Pac In Time

It's 1995, I'm sitting at my monitor and I have a feeling of déjà vu. I launched Pac In Time for the first time and something gnawed at me — like when you meet a stranger and know you've seen them somewhere before, but can't remember where.

Pac In Time is an action platformer from French studio Kalisto Entertainment released in 1994. Pac-Man — yes, that round dot-gobbler — this time left the maze and ventured into a world of horizontal scrolling, platform jumping, and time travel. The game came out for MS-DOS and offered several thematically different worlds: prehistory, the Middle Ages, the future. Sounds like a solid idea for bringing an iconic character into nineties mainstream.

As the player progresses, Pac-Man gets various abilities in his — or rather in his mouth — arsenal. For example, a hook that serves as an anchor or a swing across chasms. And that moment right there caused me cognitive dissonance back then. Hook, colorful graphics, level layout... exactly like Fury of the Furries by Arrahmanu from 1993. And that's because Pac In Time essentially is Fury of the Furries — Kalisto took their own engine, swapped the furry balls for Pac-Man and released it again. It's not inspiration, it's a direct port with changed graphics and a licensed character. Fury of the Furries was a much more interesting concept in the first place, because each colored ball had its own set of abilities and the game built logical puzzles around that.

Pac In Time simplifies it. You get one character with progressively unlocked abilities, but the variability vanishes. What remains is a decent platformer foundation — smooth controls for its time, decent graphics, SoundBlaster music that starts mildly annoying you after three hours. But the game lacks the intellectual depth of the original. It's like reading an abridged edition of a book that wasn't particularly long to begin with.

Today Pac In Time appeals more to those who like simple action platformers without any claim to surprise. If you've never played Fury of the Furries, you might enjoy it more than I did — you don't know what you're missing. But if you want to understand why this engine caught attention back in 1993, play the original instead. Pac In Time is correct, decently executed, and utterly unnecessary all at once.