We are living in an era of gamingdefined by remakes. It seems like the biggest news stories of the year all revolve around which games are being remade for modern consoles, dominating the conversation as people start to create game-of-the-year lists come holiday time.
While I certainly enjoy my fair share of remakes, I find a lot of them play things a little too safe when it comes to switching things up. On one hand, that makes sense. Remaking a game is meant to recapture the spirit of the original title while updating it for modern sensibilities, but it’s the remakes that go out of their way to do something truly unique that grab my attention most.
Shadow Labyrinthwas announced atThe Game Awards in 2024, and we received yet another look at it during this week’s Nintendo Direct. I can’t stop thinking about it. The concept of Pac-Man remade as a 2D Metroidvania keeps me up at night. It’s brilliant, it’s weird, and, if it’s successful, I hope it inspires other developers to remake retro classics in genres that don’t make any sense for the source material.
Shadow Labyrinth Subverts Expectations
If you were to ask what kind of game Pac-Man really is when boiled down to its basic components, I think most people would describe it as a grandfather (or grandmother if we’re talking Ms. Pac-Man) to the survival horror genre. Players are constantly pursued by ghosts while grabbing resources and limited power-ups. It’s a bit of a stretch, but that’s basically just Outlast.
When making a modern reimagining of Pac-Man, then, it seems like it would be a no-brainer for Bandai Namco to have designed Shadow Labyrinth to be a take on the survival horror genre, but it didn’t.It reimagined Pac-Man as a Metroidvania, a complete side-step from what anyone would expect out of the series.
Note: Shadow Labyrinth was also explored inAmazon’s Secret Level anthology series, which featured an episode that turned Pac-Man from a wholesome yellow puck into a weird nightmare.
This move is genius, and it really shows Bandai Namco is thinking outside of the box when it comes to reworking the classic systems of Pac-Man and has me excited to see what other subversions “the Swordman” and “Puck” have in store.
Will the game have some kind of mechanic based around the Power Pill? Will the ghosts be representations of the protagonist’s past lives?
By doing something completely different, I’m already much more invested in Shadow Labyrinth than if it were simply another Pac-Man port with new arcade modes. It’s really weird and that makes it interesting.
Making More Retros Even Weirder
I don’t want the games industry to stop at Pac-Man. I want more. I want weirder subversions of classic games.Tetris 99 was a good first step, reimagining Tetris as a battle royale, but I want a Tetris first-person shooter.
I want Dig-Dug as an open-world survival game. I want Space Invaders as an RPG. I want Q*bert as a stealth game. I want Track and Field as a 4X strategy game. I want Bubble Bobble as a Naughty Dog-style third-person shooter with well-acted cinematic cutscenes.
I want Pong as a dating sim.
How do any of these games work? What are their mechanics? I don’t know, I’m not a game designer, but I’ve seen how inventive studios can be when tasked with reimagining older titles for modern audiences, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that these sorts of weird retro remakes in the same vein as Shadow Labyrinth are possible
In general, I just want games to take bigger swings. I understand why that’s not possible for most studios, given the size of game budgets and the unreasonably high sales expectations of publishers, but there was a time when making Soulslikes was a huge risk as FromSoftware pioneered the genre. Now, Soulslikes are everywhere and have dominated the industry for more than a decade.
I’m excited that Shadow Labyrinth exists because it’s such a weird concept. I want weirder games, and I’d love to see other studios take a crack at doing something similar. Hopefully, Shadow Labyrinth is able to show everyone what’s possible when you roll with a bizarre idea for a game.
