This might look like a [i]Pac-Man[/i] knockoff, and it kind of is, but frankly it's actually awesome. If you were a kid with a lousy PC around the early 2000's, there's a good chance you downloaded a ton of shareware games off of various sites. These oftentimes weren't made by known companies, usually just a couple people or even one person and nowadays we see that as "indie games" but back then they weren't really noticed by the mainstream gaming press (outside of the early Shareware mega-hits like [i]Doom[/i] and [i]Duke Nukem[/i]) and are often overlooked in the annals of gaming history.
These were usually clones or heavily inspired by old arcade games and [i]Pac-Man[/i] was not only my favorite type of game at the time, it was also probably the biggest inspiration for a lot of those shareware makers. When you're that age you don't really care if a game is "real" or "official" so long as it's fun. PacVenture and PacGuy (later re-named "Pea Guy) are probably some of the better known entries in the "Shareware Pac-Man knockoff genre" and Pac-Guy in particular was how I found out about Game Maker, which set off a lifelong interest in game development that eventually led to an actual career, so I owe quite a bit to this niche, but weirdly influential genre.
What makes [i]Pac Adventures 3D[/i] so great is that aesthetically, it captures the [i]peak[/i] 2000's-era Shareware atmosphere perfectly. Judging by the screen resolution capping out at around 1024 or so, I think it might [i]actually[/i] be from that era and just re-released on Steam. Either way, all of the mainstays are here, the primitive 3D engine, stock sound effects, and most importantly of all, GS Wavetable MIDI covers of popular songs. Even the way the game hitches when a new music track loads, which is something you would really only expect from a CD-ROM game, is perfect. That might sound like they just took a bunch of stock assets and threw them together, but I do think there is a bit more care to something like this compared to a typical Unity asset flip, because each asset here comes together into a cohesive [i]Mise-en-scène[/i]— every asset fits with every other asset in a way the haphazardly slapped together knockoff games of today don't, and I do think the "2000's shareware aesthetic" has a lot of untapped potential for retro throwbacks that hasn't been explored yet.
[i]Pac Adventures 3D[/i] does this in such a pure, unironic way too— a lot of games that are deliberately designed with a retro vibe have kind of a post-modern referential quality. Games like [i]Ion Fury[/i] and [i]Dusk[/i] are meant to remind you of [i]Duke Nukem 3D[/i] and [i]Quake[/i], and while those are all fantastic titles, they still feel like something deliberately done as a throwback due to all the winking and nodding to the source material, and therefore could only have come out today because of the acknowledgement of that temporal distance from the original. [i]Pac Adventures 3D[/i] just presents itself for what it is. It [i]is[/i] a clone of [i]Pac-Man[/i], but it doesn't hammer you over the head with, say, retro-style pixel art or a bunch of 80's pop culture references. It feels exactly like the sort of thing you'd find on an E-Games demo CD and is simply content with being a good clone of another game and nothing more.
Yet if the game's janky, but intensely charming pseudo-vaporwave vibe was the only thing worth talking about, that wouldn't be enough reason to bother with it. [i]Pac Adventures 3D[/i] actually is a pretty decent [i]Pac-Man[/i] style game that does enough to differentiate itself from the original to be worth playing. Since you've got a wider-open playing field, you don't get boxed in by the ghosts as much, so it's easier in some respects, but the ghosts are still pretty aggressive and fast, so you do need to be aware and use strategy. "Big mode" also adds some interesting powerups and alternate enemy behaviors that switch up the formula even further. The difficulty is spot-on, it's a good challenge but feels fair and there are a couple different modes to play in. There's also competitive and cooperative multiplayer which I haven't tried but it's neat that they're there and something you don't get very often in "real" [i]Pac-Man[/i] games. They even have a Sokoban mode as an extra which is a completely different playstyle but works really well with the engine they've created.
Overall, I probably appreciate this more than most people will, but even if you don't share the same obssession with low-budget knockoff shareware games, but it's a solid spin on Pac-Man. 20 dollars is too much, but if there's a good discount it's worth it for Pac-Fans
