Pac-xon

Pac-xon was one of those games you'd find on a Flash gaming site in the mid-2000s. It took the familiar dot-eating from Pac-Man and combined it with the territory-filling gameplay of an older title called Qix. You played it in a browser, a simple distraction between other tasks.

You control a small Pac-Man character, moving with the arrow keys across a bordered, empty grid. Your goal is to paint a majority of that grid by tracing rectangular paths and closing them off. The tension comes from the four ghosts that patrol the unpainted area; if they touch you while you're drawing a line, you lose a life. You can temporarily turn the tables by eating power pellets that appear, letting you chase and eliminate the ghosts for a few seconds. The game starts calmly but the pace quickens as the playable area shrinks and the ghosts become more persistent. It feels like a careful balancing act between bold expansion and cautious retreat.