3-Demon (PC)

Back in the 1980s, Pac-Man’s pellet-munching maze adventures hit the world by storm, and a slew of imitators shortly followed to ride that same wave. While many competitors copied the design quite closely, some people wondered what it would be like to take the Pac-Man formula into the third dimension. While the Pac-Man series would one day go on to exploring that idea when the tech was there to make it work well, one team decided to immediately jump into the deep end before anyone had even really begun to fill that pool with water. From that ambition came the game 3-Demon, a first person maze game made in 1983.

3-Demon contains many of Pac-Man’s elements, the main appeal of the game seeming to be transitioning that game into the new format rather than trying to make anything wholly original. Moving through a twisting maze filled with pellets, the unknown protagonist of 3-Demon must gobble up enough of them to progress to the next level, but here 3-Demon diverges a bit from its progenitor. Rather than needing to pick up each and every pellet, 3-Demon is content to let you move onto the next level once you’ve acquired at least 50% of them, but the game won’t force you to take that step immediately. Instead, you are free to roam the maze and grab all the pellets you want, but at any moment after you’ve met that 50% quota, you can press down to progress to the next stage. Sticking around to grab the extra dots will earn you more points, but of course there is a risk in lingering too long.

Ghosts patrol the mazes of 3-Demon, so if you were expecting demons at all in this game you’re likely to be disappointed. Each area begins with no ghosts in the maze, but they slowly begin to make their presence known as time on the floor progress. If a ghost makes contact with the unseen player controlled character, they’ll lose a life, but the game starts you off with quite a bit of lives so you won’t be booted out of the game too quickly. It certainly helps that these ghosts just seem to aimlessly bumble around the maze rather than trying to attack you, but if you are worried about getting caught, a few larger pellets are scattered around each maze that will briefly turn the tide against the ghosts. Hit a ghost while under the effects of that pellet and you destroy it, earning some points in the process.

There’s nothing too unusual about the construction of this game so far, but once we begin to explore the third dimension, the game pretty quickly crumbles apart. In 3-Demon you are on ground level in the maze, seeing things as if you had entered one in real life. Unlike a corn maze or hedge maze though, there’s nothing really to grab onto visually as your character in 3-Demon always rigidly faces in one direction. While they don’t move automatically like Pac-Man, they do take ninety degree turns that can be a little disorienting, especially since the entire maze consists of identically colored and designed walls. It’s nearly impossible to keep your bearings in 3-Demon due to the flat visuals, but the designers seemed to be aware of this. At any time, you may freeze gameplay and pull up a map, revealing that the maze layouts are often ripped straight from Pac-Man. The map will help you figure out where to go next, but the stopping and starting to constantly check your map is a chore, and unless there’s a straightaway of pellets in front of you, it’s often a necessity to even put you on the proper path. However, the map is not as helpful of a tool as it initially seems. Whenever you take a turn, the map itself rotates as well, making it disorienting to check it as the arrangement constantly shifts based on where you are facing. This likely exists because your icon on the map is a smiling face that can’t really show the direction it’s facing, but if it had represented your character as an arrow instead it could have kept the map stationary so you could reliable use the map and actually build a mental map of the area. Instead, expect to constantly open and close it at near every turn if you want to head down the right paths.

One thing that is strange is how the game alerts you to the presence of ghosts. Due to being tightly packed between the walls of the maze, it would be impossible to ever see a ghost coming until it was hot on your trail, so 3-Demon puts a radar in the bottom right of the screen to show you how far away the ghosts are. It doesn’t show any walls though, so you just have to hope that when a ghost is near to you on the radar, its safely on the other side of one of the barriers. The nonaggressive nature of your enemies makes it not too much of a concern though, but the radar would have been a better place to at least put a small version of the map for you to reference. If the hardware wasn’t there for such a design choice though I still feel its better to see the map than know where the ghosts are, and if the ghosts were still a concern, they could have always been given noises to announce their nearness that would make for a functional change of pace from the other cacophonous beeps and boops that exist mostly for color.

3-Demon will allow the player to start from any of the first 9 floors and goes on indefinitely as long as the player survives, each area upping the speed and challenge of play. There are different high score tables for each potential starting level, but it doesn’t really bring a new level of challenge and it’s too little to motivate a player to stick around for long.

THE VERDICT: 3-Demon made Pac-Man in 3D, and that selling point is the only thing that really makes it interesting to check out. Everything else shows why such a careless translation into this new style wasn’t the best of ideas. Codependence on your map, visuals that barely give you an idea of where to go, and the lack of challenge from ghosts who mostly seem to be doing their own thing makes 3-Demon hard to invest any considerable time in.

And so, I give 3-Demon for the PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. 3-Demon is an antiquated curiosity, a proof of concept turned into a distributed game. However, that concept being proved was handled poorly, mostly because the tech was likely not there to support the gameplay idea. It would need a lot of changes to be something resembling good, like indicative visuals, challenging ghosts, a map that cooperates properly, and so many other changes that mostly seem to show that a first-person maze game aping Pac-Man needs a structural rethinking from the ground up. The best thing that can be said about 3-Demon is that it’s hard to be offended by it. It is a functional game even if its not laid out the best, and as something to play for a few seconds to see how it was executed, it certainly won’t inspire anger. Its structure is simply too flimsy and ill thought out to support seeing this game more as something to look at for a bit and then move on.

3-Demon may have been something people settled for at the time of its release, but its archaic design is a prime example of how gaming marches on to greater heights. People once accepted games like this because it was what was available, but there’s no reason to forgive 3-Demon’s flaws when you could find a plethora of better realized games now.