When a wizard invents ghost ink, which turns everything written with it into mysterious ghosts, ghosts run amok in Pac-Man's world and cause chaos within the world's books and images. Pac-Man uses his magic pen to rid the ghosts and put them all into a single book, but they exact a last-second curse on him that traps him in the book. Pac-Man then turns to the player to use his magic pen to help him eat all the ghosts from every drawing.
The game is played by drawing a limited number of Pac-Mans and then using a series of gesture marks to guide them around each stage so that they eat all of the ghosts.
Tropes found in the game:
- Anti-Frustration Feature: Certain boss fights will have a small deflectable wallblock on each side of the screen to allow a Pac-Man to bounce back and forth freely without you having to draw walls to save him from fatally going off screen, so that you can use any ink weapons you have to fight the boss. Of course you'll have to protect the Pac-Man from getting hit by the boss if you want that S-rank by braking to avoid projectiles the boss may toss at him.
- Big Bad: The Inkmaster.
- Boss Warning Siren: Occurs at the end of every chapter to indicate that the player is about to face a boss.
- Final-Exam Boss: The Inkmaster requires you to use both ink weapons you unlocked throughout the story, not just the Pac-Men themselves.
- Gameplay Grading: A typical letter grading system (S,A,B,C) is implemented for each chapter.
- Mook Maker: The Ink Master's magic ink causes everything that is written down with it to turn into ghosts.
- New Game Plus: Completing the game unlocks a "Book II", which is a harder version of the campaign.
- Painting the Medium: In a game that takes place within a series of books, individual worlds are called "chapters" with every stage called a "drawing".
- Tech-Demo Game: Tetsuya Shinoda got the idea for this game when he wanted to make a Pac-Man arcade game that revolved around using a touch screen to create marks and symbols.
- Too Fast to Stop: A popular way a small, fast Pac-Man can die is for him to go offscreen before you can draw the wall to save him.
