Please Make This Adventure Stop

Now we’re getting to one of the most infamous Pac-Man titles of the whole series. While we’ve seen a few different types of games, from numerous maze-chasers, to a platforming title, pinball games, and even a trivia game, I don’t think anything could have prepared us for what came next. That’s doubly so because this was the first game in the series that billed itself as a direct sequel. If you’re going to call yourself Pac-Man 2, you better come out swinging, and this game, developed by Namco themselves… doesn’t.

Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures was released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (with the Genesis version being exclusive to North America). At first blush it looks like a platforming sequel to Pac-Land, a game where you see Pac wander around on a 2D horizontal plane, getting up to trouble. The trick, though, is that this isn’t an action platformer at all. In fact, saying it has much in the way of action would be a mischaracterization. It’s an adventure game that, charitably, can be said to have some light action elements. For the most part, though, you are leading Pac around by the hand, making him engage in item collecting and inventory management all so you can complete quests.

The game itself is broken up into four “days”, along with an introductory section. Each day features a quest, from getting milk from a nearby farm, to picking flowers from the mountain, to getting back Pac’s son’s guitar, and then defeating the ghosts that are terrifying the city. Each requires our spherical hero to venture out of his house and wander around town. He’ll have to interact with various set-pieces, from a farmer that doesn’t want to let Pac past, so the player has to drop a hay bail on his head, or a painter blocking the way, so Pac has to kick his rigging, causing it to launch the yellow one over a puddle too big for him to cross. A lot of it is silly and all of it uses adventure logic to navigate.

The big thing that feels weird, and the reason why this game is hated by so many, is that the player doesn’t control Pac directly. Instead of having one to one control over the hero, instead the player is given a slingshot they can use to fire at the screen. Slingshotting items tells Pac where to go, what to look at, what to pick up, etc. There are times, too, where the player has to shoot objects to get them out of Pac’s way, or to knock them into an area he can look at. The slingshot adds a lot of interactivity that, in fairness, wouldn’t be possible if the player were directly in control of our yellow hero.

And that would all be fine if it were taken on its own. Plenty of adventure games put the player in charge of directing a hero with a mouse and then having them move around while the player is clicking. The difference here is that the designers also implemented one feature that really causes problems within the game: our hero, the yellow one, has a mood, and sometimes acts incredibly stupid. If he’s happy he’s fine, but if he gets too happy he’ll get smug and ignore you. By the same token, if he gets too sad or too angry, he’ll also ignore you. Trying to direct Pac around when half the time he refuses to do what you want becomes a lesson in frustration.

That is, of course, if you can even figure out what to do. The game follows adventure logic, so there are times where you have to infer things to do without the game directly telling you what or how. There are a few items for Pac to collect, usually within a given set piece, so inventory management isn’t the hard part. Understanding what you’re supposed to interact with, or how, or why becomes the real issue. If you can’t figure out what to do you aren’t going to be able to do anything, and that is only exacerbated by the fact that Pac is dumb as a rock and frequently doesn’t understand what you’re supposed to do even when you tell him properly.

Beyond that, the game sometimes hides its clues in the worst ways. There are hidden cartridges that unlock a bonus game (Ms. Pac-Man on the SNES version, and a new game, Pac-Jr., on the Genesis), but to find those carts you’re expected to go searching in really random areas. One, for instance, is hidden inside one of three trash cans, but to get it you have to force Pac to go back and forth kicking the cans, even as he’s looking inside them and not finding anything. You even get rewards the first few times in the form of power pellets, which could lead most players to think they already did what they were supposed to do. Burying items behind repetitive tasks that seem utterly pointless is a terrible way to hide secrets.

It’s not just secrets hidden that way, either. There are sections of the game that have seemingly optional ghost attacks. In these moments you’re supposed to slingshot a power pellet at the hero, changing him into his super form for a short time, letting him eat the ghosts. Many of these encounters just kind of happen, and you might even fail to notice that they’re there. Ghosts could be hiding in a seemingly normal item with no reference to their existence. But killing three of these sets is absolutely required because these three sets of ghosts (one hidden in each of three quests) each feature an ID card you have to collect. If you don’t get them you can’t gain access to the final boss fight of the game and finish out the last quest.

And yes, for some reason there’s a boss fight in a game that, up until then, featured absolutely no direct enemy encounters. Ghosts getting gobbled by Pac notwithstanding (and those aren’t really fights, more like cut-scene moments), the final boss comes out of nowhere. Maybe if you’d watched the Pac-Man cartoon back in the day you’d know the Ghost Witch and her gum monster, but for your average player (especially one coming to this game later in its life), this whole sequence feels weird. Not only do you have to give Pac a pellet so he can do his thing, you actually have to directly fight the gum monster with your slingshot. While not a difficult encounter, it requires you to do things differently in this one moment than the rest of the hour-plus game expected during its runtime.

This is always something that bothers me, when a game expects me to come up with a new solution without ever once hinting that it’s something I should be expected to do. For over an hour we were passive guides, sending Pac around and then letting him do the work (if he was in the mood and wasn’t too stupid to figure it out) and now we’re suddenly tasked with something completely different out of left field. I did get it eventually, but I sat for a while going, “what’s the trick? Where’s the item I’m supposed to find to get Pac to beat this thing?” My brain was wired one way after struggling through this stupid title, and then suddenly I had to think a different way and I just flat out didn’t understand it.

Look, I don’t think a Pac-Man adventure game is a completely terrible idea. There are moments in this game where the hero does something cute, or some joke lands, or there’s a kernel of an idea I like. I don’t think this game as a whole works, but I can kind of see how, if things had been arranged differently, it could function as a decent game. With all that said, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures sucks. It’s slow, it’s boring, it’s both too easy and too obtuse at the same time, and it all stems from a lot of bad decisions that detract from the basic adventuring experience. I’m not sure why Namco thought a Pac-Man adventure title was a good idea, but it certainly needed to be something other than what they actually released. This was a terrible experience.