Namco Legendary Mountains Builds a Suika-Style Puzzle Out of Arcade History

Bandai Namco's back catalogue is being squeezed into something altogether stranger with Namco Legendary Mountains, now available on iOS and Android. The game uses a merge-puzzle structure reminiscent of Suika Game but fills the play area with voxel characters and objects pulled from more than 100 pieces of Namco history.

Pac-Man and Dig Dug are among the recognisable properties represented, turning what could have been a fairly conventional matching game into a miniature museum where exhibits repeatedly crash into one another. Players launch voxel objects into the stage and combine matching pieces to create larger ones, chasing higher scores and filling their collection along the way. It is a clever use of legacy intellectual property because it does not require every classic character to support an entire modern game.

Instead, decades of arcade nostalgia become the toy box. Somewhere an ageing Galaga fan is about to discover that preservation apparently means dropping beloved characters into a physics container until two identical ones merge.