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Review

Pac-Man 256, Hipster Whale (Android)

Abstract: Despite a clear knowledge of what makes endless runners and Pac-Man fun, Pac-Man 256 falls flat. A monotonous gameplay loop lacks the ability to hold player attention for more than a handful of minutes. Restrictive F2P elements further frustrate the play experience. Excellent visuals and nostalgia-inducing sounds make for a pretty game, but Pac-Man 256 is ultimately hard to recommend. It’s just not very fun.

As a point of disclosure before I begin this review: I’m not a huge fan of the Pac-Man IP. Despite my many cherished arcade memories, playing a Namco Pac-Man title has never been one of them. Sure, I got a decent amount of enjoyment out of the tabletop-styled Ms. Pac-Man machine, but the gameplay loop never gripped me. To say my expectations were low coming into Pac-Man 256 would be an understatement. But the game had a hell of a lot of buzz coming from game designers and writers I trust, so I had to try it out.

Pac-Man 256 comes from Hipster Whale, a mobile game dev studio famous for their mega-hit Crossy Road. For those of you who don’t know, Crossy Road is a hybrid of the ever-popular genre on mobile devices, the endless runner, with classic Frogger gameplay. The charming aesthetic and simple control scheme had players, myself included, making their way through traffic, over rivers and through woods. Crossy Road isn’t a particularly deep experience, but one that satisfies the gaming on-the-go itch. Though not compelling for long play sessions, you could tell Hipster Whale understood what worked at the core of the Frogger experience, and translated it well into a smartphone game framework.

Part of the inspiration behind the game. The (in)famous Map 256 glitch.

Continuing their legacy of adding a mobile design twist to older arcade properties is Pac-Man 256. Made in collaboration with the IP holders, Bandai Namco, Pac-Man 256 is an endless runner fused together with standard Pac-Man maze exploration, dot eating, and ghost slaying. The game is inspired by the classic Map 256 glitch, a “kill screen” in which the entire right side of the screen was covered in a jumbled up mess of numbers. Your objective while playing Pac-Man 256 is characteristically simple: you must move upward through the maze, eating fruit and dots and power pellets, avoiding and or killing ghosts, until you die. Death comes in one of two forms. You can get hit by a ghost or, if you take too long moving upwards, get swallowed by an ever-encroaching glitch wave at the bottom of the screen. Like all endless runners, you play for high scores—seeking to beat your personal best, your friends, or to do well enough to place on the online leaderboards.

Moving through the maze isn’t as simple as it was in arcade Pac-Man, however. Pac-Man 256 gives the player a number of things to consider. Each ghost has a unique movement pattern. Inky (Blue) and Clyde (Orange) patrol areas. Pinky is still until it spots the player, after which it speeds quickly in your direction. Other ghosts move in a deadly conga line and others chase the player relentlessly after being awakened. Power-ups aid your struggle against the glitches and ghosts . Found at a similar frequency as power pellets, each power-up has a unique effect. You can collect a laser that shoots in a line in front of you, destroying all ghosts, or a bomb that will trigger on the next ghost that hits you. All of the above work together to add layers to gameplay, albeit thin ones.

Chomp your way to high scores. Be sure to mind the
lethal glitch wave behind you, too.

Pac-Man 256 offers players enough to do, but I never felt engaged with the content. It’s momentarily fun to start up a run, but the fun quickly fades as you play. Collecting power-ups can offer moments of intrigue in the relatively plodding pace of gameplay, but not enough to keep the moment-to-moment gameplay engaging. Moving through the maze lacks tension. There’s some fun to be found in trying to navigate the strange combinations of ghost movement patterns, but at times the random ghost layout can create nearly impassable blockades. Further, I never felt like I was doing enough. The only input is directional swiping, which due to a combination of some input lag and maze layout, felt poorly responsive. In a game in which you do one thing, that thing (swiping) better work perfectly. And in my experience, it didn’t.

Some ghost layouts can be downright mean.

Outside of runs you can use coins you’ve collected to level up your power-ups, but the upgrades felt insubstantial. Powering up your laser makes it last fractionally longer. Powering up your freeze blast makes it last fractionally longer. Yay. And that’s all you can do.

Making a laser last slightly longer isn't the best motivation.

Hipster Whale was pretty good at not implementing ‘shady’ free-to-play game design in Crossy Road, so I had hoped that Pac-Man 256 would follow suit. It doesn’t. Well, at least not in one crucial way. Each attempt at the endless maze costs players one credit. Players are allotted 6 credits each day. When you run out of credits you have three choices: pay real money for more credits, wait to play until tomorrow, or play without access to power-ups. As I just wrote above, power-ups are the one exciting moment of gameplay in Pac-Man 256 and are certainly major determinants in obtaining high scores. There’s no reason to play the game without power-ups. Period. To be fair, you can spend $7 for unlimited credits, essentially ‘buying’ the game. But for the limited amount of content and relatively monotonous gameplay, I find $7 a tough sell. So while Hipster Whale doesn’t implement the classic pay-wall or gameplay altering microtransactions into Pac-Man 256, the credit system feels notably restrictive. I find it hard to become invested in a game that tells me how much or how little I can play it.

On the plus side, Pac-Man 256 looks and sounds phenomenal. The game perfectly captures the Pac-Man aesthetic and seamlessly turns the original’s pixelated splendor into modern voxel beauty. The partnership with Bandai Namco comes through clearly here, with all the classic sounds and visual effects making their way into Pac-Man 256. From a presentation standpoint, it doesn’t get any better than chomping through a wave of ghosts while your power pellet is active. You can tell Pac-Man 256 was made as a love letter to the arcade hit of yesteryear and to an IP that so many people hold dear.

Pac-Man 256 looks and sounds great. If only that were enough.

Pac-Man 256 ultimately suffers from the same problem that so many other smartphone titles do: the game isn’t fun for more than 5 to 10 minutes at a time. I understand that games can exist in the small playtime niche, but I would argue they need to be a great 5-10 minutes to make the game worth your time. Pac-Man 256 is not a great 5-10 minutes. It’s an ok one. I don’t inherently hate the endless runner genre, either. I reviewed Race the Sun here on TIF and gave it 3/5 because it gave players a compelling 5-10 minutes. But Pac-Man 256, unfortunately, felt mostly like a time waster. It’s for that reason I cannot recommend the game. I found much more enjoyment out of Crossy Road. There are other, better time wasters on your phone. I would love to have more positivity about Pac-Man 256 because I can recognize the talent behind this colorful, vibrant and clever homage to Pac-Man. In the end, though, the game is just not that fun to play. Bummer.

Pac-Man 256

2/5