Shadow Labyrinth: The First Pac-Troid Game Gets Lost in the IP Woods

By Garrett Martin | July 17, 2025 | 10:00am

Video Games Reviews shadow labyrinth

Shadow Labyrinth: The First Pac-Troid Game Gets Lost in the IP Woods

When Shadow Labyrinth was announced it very quickly got tagged as that new weird Pac-Man game. That is not an inaccurate way to describe it. It is new, it is weird, and it is a game with Pac-Man in it. It’s not like any Pac-Man game you’ve ever played before, though, which is a big part of its weirdness. In Shadow Labyrinth Pac-Man isn’t the star but the annoying little helper who floats over your shoulder and constantly butts in to tell you what to do, like Navi from Ocarina of Time. Also their name is Puck, derived from their original Japanese game, and not Pac-Man. Also it turns out they’re more of a Ms. Pac-Man than a Pac-Man, anyway. And finally you’re not always eating dots and alternately chasing or being chased by ghosts, but only kind of doing that, on occasion, inside a game that owes way more to Metroid than any Pac-Man game.

Yes, Shadow Labyrinth is the latest work to dig through the deeply-plowed field of Metroid-inspired games. It’s a classic take on the formula, side-scrolling and everything, with the caverns of an alien world divided into branching sections that comprise a single connected whole. Eventually you can walk from the first room all the way to the very last, once you’ve acquired all the game’s power-ups and unlocked all its abilities and are no longer blocked by a certain type of wall you can’t break through or doors that need a specific security clearance. (It’s faster to just zap from one save point to another, of course.) Along the way you’ll jump, shoot, roll, air dash, and swing your way through its different areas, along with other means of locomotion, killing nasty creatures and looking for the next power-up that’ll let you continue your progress. It’s about as Metroid as these things get.

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Zoom out far enough and you can argue that Metroid games already have some crucial elements in common with Pac-Man, which might make Shadow Labyrinth’s mash-up make more sense. They may not fit on a single screen like Pac-Man’s levels, but Metroid’s sprawling, winding worlds are effectively one giant maze. The round energy capsules Samus eats to restore her health could easily be called power pellets. And what does Samus resemble when she rolls up into the morph ball if not an orange and red Pac-Man?

Shadow Labyrinth

That last similarity is where Shadow Labyrinth’s Metroid / Pac-Man crossover fits the best. You don’t often control Pac-Man directly here, but when you do it’s similar to the morph ball sections from Nintendo’s series. Your playable character is suddenly round and compact and able to go where you otherwise couldn’t. And Shadow Labyrinth completes the Pac-Man of it all by having the yellow orb move at a steady pace in whatever direction its facing (you can disable this, and probably should for accuracy’s sake) and placing dots alongside the tracks your Pac-Man-shaped partner clings to, just to give them a little treat along the way.

Shadow Labyrinth dips even more deeply into Pac-Man with certain maze levels that can be entered at tombstone-looking points across the map. You’ll start seeing these very early in the game, but in keeping with the genre, it’ll be several hours before you’re able to actually enter any of them. These mazes have more in common with the utterly exceptional Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (a game from 2010 that I still regularly revisit and get hooked on all over again), complete with sometimes using its music, culminating in boss battles that bring a little something new to the table. They’re not a major part of Shadow Labyrinth but they’re a welcome one, and you’ll probably find yourself hunting down every one of them once you’re able to play them.

Shadow Labyrinth’s many Pac-Man references are overt and unmissable. This isn’t just a new weird Pac-Man game, though. It’s Bandai Namco’s attempt at leveraging its ‘80s arcade IP into one of those interconnected universes that were all the rage 10 years ago—a Marvel Cinematic Universe for retro game fans. Some games get big spotlights here, with Xevious, Galaga, and Bosconian lending their names to major characters, places, or concepts. (Shadow Labyrinth really does love Namco’s space shooters.) Other references are more obscure or more muted. It’s the kind of thing that most of today’s gaming audience wouldn’t pick up on, but that a certain type of player (not exclusive to, but heavily composed of old arcade fans) will nod their head at whenever one crosses the screen.

Have any of these jury rigged IP crossovers ever worked outside of Marvel’s movies and DC’s TV shows, though? DC couldn’t even pull it off with its movies, despite decades of experience at just this kind of storytelling. Godzilla vs. King Kong, I guess? Maybe Universal Monsters, off and on, not counting the massive, embarrassing, right-out-of-the-gates stumble of its would-be Dark Universe movies? Marvel and DC have been creating and exploring this whole shared universe concept longer than video games have really existed, so they started with a huge advantage that something like Shadow Labyrinth doesn’t have. And that gets to the real hole at the center of this game: it’s a transparent piece of corporately mandated synergy—one that doesn’t really feel like an ad, but that still exists primarily to remind us of these other properties that Bandai Namco owns.

Shadow Labyrinth is a perfectly fine Metroid riff. The level design, the pacing of new power-ups, and the mechanical satisfaction of mastering its different forms of precision-demanding motion make it both very easy and demanding to play. It’s got atmosphere to spare, and the Pac-Vibes are stronger than you might expect. The story gives you nothing to cling to, though, and the unnecessary, business-oriented nature and obvious nostalgia-bait of its references are actively turnoffs.

There’s one part deep in Shadow Labyrinth where you have to swing from one end of a spike-covered cavern to another. It’s not as simple as just swinging forward and latching on to the next node; you’ll have to swing upward, downward, at angles, occasionally dashing through very small openings surrounded by spikes, and other than a couple of landing spots during the first half there’s no safe place to land. If you mess up any single part of this process you’ll land on spikes and restart from whatever piece of solid ground you last stood on. It’s one of the most frustrating and unforgiving things seen in this kind of game in decades. It’s right up there with Mega Man’s disappearing blocks or those parts in Metroid when Samus has to bomb jump her way up a wall. And every time you hit a spike you lose a health bar, at the end of which you die and have to restart at the nearest save point—adding a little bit of repetitive travel to this cocktail of annoyance. Normally in a game like this that kind of moment is tolerable because you want to see what happens next. You’re so tapped into the game-to-player endorphin loop, and also maybe intrigued by where the story is going, that you keep trying, again and again, until you finally make it through. It’s hard to see how Shadow Labyrinth offers enough in return to make that kind of struggle worth it. Who wants to go through all of that in hopes of maybe getting some weird sci-fi reference to Mappy? There needs to be something more than an Easter egg at the end of that labyrinth—especially when there’s a regular stream of Easter eggs on the way there.

Shadow Labyrinth was developed and published by Bandai Namco. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available on Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.