All You Can Eat: Pac-Man CE DX+'s Trial Week

Look, I can understand why you might not have played Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+. That name, for starters. One imagines Namco Bandai scraping the bottom of the cash-in barrel, breaking through the bottom, digging down into the ground, grabbing a clawful of gravel and throwing that in one's startled little face. Oh, but it's so far from that. It's barely even a Pac-Man game.

PMCEDX+ is a reflex-y arcade game a bit like Snake in a maze with ghosts and colours and great bleepy-bloopy noises. It's pretty nice. And it's free to play all week on Steam, so do have a look.

While ye olde Pac-Man had you carefully avoiding and luring ghosts, Championship Edition DX is about zipping around, waking ghosts up, waking so many ghosts up, making them chase you, making so very many ghosts chase you, then turning around and devouring the blooming lot while sounds blare and colours flash and fruit fly and oh it's so exciting. It's a leaderboard-o-rama, see. It did have a demo before, but now you can try the whole flipping thing.

You can play the full game as much as you please until 6pm on Monday through Steam (that's 10am Steamtime). In theory, if you're logged in, that'll let you simply download it. Myself, I spent a minute muttering "What. What are you doing? Why aren't you working?" while refreshing the page and clicking this link before Steam noticed I was allowed to play.

The game's also on sale until Monday, if you fancy keeping it. The 66% discount brings it down to £2.71. A bundle with all the DLC is £4.07. Here, watch this person rack up a respectable score: