It seems every gaming franchise needs a location-based mobile game. Last month, it was The Witcher: Monster Slayer. Now, it’s Pac-Man Geo.
The announcement of Pac-Man Geo came from Bandai Namco itself. Gameplay details are very light, beyond the company saying you’ll basically be playing Pac-Man in real life. You can basically create a stage based on the map of your location. And from there, the game presumably generates power pellets and ghosts to make the experience similar to the video games.
Bandai Namco says the game makes use of road information from Google Maps. The company also says that it’s been prototyping the game since 2018, with actual planning and development starting a year later.
It’s a very strange time for location-based games to be springing up all over the place. Even the arguably most successful one, Pokemon Go, adjusted its gameplay so that players don’t actually have to leave home to play. And yet now, in the span of almost exactly two weeks, we see two mobile games of this genre getting announced.
But for what it’s worth, Bandai Namco says that Pac-Man Geo will be launched sometime in September. It will be available on 170 countries, and it looks like Malaysia is one of them. That being said, at least on the Google Play Store, it still says “Coming Soon”, with your option to download reading “pre-register” instead.
(Source: Bandai Namco [PDF])
