Only this time, you’re playing against friends (or AI ‘Pac-Bots’, which adorably have little antennae on their heads). The basics remain zooming about a maze, eating dots, and avoiding ghosts. Fortunately, this battle mode take on an arcade classic is really good. Him ending up on Apple Arcade is quite the coup, then.

Yellow dot-muncher Pac-Man has serious staying power, and is reportedly the sole videogame character with more widespread recognition than Mario. (Image credit: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.) Pac-Man Party Royale It really pays to spend a little time learning the touchscreen controls on an iPhone, and marveling at how such a game can work so well when you’re pawing at glass instead of having your mitts wrapped around a gamepad. It quickly becomes second nature to roll, parry, and hack to pieces anything that comes your way, from giant forest critters to enemies with unfeasibly large swords.Ĭuriously, Bleak Sword doesn’t work nearly as well with a controller.

Protagonist and enemies alike are stylized pixelated stickmen, but the controls are all modern gestures. Bleak Sword is to a great extent the same game – albeit stripped back for mobile play, and with visuals that appear to have escaped from a 1980s PC. Get Baldo: The Guardian Owls (opens in new tab)įire up the likes of Dark Souls on a PlayStation 4, and you can stomp about a beautifully rendered environment, hacking to bits all manner of adversaries with your medieval-era weapons. The game is headed for Apple Arcade, which is why it's a top newcomer on our list, but it's also available on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch. But the main inspiration is Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki - it’s our homage to those masters.” There are some places in chapter two where it's a direct homage to the Monday Island series. “It's more about the humor, some puzzles stuck out in our memory. “There’s a lot of Monkey Island influence in there,” reveals Barba. “There is about 50 to 100 hours of gameplay depending on if you’re a skilled player, or want to do every side quest, so it’s quite huge,” Barba tells us. TechRadar spoke to Domenico Barba, the Naps Team programmer and studio co-founder. This is a fun journey through magical lands with puzzles to solve and mysteries to unravel every step of the way. That's lucky for us because it's how we now have Baldo: The Guardian Owls. However, a number of hardware and publishing limitations meant it never saw the light of day. Naps Team had been working on a Game Boy Advance title called Dark Knight, including the now-titular character Baldo. The idea for the game has been in development in some form for a while. Italian development studio Naps Team has forged an alchemical mix of anime-visuals and classic Zelda mechanics into its new game Baldo: The Guardian Owls. (Image credit: Naps Team) Baldo: The Guardian Owls

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