Pac-Man World 2

Every so often the hub village hands you a token for a working cabinet of the 1980 arcade original, and for a minute the whole production stops being a 3D platformer and becomes the thing people actually remember. That tension runs through the entire game. Namco spent the early 2000s trying to work out what a yellow circle with no arms does across thirty hours of polygonal level design, and the answer here is that he bounces on things.

The move set is small and well-chosen. A butt-bounce flattens enemies and cracks floor panels, a rev-roll builds speed for gaps and ramps, and a flip kick turns a bounce into extra height. Pellets still line every corridor, which is the smartest decision in the design, because it means the camera and the path are doing the same job: a dotted trail tells you where the level wants you to go without a single arrow or waypoint. Collect enough and the familiar power pellet turns the ghosts blue, and you chase them instead.

The structure is a loose hub with themed worlds strung off it, moving from forest and ice to a haunted mansion and a factory, each ending in a boss built around one of the four ghosts. Difficulty is uneven. Some stretches are gentle enough for a child; others, particularly the later ice and lava platforming, demand precision that the slightly floaty jump arc does not always support. The underwater sections remain the low point, as they tend to be in platformers of this generation.

What holds up is the presentation. The colour work is bright without being garish, the worlds are legible at a glance, and it runs clean on PS2 hardware that was often asked to do more than it could. What has aged is the ambition gap. This arrived during the stretch when every mascot with a recognisable silhouette was being pushed into a collectathon, and it hits the beats of that genre competently rather than reinventing anything. It is a well-built example of a form that was already crowded.

Play it for the craft in the first few worlds and for the unlockable mazes, which are not a throwaway bonus but a genuine reason to keep hunting tokens. A platformer that keeps reminding you how good its ancestor was is taking a real risk, and this one mostly gets away with it.