Pac-Man with upgrades, and time to think. I love it.

2025 is a heck of a year for games, right? We've seen so many Big Expensive Games release on PC in the early part of the year simply because a ton of projects were delayed from previous years and they're releasing now. I spent some time in the Maze Mice demo after watching the inimitable Jeff Gerstmann playing it on his stream, and yesterday I finally dove right in and bought the whole thing. And Maze Mice is shaping up to be my favorite game this year, and easily my favorite soundtrack of the year, despite all the competition I just mentioned.

The Game
Pac-Man CE DX is one of my favorite all-time games. The premise is pretty simple: do the usual Pac-Man thing where you collect dots, but when you get the big item at the end of the trail, the new trail and new big item appears. That's your new objective; get the new big item. When you pass by a sleeping ghost, it wakes up and follows you. Manage the trail of ghosts behind you and don't screw up your pathing and you'll be fine. Get a Power Pellet and you'll eat them all and rack up points. It feels good. It controls like a dream.
That's great, but what's the friction with such a simple premise? Well, there are ghosts that aren't sleeping that you'll need to brush past to add them. Also, the speed increases so it's easy to screw things up. That's really it - it's not a deep game. You can change the map, and that makes things a little interesting, but that's about it. The replay value is simply "Do you like how this moves and feels? Play it again and chase a high score on the leaderboard."
Maze Mice goes after two things: first, the only difficulty spike shouldn't be speed. Second, replayability can't just be based on a number going higher than someone else's number. How does it get there?

Difficulty: Okay, what if we add Super Hot to Pac-Man CE DX? When you stop, the game stops. Just like that. When you move, the game moves. Just like that. Now if you're not hard-wired into your CPU through an embedded brain chip, you're still fine - you can take a break, you can move, you can look around and assess. It becomes more of a puzzle, there's more map reading for the best route. Now, this makes the Pac-Man premise easier, so where's the friction? First, the enemies are more complicated. You get a Cat Train just like in CE DX, but that train is full of cats with HP. You need weapons to remove them or that train will get unmanageably large. More on that later. Also, there are Cat Ghosts that, unlike the non-sleeping ghosts in CE DX, violate the boundaries of the map. They float through walls slowly. And here you are, speeding around the map from Big Orb to Big Orb just like in CE DX, which inevitably concentrates them in the center. And then an orb appears in the center. What do you do? Further maps and new enemies are cool, I'm sure - I haven't gotten there yet!

Replayability: Okay, we have Pac-Man + Super Hot. But what keeps you coming back? Not a score, necessarily, but instead the randomness associated with both roguelites and auto-shooters. That's right, the third part of this equation is Vampire Survivors. Auto-shooting weapons, passive upgrades, and items that appear on the map to create boosts or big damage will manifest as you gain levels, which you gain through XP, which you gain through gathering the pellets and the Big Orbs. These all have cooldowns, and they're graciously displayed with the item icon on the margins of the screen. I personally love the items-on-the-map wrinkle to these perks: having mines or an "item crush" saxophone appear on the map and having to chase those down is an extra little sub-objective in your pathing to the orbs. Hitting the sax and then efficiently detouring for the orb feels great. This randomness, as with many roguelites, increases as you finish games and accrue points (the same as your XP). You "level up" and gain more wrinkles as you progress, just like with the dev's last game Luck be a Landlord. That past game suggests that this one will have plenty of synergies as development goes on.

The controls feel great. Everything's clear. It's maybe not my favorite visual aesthetic, but it works. But there's one other thing about this game you need to know:

The Soundtrack
The same composer for the OST to Luck be a Landlord is back, but with a new creation method: every chord in the soundtrack uses extended harmony. That's 7's, 9's, 11's instead of just 1, 3, and 5. For the non-musical out there, that means that stuff is so much more colorful this time around. Think the best parts of a Shoji Meguro Persona soundtrack where things are Jazzy As Heck, think Jazzy NYC '99 from 3rd Strike - it's every single track in this game. I love this - I've always been a chord-head and this approach is a dream come true. I can't wait for more. I crave more. It's so darn good. More musicians should consider this approach. He's got a whole blog post about it, go read it.

This was an early access review so things are bound to change, but given this developer's track record, I'd say that if you like the premise, try the demo, and if you like the demo, jump right in, right now. It's good already and it's gonna get bigger.

Are you a fan of Pac-Man?  How about SUPERHOT?  Now imagine a game of Pac-Man where the game only “plays” when you are moving.  Replace the pizza with a mouse and the ghosts with angry hissing cats and we’ve got Maze Mice, a surprisingly addictive arcade/strategy game that has consumed at least 20+ hours of my life…and that was before it even entered Early Access.  I normally avoid roguelite games, but this one had just enough Pac-nostalgia to keep me engaged.

Read full review at https://gamechronicles.com/maze-mice-early-access-review-pc/

More Steam reviews on our Curator page - https://store.steampowered.com/curator/4961591-Game-Chronicles/