Shadow Labyrinth Review

Down A Dark And Winding Path

HIGH Finally unleashing the full-power Mech Mode.

LOW Spending 45 minutes trying to beat a single platforming sequence.

WTF Are those seriously Dig-Dug enemies?

Might as well rip the band-aid off right away — yes, this is the Pac-Man Metroidvania.

It’s about a gamer who gets pulled into a strange Namco-themed dimension and has their soul dropped into a swordfighting robot. It seems that Puck, the ravenous yellow sphere, needed someone to help her activate a giant machine for reasons that are way too convoluted to get into here, so the player got dragged into an insane sci-fi struggle because it seemed like they had… decent reflexes?

After that absurd opening, things get even stranger, as Puck and her player sidekick explore bizarre, shattered landscapes crammed full of biomechanical horrors. The player can fight back using fairly standard 2D side-scrolling combat. There are slash combos, dodges, parries, and an array of power moves that the player can obtain by killing bosses scattered around the world.

Well, killing and eating them, technically.

In Shadow Labyrinth‘s most potentially-upsetting detail, simply killing enemies isn’t sufficient to obtain new abilities and crafting resources. Once the player has slashed an enemy into submission, they have to remember to call Puck out so that she can lunge forward and chomp her way through the enemy corpse, gathering the items the player will need to craft upgrades. Luckily, boss devouring is an automatic process, although the form Puck takes in order to unlock new abilities is as horrifying as any of the twisted foes the player will encounter.

While Shadow Labyrinth can be appreciated for its tight, easy-to-learn combat, what it should be applauded for is the innovative take it has on classic Pac-Man gameplay.

Scattered throughout the map are special electrified floors. If the swordfighter steps onto them they’re instantly transformed into Pac-Man, complete with automatic movement and wakka-wakka sound effects. However, it’s more complex than Pac-Man ever was, because Puck has access to a jump move that allows her to vault from one electrified floor to the next. This one addition allows the developers to include maddeningly complex sequences that require pixel-perfect precision in order to vault through gauntlets of energy fencing and spinning buzzsaws.

There are even special dedicated Pac-Man levels that the player can defeat in order to unlock resources. Each one is a clever take on classic Pac-Man gameplay, with the player trying to collect enough pellets to switch over to ghost-eating mode while zipping through mazes that gradually fall apart as pieces of the world transform into weapons to be used against the ghosts. It’s to Shadow Labyrinth‘s credit that they included a minigame so creative in the ways it uses assumed familiarity with Pac-Man that it easily could have been sold as a stand-alone product.

While the gameplay is stellar and art design are truly exceptional, Shadow Labyrinth does have one major drawback, and it’s that it’s – and please excuse the wordplay – a little too labyrinthine.

The map is simply enormous. It takes forever to get from one place to the next, and fast-travel nodes are few and far between. It wouldn’t be so bad if the levels were absolutely packed with interesting features and monsters to fight, but that’s just not the case — every single one one of the areas has at least a few sections that force the player to simply wander for minutes on end to get to another checkpoint.

What’s worse is the sheer number of movement abilities the player needs to unlock in order to make their way around this enormous map. While it’s relatively common that metroidvanias ask the player to get a couple of movement upgrades to see everything, Shadow Labyrinth sets the number absurdly high. There are multiple jumps, air dashes, a grappling hook, a giant laser, and more. The map isn’t much help in keeping track of all the locations players will need to revisit, either – the player can unlock markers for it, but there are just four colors, and close to a dozen obstacle types.

It took me over sixty hours to do everything, and it’s not exaggerating to say that nearly half of that time was spent scouring the map for places to use a new ability I’d unlocked in the hopes of finding a path forward.

Shadow Labyrinth is also punishingly difficult at times – not just the devious and brutal bosses, either. Ithas some of the trickiest platforming I’ve seen in ages.

At a certain point it became clear that I could progress no further until I obtained the ability to double-jump. The only place I’d failed to search was a winding tunnel made of instant-death spikes that could only be navigated by zipping from one grapple-point to the next, with the slightest mis-angled shot or split-second hesitation erasing all progress. I’d hesitated in exploring based on the assumption that it was the kind of late-game location I was supposed to conquer after getting all of the movement abilities, but no, this ridiculously complex and demanding exercise in free-fall platforming was the barrier keeping me from the double-jump. This truly is a situation where only the most dedicated players need apply.

Shadow Labyrinth is equal parts magnificent and frustrating.

The action is stellar, the setting – largely made up of deep-cut references to Namco’s arcade history – is uniquely fascinating, and the retro Pac-Man gameplay is perhaps the best the franchise has ever offered. At the same time, it makes exploration such a chore that I swore off finishing it and stepped away from it more than a few times. I always came back, though, which goes to show just what an incredible job the developers have done here.

Even when I hated what I was doing, it was always a pleasure to engage with, and there aren’t a lot of games I can say the same about.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on PC/SW/PS5/XBS. Copies of the game were purchased on Steam obtained and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 60 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Fantasy Violence. It’s fantastical and stylized action, and it’s safe for just about anyone to play. I’m serious about how scary Puck eating enemies is, though. It’s absolutely brutal, and deserves a warning if younger teens are interested in checking the game out.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All information is delivered via text on screen. I played most of the game without audio, and encountered no issues. This experience is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are not remappable.

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