I apologize to Pac-Man, I was not aware of how nasty your game is

I feel that Bandai Namco cheated me, but I'm not angry with it. When I first got my hands at Shadow Labyrinth-The upcoming Metroidvania, which imagines Pac-Man-last month, I had an burst swinging around on a grip hook, solves puzzles and sliced ​​and was then through hordes of foreign freaks. I thought I had a pretty good idea of ​​what kind of game Shadow Labyrinth was from my short time with it on Pax East, but after playing a longer part of the game last week it shows me that I was very, very wrong.

Shadow Labyrinth is an action -filled and very mobile Metroidvania – that part was true. But what I didn't realize about it before is that this game is designed to make you cry. Other writers who participated in the preview with me called it Pac souls. I know it's cliché to compare everything with dark souls, but believe me, Shadow Labyrinth is a sadistic son of a puck.

A search game for Sickos

Whati played this time started about a third of the way into the game, in a Navstad called Bosconian Village. The Bosconians – a reference to the Namco shooter in 1981, Bosconian – is a foreign race that has come to the foreign planet where Shadow Labyrinth takes place because the evil that infects this plan also threatens their home world. I knew Shadow Labyrinth had a connection to Bandai Namco's interconnected USGF time line, but I didn't know how deep Lore would go. Obviously, Shadow Labyrinth is a pretty fleshy sci-fi epic.

This section is before the level I played earlier, so I did not have access to the grip hook or some of the other abilities you acquire later, which made me feel quite vulnerable. The goal of this section was simple: Follow three paths to collect three gold plates, then connect them together to create a key that opens the door to the next area. As it turns out, this was much easier said than done.

Each of the three roads represented another type of challenge: battle, platform and puzzle solution. The puzzle involved to roll a series of boulders down different paths to break through the walls, and there was no sweat. The other two … I will have nightmares about the other two.

Fighting for your life

The fighting track is a series of five rooms you have to fight through, one by the next, with gradually more dangerous enemies and without any checkpoints. The first room throws a lot of little goobers at you who die in two hits, but load on you with Spears.

There are three ways to avoid injury. You can avoid rolls, which give you some I-frames to pass through attack enemies, you can parry, which throws the enemy from balance, or you can block, which covers you with a smash bros.-esque bubble that breaks when it has taken enough damage.

The Parry window is a razor, and although it is easy enough to block a Dink that goes towards you with a spear, everything that moves faster than a shopping cart that rolls down the candy process is quite difficult to time. You can't spam Parry, nor can you activate it directly from an attack combination (there is half a second delay), so if you are facing several attacks from different directions, Parry will not save you.

The block has its own shortcomings. A big hit from a large enemy will crush it directly, while several hits from small enemies do the same. It will also not prevent the foreigners from attacking, so if you get stuck in a combination you will probably end with a broken shield and a bunch of missing health. Shadow Labyrinth uses a piston style system to heal, so every drink you pop is one that you will not have later when you move down from floor to floor.

NOTE: Preferably use puck to consume every monster you kill to acquire new craft resources. You only have two seconds to do this before the body is due, and in the heat of the battle it is not easy.

This blade was difficult. Partly because I had to jump into a section several hours into the game without experience, but even if I was heated, it would still have taken me two -digit attempts. There is a large selection of enemies in this particular challenge, each with their own attack patterns and Parry Timings. It is a lot, and I didn't even get the impression that this is supposed to be a particularly serious struggle.

Sawblade and laser beams

Every anxiety that I felt about the battle tower was nothing compared to the suffering that the platform path made me through. I didn't know there were demons at Bandai Namco. This long obstacle course combines moving platforms, disappearing platforms, rotating saw blades, lasers that turn on and off, and the extremely unintuitive mini-puck mode, alias Pac-man Spider-ball, which has puck zooming along walls and ceilings with a strange angular hope to avoid obstacles.

On top of all precision platform, you must also fight with time limits. Exit doors bangs if you can't reach them fast enough and put even more pressure on your platform.

On top of toYou only get a checkpoint about halfway, which means you will probably die and redo sections that you have already conquered over and over and over again. The last challenge is a long mini-puck race against the time that requires you to avoid moving lasers and razors that are constantly flying on you. If you die, you will get back four challenges that need to be repeated.

God has mercy on my Pac-man

And after all this, when you have collected the three tiles and opened the door to the next section, there are even more platform and combat meetings – but not quite as punishable as the first set. Bandai Namco gave me three hours to play through both of these sections, fight a boss based on Pinky The Ghost and then fight another Boss based on the killer from Splatterhouse, and in three hours I just managed to get to the Pinky fight.

So I registered for another session. I don't like to give up, but even more important, despite my frustration and often outbursts of “Oh come on!” I still had a lot of fun. Shadow Labyrinth is a much more intense experience than I expected – even after playing it once before – but now that I know what I get into, I'm looking for the challenge. I should have known better. Namco's catalog is filled with brutally difficult games, and Shadow Labyrinth is an Ode to that heritage. I just thought the studio had been milded in its old age. Boy, I was wrong.