When the creators of Amazon's Secret Level spoke about the Pac-Man-themed installment of their animated anthology series, which adapts notable video games with each episode, they left out one crucial detail at the behest of the game's owners at Bandai. They didn't imagine all of the details of this dark, apocalyptic reimagining of the classic arcade game themselves. The concept largely stemmed from a secret Pac-Man game that had been in the works for some time.
"When we talked to the developers, they said, 'You can do whatever you want for Pac-Man, but can we show you what we're doing for the next game?'" series creator Tim Miller tells Entertainment Weekly. "What they showed us was so f---ed up and off the hook. It was a swordsman wandering an apocalyptic wasteland, Pac-Man was a mobile gun platform, and the ghosts were these mutant things. It was so f---ed up! If you gave me a million years to guess what the next Pac-Man game would be, I wouldn't have got there."
Bandai revealed what that game is through an announcement trailer, which was unleashed Thursday night at the annual Game Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. It's called Shadow Labyrinth, a 2D action platformer in the Metroidvania style. The Secret Level episode, in fact, acts as an official prequel to this game.
In the animated short -- spearheaded by Miller, executive producer and supervising director Dave Wilson, and teleplay writer JT Petty -- we meet a lone Swordsman (voiced by Aleks Le in Secret Level) who wakes from a water tank inside some kind of wasteland maze. Puck (voiced by Emily Swallow), a floating gold orb, is there to greet him. This entity informs the Swordsman that he must "eat or be eaten" by the various mutants inhabiting this plane.
In the end, things don't go well for Swordsman here. He dies after Puck burrows into his back, transforming into a giant shadow monster devouring anything in its path. Discarding the Swordsman's body, Puck, however, remains trapped in the maze. That casualty was Swordsman No. 7. When Shadow Labyrinth begins, gamers will play as the next iteration, Swordsman No. 8, who must also attempt to succeed in escaping the maze.
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"We were trying to do something that we've never done before," Shadow Labyrinth producer Seigo Aizawa tells EW ahead of the Game Awards, via translators. "The maze is one of the key elements of Pac-Man. Also, think about that mystery atmosphere. That's the reason why we decided on the 2D action platformer, plus a dark and mysterious Pac-Man.... We wanted to really welcome new players who have never played Pac-Man before."
Everything about Pac-Man has been reimagined for Shadow Labyrinth, from the cherries to the ghosts to Pac-Man itself. "If you take a look at the trailer closely, you will see various monsters, including the spiders and the lava. All these are small details that we would like the fans to catch," Aizawa-san points out. Exploration, he adds, is key to figuring out your own play style, beating the various bosses, and uncovering new details to the lore and the world of Shadow Labryinth.
"This game does have a very boots-on-the-ground story of what's happening to the characters that you've seen in the trailer and others that you might meet," Knoah Piasek, Pac-Man Brand Marketing Manager at Bandai Namco Entertainment America, adds. "The world where this all takes place also has its own story and lore, which players will discover if they do a good job digging up all of the little bits and clues during their play experience."
"We wanted to make the game quite difficult to complete," Aizawa-san says. "It's about a 30-hour game, so there are many ways to beat the bosses and to explore the maps."