Shadow Labyrinth

Shadow Labyrinth is a 2D action-adventure game featuring many Metroidvania aspects. The player controls Swordsman No. 8, who can perform melee attacks with a sword and charge a variety of "ESP" abilities. Alongside traditional combat, No. 8 can fuse with PUCK to travel along walls and ceilings in sequences reminiscent of the original Pac-Man, controlling speed and launching off surfaces to attack enemies.

They can also fuse into GAIA, a large mechanized form used to fight powerful enemies and bosses. Occasionally, they are transported into enclosed mazes where they have to eat many sleeping ghosts in a similar fashion to Pac-Man Championship Edition 2.

The game is set within Bandai Namco's UGSF (United Galaxy Space Force) timeline in the year 3333. Thirty-three years earlier, Operation Panzer is disrupted by the Red G-HOST, causing the Panzer GAIA weapon to crash on the planet Xevious. A player from the real world in 2025 is suddenly transported into the game’s universe, awakening in a ruined prison without a mouth or arms. He is guided by a robotic companion named "PUCK", who identifies him as her eighth summoning attempt, while an oloid appears and grants him a prosthetic arm so he can wield a sword, becoming a Swordsman.

As the Swordsman and PUCK travel across the devastated world, it's revealed that Xevious is controlled by a supercomputer named Gamp, which has corrupted both native life and remnants of UGSF technology. PUCK reveals that her original purpose was to destroy Gamp using the dormant Sheyenne GAIA system, but UGSF command instead intends to destroy the planet. The pair encounter a woman named Thebe, who is later revealed to be a lost part of PUCK that was separated and manipulated by Gamp. After confronting several powerful G-HOSTs and cooperating with a lost Bosconian tribe to power the Giant Black Tower, Thebe sacrifices herself so PUCK can regain her true form and use the Sheyenne GAIA to access Gamp’s stronghold.

Bandai Namco Studios began developing Shadow Labyrinth in 2020. When conceptualizing the game, the team made expanding the audience of the Pac-Man series, a predominantly family-friendly franchise, their primary goal. They decided to do this by creating a darker entry in the series. They revisited the original concepts for the first Pac-Man game, and boiled them down to "the maze concept, the eat concept, and how the table can flip all of a sudden".

Using that basis, the team began creating Shadow Labyrinth. The game's development team includes Katsuhiro Harada, producer of the Tekken series, and it was developed using the Unity engine. Per the development team's vision of expanding the appeal of Pac-Man to those who had never played a game in the series, they chose to leave any references to it out of the game's title.

Critics generally praised the game's visual style and its unconventional reinterpretation of the Pac-Man franchise, highlighting its atmospheric environments and experimental mechanics. However, reviews were mixed regarding its combat pacing, checkpoint placement, and difficulty balance, with some critics finding the experience uneven despite its creative ambition.

The PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 versions of Shadow Labyrinth received "mixed or average" reviews, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received fair approval, being recommended by 39% of critics. In Japan, four critics from Famitsu gave the game a total score of 32 out of 40, with each critic awarding the game an 8 out of 10.