Summary
- One of the biggest surprises of The Game Awards was the announcement of Shadow Labyrinth.
- This 2D action platformer takes the world introduced in Secret Level’s Circle episode and goes even further with it.
- TheGamer had the chance to talk to Shadow Labyrinth producer Seigo Aizawa about how the game came to be and what it means for Pac-Man going forward.
From the reveal of Naughty Dog’s long-awaited new game to confirmation that Okami is finally getting a sequel after nearly two decades, last week’s The Game Awards was an incredible event full of surprises for 2025 and beyond.
One of the biggest revelations of the night actually happened during the event’s pre-show, when Bandai Namco announced Shadow Labyrinth, a standalone 2D action platformer (more on that phrasing later) set in the same gritty world as Secret Level’s Pac-Man episode, Circle.
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Considering how dark and loosely tied to the more joyful source material Circle is, combined with how recently the Secret Level as a whole debuted, Shadow Labyrinth coming out of nowhere as its own thing was a strange and memorable highlight of the ceremony.
How The Most Disturbing Take On Pac-Man Came To Be
Things only got more interesting when I sat down with Shadow Labyrinth’s producer, Seigo Aizawa, to find out how the twisted take on Pac-Man came to be. If you’re anything like me and believed everything Amazon said about Circle, you might think that Bandai Namco is just adapting the Secret Level episode, but that isn’t the case at all.
“We’ve been holding onto this secret for a very long time,” Aizawa tells me. “So, we’ve actually been in development for about four years. When Amazon came to us about the Secret Level project and asked whether we were interested in joining them, we showed what we’d been doing. We showed Labyrinth to Tim [Miller] and Dave [Wilson] and they were very impressed and found it cool.”
Although this might not come as a surprise to some considering how much Secret Level feels like an extended commercial for the games it adapts, Circle is by far the most creative and risk-taking of them all. To hear that the grim and gory version of Pac-Man actually comes from Bandai itself and has been in the works for some time was quite a shock.
Shadow Labyrinth came first and then we shared the scenario and that is how we joined Secret Level. – Seigo Aizawa
Now that we definitively know that Amazon isn’t behind the delightfully weird and vague new direction for everyone’s favourite yellow sector, that just leaves one big question – why? With Pac-Man being one of the most recognisable and beloved gaming icons in the world, what caused the Shadow Labyrinth team to step so far out of its ghost-riddled box?
“We’ve been making family-oriented games with the original IP, the original Pac-Man, who is well-loved by a lot of people,” Aizawa says. “But then at the same time, there are still many others who have not actually played Pac-Man before, and we wanted to reach that audience as well. That’s why we came up with this automotive concept of Pac-Man, the dark Pac-Man you see.”
Aizawa says that the team considered including Pac-Man in Shadow Labyrinth’s title, but settled on leaving him out to reach a wider audience. You can still spot his distinctive shape in the lettering, though.
Turning Pac-Man Into A Not-Metroidvania
Beyond the initial shock of Bandai twisting gaming’s happiest protagonist into a murderous yellow orb, another key thing that makes Shadow Labyrinth such a strange yet exciting proposition is how it plays. Or rather, how it seems to play since we’ve only had the gameplay reveal trailer so far.
The reveal trailer for Shadow Labyrinth showed the Swordsman (the eighth incarnation of the Secret Level character, making Circle a prequel) and Puck exploring various locations in the maze with a mixture of 2D hack ‘n slash combat and platforming.
Regarding the game in general, we say 2D action platformer, but at the same time, we acknowledge that many people would call the game a Metroidvania. – Seigo Aizawa
The vibes are instantly reminiscent of similar Metroidvanias like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Dead Cells, but that’s a term that Aizawa and Bandai don’t like to use. While they know that audiences will inevitably call it by that name, and are comfortable with the comparisons that have been made, the team prefers to call it a 2D action platformer instead.
“One of the features of Pac-Man is the maze,” Aizawa tells me. “If you look at Metroidvania, the exploration part is a big feature of those games. We feel the idea of the maze in Pac-Man has a very strong link with the exploration element that you see in Metroidvanias. In the same way, the strong atmosphere of Shadow Labyrinth matches well with other action platformer games.”
Shadow Labyrinth Will Resemble Pac-Man More Than Circle
While the Secret Level episode based on Shadow Labyrinth had only very loose ties to Pac-Man with its vague, disconnected story, that won’t quite be the case for the game, which appears to be including a few more links to the series that inspired it.
Aizawa says that Shadow Labyrinth aims to have a “solid storyline”, suggesting that the tale of the Swordsman and Puck will go deeper than it did in the ten-minute episode introducing the concept. The game will start in the same way with the Swordsman awakening from a pod with no memory and being guided by Puck, but Aizawa notes that the game revolves around the pair of them as protagonists.
Beyond what’s been shown in the brief reveal trailer, the producer is keeping quiet on all the ways the game will play with Pac-Man’s core concepts, but it seems that players will be fighting the ghosts instead of avoiding them. The dark version of Pac-Man is also seen at one point, as well as a more traditional version that’s closer to the original.
“As you can see in the reveal trailer, there is a scene where the Puck and the Swordsman fuse to become a Pac-Man shape,” Aizawa points out. “During gameplay, you can transform into the puck shape and then run on lanes. That form allows us to access the place where the Swordsman cannot, and that is how we incorporate the Puck element into Shadow Labyrinth. That is one example but we have more to announce in the future.”
The Shadow Labyrinth team is aware that Metroidvania fans expect a “certain difficulty level” and is hoping to achieve that. At the same time, it’s also making sure that newcomers find exploring and playing approachable.
The Future Of Pac-Man Beyond Shadow Labyrinth
While Shadow Labyrinth represents a major shift for Pac-Man as a brand, showing that Bandai is willing to significantly shake things up, it’s fair to say that this new take won’t be for everyone, especially those attached to the family-friendly icon.
The Shadow Labyrinth team has big hopes for the Swordsman and Puck, going as far as calling it “one of the new franchises” for the series, but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten about good ol’ Pac ahead of his milestone anniversary in 2025.
“We are approaching our 45th anniversary next year, and the motto for that anniversary is actually ‘big impact’,” Aizawa says. “So, we hope to achieve that by making a huge impact via Shadow Labyrinth. Of course, it’s not just Shadow Labyrinth, with Pac-Man itself we do have projects. It’s not going to stop at Shadow Labyrinth.”
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