Shadow Labyrinth review: That way Pac-Man lies

Video games being self-referential is about as special as grocery store sushi, but Shadow Labyrinth is like how Kroger started dusting its spicy California rolls with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos crumbs. The team behind this monstrosity basically asked: “Pac-Man’s 45th birthday is here; what if instead of the usual stuff we made everything as weird and gross as possible?” And folks, these people succeeded. Shadow Labyrinth is a massive, complicated, stressful Metroidvania that is full of self-referential material presented in supremely unhinged (but shockingly narratively cohesive) fashion.

What have you done?

Shadow Labyrinth starts with a child sitting on a bench in a dark city, bent over a gaming handheld while rustic jazz reminding me of Rusty Rabbit croons in the background. Once you press start that child disappears, leaving the device on the ground. The starting screen permanently changes, reminding you of what you’ve done to this innocent soul every time you load your save.

The soul wakes up in an alien dungeon, inhabiting an armless and nearly faceless body shrouded in a tattered cloak. A floating robot named PUCK greets you, and yes, she is a robotic Pac-Man fit with sinister, glowing LEDs. PUCK is running the show, and she tells you to grab a nearby sword to help her complete her mission. And she has not a care in the world about what happens to this new body in the process. What follows is an arduous journey through an endlessly hostile environment, full of ancient technology, monsters, natural hazards, traps, and multiple forces entangled in decades of intergalactic conflict. Oh boy.

As you’ve probably seen in the marketing materials so far, PUCK is something akin to evil as she gleefully takes control of our mysterious swordsman to literally devour enemies, sometimes in the form of a ghastly mech, sometimes in the form of a withering, demonic, dark cloud-like being in the shape of Pac-Man that sloppily chomps on larger foes to absorb their powers. She does this by taking over the swordsman’s body of course, with a callous dismissal of his say in the matter. It’s funny because it’s Pac-Man stuff being edgy and creepy, but it’s also kind of aggressive, cold, and grotesque. The marketing doesn’t do this jarring juxtaposition justice, and it’s really effective as far as creeping you out and making you feel dirty. Especially if you find yourself revisiting that starting screen during your run.

Pac-Man? Evil. Galaga? Evil. Dig Dug? Super Evil. 

This gnarliness extends to many more Bandai Namco elements, some of which are simply references for funsies and others showing up to actually enshrine this game into a specific slice of canon. If you aren’t familiar, Shadow Labyrinth is set in the same timeline of events as classics like Galaga and Dig Dug. Yes, there’s a timeline for this stuff, and you can check it out here. It’s super in-depth in a way that sickos will love, and the ways in which Shadow Labyrinth is connected are wild. I won’t get into it because of spoilers and whatnot, but the way Galaga in particular is represented made my jaw drop due to how unabashedly insane it all is.

Galaga also happened to be related to one of the hardest parts of this game, which is a great segue to talk about how challenging this adventure is. This is not your typical Metroidvania, nor is it a “hard” game in the way we’ve grown accustomed to thanks to Soulslikes taking over gaming conventions. This is old school as hell, in a way that lets you know immediately you have no friends here. For example, as you explore these massive, sprawling, maze-like spaces, you’ll soon notice how far apart save points are spread. And even when you reach one, it’s more likely to be a “checkpoint,” meaning it doesn’t give you access to all the functions a regular save point has. And you feel that difference, especially early on when every moment and slice of health you have matters.

It’s a grueling challenge, the kind that tests your reflexes, pattern recognition, ability to understand strict rules, and of course your patience. It’s going to filter people, even folks who have come to enjoy what we typically call difficult games. It’s going to make a lot of reviewers like me look bad for suggesting it’s too hard, although I’ve found myself mostly having a great time. But be warned. This isn’t Hollow Knight, or even Metroid. This isn’t a Metroidvania that wants you to have a good time filling out the map and making discoveries. This is a Metroidvania that hates you and wants you dead. But the reward for your struggles is a new piece of bonkers, twisted lore. And that was often worthwhile for me.

Get good? You can certainly try

The times when it didn’t gel as much were the times I felt the challenges were asking too much. Some hard games like to push you beyond the limits of your own controls, throwing enemies at you which threaten to outpace the rules you have to play by. Shadow Labyrinth is guilty of pushing that line constantly, and a few times it feels like it goes over. Falling prey to these moments feel confusing, like it’s hard to comprehend how you’re even supposed to get past. Sometimes it wasn’t until I had beaten my head against a section over a dozen times that I was able to get by, and it often felt like divine intervention more than learning or overcoming something with my own evolving skills.

Also, because of how sprawling and dense the maps are, there’s a point at which Shadow Labyrinth’s disinterest in giving you directions (fine) and its limited self-marking (fine) crash head-on into some mandatory backtracking that is not remotely foreshadowed at all. You have markers you can use, but there’s no reason to think this specific part was a good spot for a marker. If you don’t have an excellent memory or navigational skills, I can’t imagine not needing a guide at least once for the average player. I was certainly in despair, wandering aimlessly hoping to jog my memory for where this specific spot in a massive, multilayered, location-segmented map was. Yeesh.

I also find myself having a hard time deciding what I think about how this game looks. It has that 2D, highly detailed, high-resolution look that does a great job expressing the horrors of things like Dig Dug characters redrawn like GWAR puppets. But animation uses that tweening style we see in a lot of lower-budget games, giving everything a kind of cheap feeling even if it isn’t actually, literally cheap. When it isn’t moving, Shadow Labyrinth looks pretty sick. When it is moving, it sometimes looks like a fan game someone made in Flash 20 years ago.

Despair, suffering, and Hell Yeah moments

Shadow Labyrinth makes up for its visual compromises in its action though, where things feel accomplished, deliberate and measured. Even though, as I hinted at earlier, sometimes the rules you have to abide by are broken by your enemies. Those moments are frustrating, but as you gain more abilities and your kit evolves, there’s a satisfying grit to getting around while you’re almost constantly in danger. This isn’t like a Metroid game in which you’re playing a seasoned bounty hunter capable of zipping around and basically being a space ninja.

There are severe limitations to what you can do, and using your abilities can be just as challenging as fighting. But the neat thing about these hard-ass, rules-oriented games is the sense of intimacy of how those limitations intersect with mastery. You learn where you can or can’t stand, how to manipulate your strikes and close distance, how best to launch yourself from grappling points that have tight error margins. It feels good to suffer here, in a sense.

Speaking of difficulty and rules, there are also Pac-Man maze-style minigames you can encounter, because of course there are. But much like the rest of the game, these moments are out of control, weird, and as frustrating as they are enthralling. Think the beloved Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, but if it hated your guts for showing up and daring to grab a controller. I’m still not quite sure what to make of these. Each one feels like surviving being hit in the face by a tidal wave.

One of the best parts of running into a game like Shadow Labyrinth is there’s no telling what kind of audience it has. It’s weird, difficult, janky, ambitious, and did I say weird? Let’s go with bizarre. Absurd. Deranged, even. The announcement was met with confusion, and I think the end product will be met with even more confusion than anticipated. But there’s also some gas here, with an experience that almost never slows down, never lets you rest or breathe, but is always wrenching your brain and making you think. This is an utterly fascinating experience, and a wonderful exercise in a team taking something mundane and being relentlessly creative. Tons of people will probably hate it. But folks who gel with this particular brand of crazy have a potential new cult classic in their libraries.

Shadow Labyrinth is available on July 18, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this review.