Shadow Labyrinth - Switch 2 - Abandoned August 6
I had high hopes for Shadow Labyrinth. In hindsight, I probably had unrealistically high hopes. I think I got too caught up in the cool premise - a dark Metroidvania where Pacman possesses you and devours the corpses of defeated enemies - to think about how likely that is to be pulled off well. Spoiler alert: it was not pulled off well. The game isn't bad, per se, but as I have described Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash on 3DS, it's painfully okay.
You play as some dude whose name you don't ever learn - or at least not by the midpoint of the Crystalline Palace which is where I screamed loud enough to hurt my throat, threw my controller across the room, and rage quit - who is summoned by a small yellow robot named PUCK who bears a shocking resemblance to Pacman to the world of the United Galaxy Space Force, a unified timeline that Namco has used to put a number of their classic IPs into a single universe. You find an ESP sword, but you can't seem to take hold of it. Fortunately, you also conveniently find a robot arm lying around on the ground, so you use that to hold the sword. You then progress through a mostly dull and uninteresting world via 2D Metroid style platforming while fighting enemies with quick Castlevania style melee attacks. You learn some special moves later, like a crescent shaped energy blast and an energy grenade, but the basic three-hit sword combo is the bread and butter of combat. You can also summon a giant robot for a brief period of time to deal heavy damage. The big robot is some kind of UGSF special weapon or whatever, but I'm pretty sure they just wanted to make up an excuse to put a giant robot in the game. I used it a bit against bosses early on, but I mostly ignored it for the latter part of my time with this game.
There are a lot of problems with this game, and most of them are a case of coming in just shy of the finish line. The game's level design has potential with some levels being baren and looking either lunar or Martian, some levels having a sci-fi feel that looks like a space station, some being in a jungle setting, etc. The problem is that none of them are interesting. You have an incentive to kill enemies as they drop money and eating them recharges your giant robot, but it just gets boring killing the same enemies over and over and over and over again with the same sword combo. I know that's basically how combat in Castlevania works, but this just feels different and far less engaging. I ended up jumping over or dodging through most enemies and just running to the next screen transition to progress because I didn't feel like bothering to kill them. The story is interesting and definitely the best part of the game in my opinion, but it too falls short. It tries to create this air of grave importance, but it ends up feeling like a fanfiction written by a middle schooler who wanted to make Pacman edgy. Remember Shadow the Hedgehog on Gamecube? This feels like that but with Pacman. There are some bonus levels you can find that let you have a more traditional but still fresh take on Pacman, and I honestly think that's what the game should have been, but those weren't enough for me to feel motivated to explore every blank area on the map.
The music is also just boring. It's virtually non-existent. Again, I think they were going for a lonely, dark vibe for the game with the minimal music, but it just ended up making the game feel empty. The visuals are okay, but they're nothing special. As far as I can tell, it looks the same on Switch as it does on Switch 2. Speaking of the Switch 2 version, the performance is garbage. I don't have the fancy setup that Digital Foundry has for measuring frame rates and frame pacing, but the frame rate was constantly fluctuating all over the place and utterly garbage frame pacing with more dropped frames than Xbox Game Studios has dropped employees. I can deal with that, though. The frame rate issues are mostly in really busy fights or transitions between areas. What really drove me up the wall was the obstacles. The game loves to have acid pits and spike traps - especially the spike traps - all over the place. By itself, that's not a bad thing. Every good Metroidvania needs some solid obstacles to make navigation a challenge. The problem is that this game isn't fun enough to justify practicing those obstacles enough to "git gud" at them. It's one of these spike obstacles that made me rage quit. There was a room that was basically all spikes with a ton of spike walls that had tiny holes juuuuust big enough for you. The only way to navigate this was to grapple from one grapple point to another, and if you want to proceed, you had to grapple through those holes at the PERFECT angle because touching a single pixel of a spike gets you killed and sent back to the last platform you were on with one bar of health lost. Once you lose all of your health, you go back to your last save point or checkpoint, and that right there is what makes the game hard. It's not that the game itself is super difficult outside of that spike room obstacle. It's that the save points and checkpoints are often a looooooong way away from each other. Any one of those things, by itself, wouldn't have ruined the experience for me. All of them together? I got about 85% of the way through the game until it just stopped being worth it to keep powering through a game that I didn't even find fun.
Honestly, Shadow Labyrinth isn't a bad game. It's just not a good game. It's...well, like I said, it's okay. It's more disappointing than anything else because it was almost pretty good. It was never going to be great, but it was so close to pretty good. It fell just a little bit short in basically every facet of the game. I very rarely shelve a game unfinished - I get a little obsessive compulsive about finishing games that I start - but this one just...wasn't worth it. I wasn't enjoying it at all. I was only playing it to finish it, and that's when you need to stop playing that game.
