvania for several years.

The game becomes more intriguing when he bends into Pac-Man of all this. Find and activate the blue rails and suddenly you go to the game as a album, chewing on them. Morph Ball Metroida has an obvious impact, but these bits play more like this series “Warbdlier Spider Ball, when you jump into the rails, chewing granules and trying to avoid obstacles and enemies (or briefly transforming into number 8 to get rid of them). An innovative way of discovery, and later sections that constantly change between two toys platform.

Mazed and confused

Then there are the levels of the maze, in which you are distorted in a completely separate stage in which you If Pac-Man, although the Pac-Man version that has gone through Jeff Minter Machine. They are basically inspired by the remixes of the original game, with new new ideas, such as platforms that can be armed when you hit them, and weapons like a Pac-Man lure, for which good people from 1980 would kill. A strict five -minute timer is a blessing and a curse here, because it is not always obvious what you should do. But the shortness of these stages usually causes one more to attract when it is difficult to resist.

These sections also have great energy. Dance music sticks cheerfully, with colorful visualizations and sound effects practically cheering you when you get ghosts. And then you return to Shadow Labyrinth, with his mournful, forgotten melodies (wait … was Are there music?) And an uninhap art style. It is hard not to feel the slightly empty that more versatile dancing tone of the maze could not penetrate in the tons of the main adventure.

Although the game is not completely free of humor, the self -sufficiency of the majority is as surprising as boring. An outstanding Technobabble festival, full of cliché and matte characters. Even steam achievements have a text such as “in war, the size of the hand holding the sword does not matter.” You start to miss the days that this guy stuck to say “Wakka Wakka Wakka” instead of a terrible fan-fiction sun-fiction.

It is difficult to get a dramatic range from a character that is basically a melon with a lack of a piece. And although Puck’s tendency to continuously catching breath in the story apparitions is quite funny (that is, what else can they do physically?) There is nothing so emotionally moving like Pac-Man meeting his only true love in the first intermittent Pac-Man intermittent The fact that Shadow Labyrinth is hopelessly trying, simply reminds how stupid idea was above all a dark, grim idea.

Look next to this garbage and you will find a funny metroidvania suffering from a funny identity crisis. Perfectly playable empty Knight-Lite one moment, update of the classic PAC-Man, which devours in the next, with the average science fiction yarn sprinkled on top. In short, Hello Kitty, who tastes like the crystal finish, is probably the strangest official rebrand you will see this year. So an interesting mess, not an unexpected triumph, but every day I will take over another bloody world of Pac-Man.