Developed/Published by: Hipster Whale, 3 Sprockets / Bandai Namco Entertainment
Released: August 19th, 2015
Completed: 22nd August, 2015
Completion: I scored 12,583 points and I was like “ok, I get it.”
Trophies / Achievements: n/a

First up, I’ve previously written up Crossy Road, and you might want to read that first, because it’s fairly obvious that Crossy Road is the design core of Pac-Man 256, which, when you think about it, is kind of weird. “Make a Pac-Man game based on Frogger.” (Actually, this could be kind of a cool jam idea: retro mash-up. I suppose people do this already, but legitimate design mash-up, not just slamming two games together without considering the game systems. It’d be easy to make Pac-Man Frogger where, I don’t know, it’s just Frogger, but the cars are ghosts! Or whatever.)

So. I played Pac-Man 256, immediately thought it was gash, and was prepared to put it down until Sage Solitare’s designer Zach Gage said it sounded like I hadn’t “really” played it after some mild questions on Twitter, which was like a red rag to a bull honestly. I played it quite extensively for several days, and so I think I’m totally in a good position to critique this. Let’s begin.

Pac-Man 256 is… half a design. It’s a really good example of a game where they came up with the idea, said “why it practically designs itself!” and that was it. If you’re not familiar with it, and don’t want to download it and see, here’s the deal with Pac-Man 256: you’re Pac-Man. He’s on an endless isometric Pac-level. if he doesn’t keep moving forward, the “kill screen” glitch catches up with him and kills him. There’s all the usual stuff—ghosts, power pills, fruit—but there’s also a mechanic where you can use one continue each game (so you get one life, basically) and three optional power-ups, which you can pick up the same way you do power-pills, and which work in a similar fashion (it makes you invisible to ghosts! or a giant pac-man who eats ghosts!) but if you pick one of those up, you can’t pick-up a power-pill and vice versa. Oh, and fruit works as a multiplier for a while, not just a straight point-gain.

This all sounds good! There are some issues, however. You see, Pac-Man was a game about cleaning the whole stage, not about driving endlessly forward. Pac-Man 256 adds a dot-chain mechanic where you get a bonus for perfectly eating 256 dots in a row (with no missing/turning back, apart from on corners or something, there’s a weird quirk where certain missing dot spaces are fine?) but this is rather hard to do, especially as there can be serious clumps of ghosts, and big swathes without dots. As far as I can tell, this is to incentivise playing the game different ways; maybe this time you’re going for chains rather than just points.

Now, I’m going to claim something that might be talking out of my arse, but I think not even Pac-Man Championship Edition was about chaining individual dots (correct me if I’m wrong) but about clearing sides as fast as possible. Simply because the nature of Pac-Man is it’s a game where you have to navigate around the movement of the ghosts. Pac-Man CE designed the level sides to be eaten in a long combo, but very clearly so; I can’t see any similar pattern in the generation of Pac-Man 256, and it’s a flaw; the game really does put you into positions where you think “urgh, if I want to keep this chain going, I’ll have to avoid that fruit” which is really weird, but it seems intentional—fruit usually has large dot gaps around them. (Also, I’ve seen it implied power-up spawns are connected to dot-chains, so the risk/reward is to bypass fruit for power-ups… maybe. This may be true, but it’s not a great design, for reasons I’ll outline.)

Then, thanks to scrolling, you’re never clear on where ghosts are, or how many of them there are. taking any long straight route is often suicide; you’ll generally find yourself boxed in and have to use a continue. Unlike a Frogger-based game where this is fine, here you’re in tunnels, so you have zero wiggle room. You can’t dodge to the side unless there’s a path there. It’s easy—stunningly easy—to get yourself into a no-win situation that you couldn’t forsee, which is a fairly huge issue for a Pac-Man game.

So the game loses that cleaning mechanic for a survival one, with a dot-chain mechanic that doesn’t gel with its score mechanic, and scrolling that means you can often suicide. It also doesn’t, for some reason, measure distance; perhaps the dot-chain mechanic is meant to replace that, so there’s a conflict in the player’s aims that I feel is never satisfied, as “forward” is not always “higher score.”

Maybe they removed distance, due to an issue I had with Crossy Road (not that they know I had the issue, just that it also weighed on their minds.) Remember how I complained that it was boring to climb back to a distance you had reached in the aim of a higher score? Well, one of the absolute strangest things about Pac-Man 256 is that they came really, really close to solving it. As it stands, it’s the same situation. Once I reached 12,000+ points, I couldn’t stomach trying for higher…

Actually, wait, let me take a detour here. One way that I think they did intend to solve the problem is in the unlockable power-ups. If you just keep playing, you’ll unlock and pay for more powerful power-ups that can last longer and longer, so higher scores are easily achievable. It’s not so much a game design than a bit of microtransaction design (you can pay for coins, so if you pay to unlock everything you’ll be able to compete at the highest level). It actually managed to totally de-incentivise me (what’s the point in playing to earn the lower difficulty level that will grant me scores I can’t achieve now?) but the idea certainly seems to be that as you’re more powerful, the race to let’s say 12,000 points is quicker. (There are even three point-aiding power-ups, that take a long-ass time to unlock.)

The thing is, of course, is that’s a crap bodge of a solution for anyone who actually likes skill-based games. There’s a solution right under their noses, though. Playing the game, one of the weirdest and most unfair things is fruit. Sometimes you hit a 2x fruit. Sometimes you hit a 6x one. Maybe you hit a 6x one straight away and start tearing up! Maybe you don’t. I might be wrong (in fact, I just played it for a wee while there, and I’m pretty sure I’m not, but I’m open) but this has no connection to anything. It’s just random, and means that like a lot of randomly generated games, you’re just waiting for a good “seed” to get a high early score. If you’re going to have multipliers, why not connect them to something?

High multiplier fruit only appear once you’ve chained a certain number of dots. High multiplier fruit are difficult to get to (and not just “they break your chain”—fruit is consistently better). High multiplier fruit makes the game much harder—but the reward much faster.

I’d much, much rather be playing a game where I hit a 12x multiplier and died reaching 12,000 in a twelfth of the time than laboriously wait for a good “seed.” It’s just boring.

Pac-Man 256 is one of those things that looks genius, but doesn’t pay off at all. In comparison to the beautiful Pac-Man Championship Edition (not DX, that’s a dilution) it’s just horrible—if you just made Pac-Man CE endless it would still be better than this. The game simply never manages to gel moving forward and dot-chaining endlessly with the core Pac-Man of screen-clearing and performing skillful manoeuvres to chain ghost kills or collect fruit. It falls between two chairs, and if you’ve ever done that, it’s a pain in the arse.

Will I ever play it again? Doubt it. You don’t improve the design of a game like this after release, you just release hats for Pac-Man that people can pay for. Have they done that yet?

Final Thought: I’m not going to write about Sage Solitaire (though I could) but I’ll use it as an example to defend Pac-Man 256. Sage Solitaire has a lot of the “seeding” issues that you could say these games have (and, indeed, solitaire always does) but it’s mitigated by the fact that you’re playing with a known 52 card deck. A dedicated enough player can “do the work” to get the best result they can. However, the point of Solitaire, as far as I can tell, is not to min-max. You’re playing it to pass the time in an amusing diversion. it’s a time-waster.  It’s entirely possible that here I’m a poker player in a room of solitaire fans. If you enjoy Pac-Man 256 (or Crossy Road) as a time-waster, you don’t really care how long it takes to get your high score, and in fact the unlockable power-ups are a great, fun incentive to keep returning. You’re just playing a modern solitaire.

I think there are so many more beautiful things to play than solitaire.