I've always been fascinated by Devil World, a game that Shigeru Miyamoto made for the Famicom back in the early 1980s. It was, I gather, his first game made exclusively for a console. Devil World's a spin on Pac-Man, but one that never made it to the West because it used a lot of religious imagery. Devils, sure, but also bibles and crosses. It's always sounded weird and intriguing.
Now, Devil World has finally landed on the Nintendo Switch, and I've been playing it on and off for the last few days. It's certainly a little strange to see a Nintendo game in which you collect bibles and get powered-up by crosses, and looking back at a screenshot I took which has a huge crucifix for the player to navigate I did feel the vaguest frisson of something or other. But the iconography is far from the most interesting thing about this game, I suspect. Let's dig in.
As I mentioned, Devil World's clearly inspired by Pac-Man, and that alone makes it worth looking at. Why? Because here's Miyamoto working with a very established game design to build upon. (His fellow designer, Takashi Tezuka, had apparently not played Pac-Man when he began work on the game, but he soon got caught up, and apparently really enjoyed the original.) So what does Miyamoto do?