Having just passed his 45th anniversary, which is ancient in gaming years, you might expect Pac-Man to be considering retirement. Perhaps he has finally buried the hatchet with his ghost nemeses. Maybe he spends his days with his wife, trundling around a nice hedge maze in the country on a mobility scooter.
But game characters don’t get to retire. And judging by the yellow guy’s latest game, he is going in the opposite direction. The first hint that Pac-Man has gone feral is that his new adventure is rated “T for Teen”, due to an abundance of violence and blood.
The game in question is Shadow Labyrinth, a metroidvania which casts players as a hooded figure known as The Swordsman, accompanied by a familiar, sunshine-yellow sphere named Puck. This is Pac-Man transplanted into cosmic horror, traversing perilous landscapes and battling nightmarish creatures. When you defeat a boss, Puck transforms into a giant, blood-red Pac-Monster and devours the enemy’s corpse.
It’s a startling change, but Pac-Man is not the first gaming icon to undergo what we might call “mascot drift”: where a character is ripped away from the tone or genre with which they’re associated and placed in a wildly different context. In an age when familiar IP is a sure route to strong sales, game developers are scouring their back catalogues to see if they can squeeze any life from their old characters. Are the results a creative, welcome reinvention of fan favourites, or scraping the bottom of the IP barrel?
Sometimes mascot drift reeks of shameless brand synergy — hence Darth Vader and Sabrina Carpenter strolling around the colourful island of Fortnite. But in other cases it makes sense, as in fighting games such as Super Smash Bros which have large rosters of characters who can be boiled down to a few recognisable moves and poses. In the case of Pac-Man’s latest outing, it works because Shadow Labyrinth is a satisfying original game first, and a mascot vehicle second — a priority evident in the developer’s canny choice to not even put Pac-Man’s name in the title.
Mascot drift is most successful when developers take a big swing and commit to the concept. Lies of P, for instance, does the opposite of what anyone might expect from a game about Pinocchio, curdling the puppet’s morality fable into a bloody adventure through a decaying Belle Époque city. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog swaps acceleration for investigation, as you team up with Tails to investigate the apparent murder of Sonic on a train — its willingness to kill off Sega’s star, even as a gag, demonstrates the company’s subversive edge.
Nintendo is a master of mascot drift, with a cast of iconic characters who are regularly deployed in experimental new settings, from racing to tennis to brawling. Mario alone has been a plumber, footballer, doctor, referee, archaeologist, chef and painter. In last year’s Princess Peach: Showtime!, the perennial damsel in distress was reframed as an action hero who could become a ninja, detective or figure skater, while Cadence of Hyrule turned Zelda into an epic dance battle. The key to Nintendo’s experimentation is that while the genre may change, the tone stays on-brand: sweet, colourful and gloriously inoffensive. You’d never see a body horror game starring Kirby, though given the adorable pink ball’s penchant for sucking enemies into its mouth, there’s all the source material you could need for a gruesome Cronenbergian nightmare.
Placing familiar characters in a fresh context to attract new audiences is not unique to gaming. In the superhero world we’ve seen Batman evolve from 1960s camp to Christopher Nolan’s grim realism to a family-friendly Lego comedy. Recently there has been a slew of horror flicks capitalising on the IP expiry of beloved children’s characters, such as Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. This year the American IP rights to Popeye expired and there have already been three slasher movies: Popeye’s Revenge, Popeye the Slayer Man and Shiver Me Timbers. All were critically panned.
But it makes sense that mascot drift happens most energetically in gaming, a medium powered by a drive for innovation. Most games prioritise systems and mechanics over story. Their characters aren’t complex humans, they’re hollow puppets deployed in scenarios. In fact, the more specific their characterisation, the less flexible and useful they are for developers. It’s hard to imagine Ellie — the tough, traumatised survivor from zombie blockbuster The Last of Us — being placed in a zany kart-racing game.
That said, playing Shadow Labyrinth did make me reconsider the original Pac-Man, not as a cheerful arcade icon, but as the story of a ravenous yellow orb pursued by ghosts through an infinite neon labyrinth. Perhaps it’s always been a horror game in disguise. Sometimes it takes a dramatic shift to reveal what was there from the start, lurking at the heart of the maze.
‘Shadow Labyrinth’ is available from July 18 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam
