Thanks to unepic fran for the review code

Title: Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons
System: Steam
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 05/21/2024

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Story

In this MSX-inspired metroidvania, you take control of descendants of greek warriors and set out to free a tower of evil demons causing trouble to the gods! The plot really tries to be an unofficial sequel to Konami’s Maze of Galious, and due to that game using ancient Greek characters, they manage to get away with it pretty well! The story gets out of your way once you start the game and see the introduction cutscene, but there’s still plenty of amusing dialogue with nods to that MSX classic every now and again.

Presentation

Back in 2023, this very game was created on the MSX2 as a tribute to Galious, and programmed with the specs of the computer in mind. Indeed, just like how Goodboy Galaxy stuck to the GBA limitations to flesh out its ideas, the original Pampas and Selene did a good job of pumping out every bit of detail into those sprites and backgrounds as possible, and it manages to far surpass the presentation of the original Galious as a result, with some outstanding chiptune music and excellent Konami-quality sound effects.

Here in this modern port, Maze of Demons mostly sticks to that MSX baseline, with multi-screen dungeons to explore and a lot of menu switching, but the visuals have gotten a nice facelift, with new details added everywhere to make the game pop, some layouts/items being altered, along with the music getting an upgrade to pack in some excellent MIDI renditions, with the original MSX OST as a toggle to listen to during the game. As much as I love the style of MSX games, the computer wasn’t always the best at delivering smooth aciton or detailed backgrounds, so I appreciated the facelift given to the presentation here, and the ability to change the main character sprites to various Unepic Games mascots if you owned prior titles in your steam library was a pretty cool bonus. You even have a scanned manual of the MSX2 version to read, which includes a fun prologue comic!

Overall, a great looking indie MSX2 game given a nice 16-bit upgrade and feeling right at home on modern consoles, though I will say there’s a very slight smoothing effect that I noticed on the sprites and fonts when played in full screen mode, (like on a Steam Deck) and it did bug me that I couldn’t find a way to fully turn it off. The game still looks great despite all this, but man, I wish those pixels could be razor sharp on all displays!

Gameplay

The main goal in Maze of Demons is to guide Pampas and Selene throughout a massive castle, working to defeat the Lich king by tracking down the ten demons guarding the seal to his doorway. Pampas has a quick sword attack, while Selene has a slow magic wand but can last longer underwater, and you swap between the two on the fly with a shoulder button. After a brief introduction and being able to adjust to the first rooms of the game, you then have a lot of freedom to just explore and poke around the castle, even from the very beginning! The controls are very tight right from the getgo, and regardless of what controller I used while docked or playing portably on my Steam Deck, Maze of Demons felt like butter from start to finish, a great sign!

You’ll quickly find that various Greek gods are stationed around the castle, each with their own favors to ask of the player, and clearing these is the biggest step to opening up more and more of the castle, but even from the onset the castle is rather spacious, and once you find your secondary weapons you could choose to do the dungeons in order starting from the very first one, or just explore any room within your reach and see what items you can collect, however you please! While Maze of Demons isn’t open enough to the point you could go to the final boss and take him on immediately, this game doesn’t need to be. The generous amount of exploration you’re offered from the getgo is enough to satisfy any curious urges you may have, and reward you with some very helpful items for surviving the tougher enemies in the other parts of the castle.

Want to do fetch quests from the Gods to unlock the outer gates? Go right ahead! Wanna just find another dungeon and complete them out of order? Well, for the first six, you sure can! (The other four require items that the gods will give you upon clearing a certain amount of dungeons, so that’s essentially the only thing stopping you from exploring the entire castle from the onset) Want to focus on powering up your characters and buying helpful items from shops to make the boss fights and dungeons a lot easier? Sure!

This crazy amount of freedom is what makes Maze of Demons shine right out of the gate, and I was in love with it almost right after beginning my journey, with each session being incredibly difficult to put down before either my Steam Deck battery would die, or I had to prep for my day job. It just hooks right into you and lets you wander in amazement for a good chunk of the early game, giving me a lot of similar vibes to when I’d goof around in a Zelda title for the first time ever.

See, being a Galious inspired game, that also means Maze of Demons shares a bit in common with the other Galious inspired Metroidvania, La-Mulana. Both games are pretty open, both games are based on the Konami classic, and both games have a focus on exploration at your own pace with nothing forcing a specific order. However, while La-Mulana is an outstanding game, it also goes in hard on the retro puzzles and cryptic note-taking nature those kinds of riddles required to complete. Maze of Demons on the other hand, doesn’t really make you write down anything at all, and outside of tips and indicators on the map the Gods give you, you’re mostly on your own with solving the puzzles, but you won’t ever have a moment of being stuck on a puzzle because the answer was written on a stone tablet four dungeons ago, which is a huge relief and makes the game a lot less annoying.

That doesn’t mean the puzzles here are trivial, as some of the ones in the dungeons still stumped me for a good bit! But even then, they were all puzzles confined to that same dungeon, and eventually I figured all of them out with a very satisfying, “ah-ha!” level of satisfaction, making clearing these tricky dungeons way more satisfying than just going straight from point A to point B. See, each dungeon hides around eight runes that are needed to summon the boss to its chamber, and if you don’t have all the runes, you can’t fight it. They’re usually buried in tombstones and are easy to find throughout a dungeon, but the trickier ones are almost always tied to these puzzles, or having to clear a room of tough enemies to access it. Even with all of these runes being scattered, the dungeons are rather small, with even the final one not taking too long to complete, so this mini scavenger hunt was a great romp each and every time I went to a dungeon.

The bosses are pretty fun as well. Some are very blatantly inspired or follow up a boss fight from Galious, but quite a few of them are fully original to this game and make great use of the two heroes and their arsenal, all leading up to the final boss which ended up being my favorite of the entire game due to his fight feeling like a true final test of your skills. Every offensive ability Pampas & Selene have by that point adds another way to make the fight easier after seeming impossible. Once you realize how each weapon/skill you gained work as counters to his attack patterns, it becomes all the more triumphant finishing him off and feeling like you’ve accomplished mastery of their techniques, putting a wonderful bow on this fantastic journey.

Conclusion

I’ve played many Metroidvanias in my life, and one of my favorites in history is literally a Galious inspired game. I’ve also played plenty of MSX inspired games that were either noble efforts that didn’t live up to the classics (including the dev’s own Mini Ghost, a good game, but one that could have been better and had much iffier level design), or stayed too close to Galious to the point they didn’t feel distinctive enough. Add in a bunch of secret treasure chests to find, a ton of in-game achievements to take on the challenge of, and a lot of routing potential to make each playthrough different from your last, and you have yourselves one fantastic Metroidvania!

I’m very happy to say Pampas & Selene did a damn good job with their journey, and Maze of Demons hits the ground running with an experience that’s incredibly difficult to put down from the minute you start the game. Having dabbled with prior games from Fran, I’m absolutely confident in saying that this is easily the best game from the developer yet, and honestly one of my favorite Metroidvanias in years. Just the sheer amount of polish, quality of life, freedom and focus on making this a fun game inspired by the days of MSX, really leads to Maze of Demons standing out as the kind of retro tribute you want to play; the kind that makes you feel like you’re playing the childhood classic you think you remember in your head, but in a better form, rather than dealing with the reality of some of these older games having cryptic elements or being way too frustrating at times.

Yes, it still has a lot of Galious-inspired elements to it. If you’ve played La-Mulana, you can pretty much sum Maze of Demons up as like that game, but without any of the extremely difficult puzzles, and just a pure, somewhat open-ended experience with very addictive gameplay and great satisfaction from secret finding. If you’ve wanted a Metroidvania with a more open-ended perspective, but without the frustration of La-Mulana and something that still guided you just a little bit to prevent yourself from wandering in circles, then Maze of Demons is an engrossing one I cannot recommend enough, and is essential for fans of that classic MSX adventure. This truly is a love letter to the MSX2 just as much as Nigoro’s classic was, and one that I argue exceeds the original inspiration in quality just like Mulana did.

I give Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons a 10 out of 10.