Still dotty about Pac-man

PAC-MAN MUSEUM+ PC. Also on PS4, Xbox, Switch

WITH a silhouette as recognisable as Micky Mouse, old Pac-man has undoubtedly earned the right to be immortalized in a museum and at least this one is very interactive.

This collection of mainly arcade releases stretches right back to his dot-munching debut from 1980 and includes some decent titles from that decade such as Pac-land, which sees the yellow glutton sprout legs, and the isometric Pac-mania, though sadly no Ms. Pac-man for copyright reasons.

The fourteen games on offer are presented as machines in a virtual arcade, which you can wander through and bedeck with various trinkets, and the addition of online leaderboards and high score challenges bring something new to these ageing classics.

Despite being a sucker for nostalgia, I’ve found myself most drawn to the more recent titles, such as the excellent multi-player Battle Royale and Pac-man 256, which has you gobbling against the clock, proving there’s life in the old Pac yet.

INDUSTRIA PS5. Also on PC, Xbox ★★

SET in East Berlin just before the fall of the wall, Industria is big on atmosphere.

From grim post-industrial landscapes to unsettling dream sequences, it plays around with timelines and alternate futures, whilst weaving a tale of lost comrades and sentient machines taking umbrage with humanity in general.

What it’s light on is pacing, with rather too much puzzle-padding and missions which tend to boil down to finding some sort of key to progress along a very narrow path.

Things do perk up when you get to fight back against your metallic oppressors, though even then, the weaponry is pretty unimaginative and the combat annoyingly twitchy.

If you like the emphasis on narrative in your first-person shooters, you may enjoy this, but the gameplay glitches and frustrating inconsistencies (you can perform telekinesis on objects but not climb a waist-high step, for example) got in the way of the story for me.