In Pac-In-Time, players control Pac-Man in his mission to return to the present day after his nemesis, the Ghost Witch, cast a spell that transported him to his youth in 1975, five years before his debut appearance.
[1] Levels are designed around solving puzzles and backtracking to previous sections, taking place in environments such as mountains, villages, and castles.
[1] The Ghosts also appear and will give chase to Pac-Man; he can defeat them by eating a Power Pellet, which will cause them to turn blue and edible.
[1] Pac-In-Time was designed by Atreid Concept, a French video game studio headed by business entrepreneur Nicolas Gaume.
Pac-In-Time is a reskin and rebranding of Atreid's older game Fury of the Furries, a puzzle platformer originally released for Amiga, Macintosh and MS-DOS in 1994.
[5] Pac-In-Time was developed for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy, Mac OS, and MS-DOS.
The Japanese Super Famicom version was changed to be harder than its international counterparts, adding instant-death traps and generally making levels more difficult and challenging.
[9] Pac-In-Time was met with a generally favorable reception from publications, and is seen as a unique and innovative title in the Pac-Man series.
[7][12] Critics also praised the game's controls and items;[3][11] GamePro in particular said that together they "breathed new life into a classic character.
[7] By contrast, Next Generation felt that the level design became repetitive and lack in variety between them, which they stated was the game's only weakness.
However, unlike Pac-Land - a previous attempt to blend the Pac-Man universe with a platform-game scenario - this one is a pleasantly addictive romp that knows just how to tease players into coming back for more.