My initial experience playing the game was unexpectedly fleeting, as it probably was for most other people who had the opportunity to play PacMan (WeiHao Xu's). Because the game begins as soon as its loaded and ends after a set few seconds, it took a few playthroughs for me to cement my first impressions. Like the game it was inspired by, PacMan was quite intuitive. Using the arrow keys, I was able to control the PacMan sprite and move it about the screen. Then, using my empirical knowledge of playing previous Pacman titles, the obvious objective of the game was to consume as many little orbs as possible in the given time frame. And so, that is what I had set out to do. Now the objective sounds simple enough, and with practice, collecting as many points would then be only a matter of pursuing all the densest pockets of potential points. A slightly annoying twist, though, which requires the player's adaptation is the randomness of the dots. Not only do they appear in random parts of the playspace, they also completely respawn every second. This in turn, defeats the purpose of crossing the screen to devour the big clump of points on the other side since they will despawn before they can even be reached. Now then, the strategy becomes, first judging the approximate radius around the PacMan which he can reach before the next wave of dots spawns. Second, a bias towards dots nearer to the center of the playspace is arguably preferable since if a clump of dots near the edge of the screen may pull PacMan away from future clumps that spawn in the interior, and now the PacMan's radius of dots he can reach within the second not encompasses unplayable area outside the playspace that won't spawn dots for PacMan to gobble. Thirdly, you must be in the good graces of RNGesus. Or more explicitly, one needs good luck to score well in this game. Because the timer is so short and the dots respawn so frequently in this short time, a significant amount of points that you score are almost entirely luck based. No amount of strategic play in this game will account for the sheer amount of points one's luck will earn them, but that does not rule out any strategy at all. This fine balance therefore encourages much replayability when it comes to earning high scores. No matter how many times you play your best, you may just get a little luckier at predicting the spawning of dots and earn an even higher score, and conversely, you may have arguably played your best possible in some instances but the unfavorable spawns of dots may ruin any chance of a decent score. For this reason, despite not having the same visual flavor and as many interesting gameplay mechanics as its forefathers and how primitive it feels, seemingly having been made with the p5.play library, this incarnation of PacMan really feels like it captures that essential essence of an arcade game.