At a glance: Pepper II · ColecoVision · Coleco/Exidy, 1983 · Maze chase · Score: 8.5/10
Pepper II does not want you to relax. Exidy’s 1982 arcade sequel takes the maze chase and scales it up in every direction: the maze is four interlinked screens you move between freely, the enemies include roaming eyes and a pitchfork-proof devil, and the core task — zipping closed every path in the maze by walking over it — means the safest play is always the most exposed one. Coleco’s ColecoVision conversion brought this under-distributed arcade game home in 1983, and it remains one of the system’s most distinctive cartridges: a maze game with the tempo of a chase film.
You are Pepper, an angel in training, and your job in each of the four connected mazes is to trace every corridor so the paths fill in behind you, sealing the maze section by section. Guardians patrol against you: the Roaming Eyes, which drift the halls in pairs, and — on the harder turns — the devil, who needs no warning and respects no weapon. Scattered through the maze are pitchforks, and grabbing one flips the power dynamic for a few precious seconds: Pepper sprouts horns of his own, and the hunters become the hunted.
Zip it all, if you can
The zip mechanic reorganises the maze genre’s psychology. In Pac-Man-likes, the dots are passive pickups; here the unfilled paths are a visible map of your unfinished business, and the game’s geography keeps pulling you back into danger zones to close the last few segments. Completing a full maze section seals it with a satisfying fill and racks up the points, and finishing all four is a genuine feat of route-planning. Because the four mazes join at their edges, escape is always an option and never a solution: enemies follow the same doorways you do, and a maze left half-zipped waits for you, unchanged, with its patrols intact.
The pitchfork economy is the second system, and it is beautifully judged. Power lasts just long enough to clear a local threat or sprint a dangerous stretch at devil-may-care speed — and the Roaming Eyes turn dangerous again the instant it fades, which will strand you exactly once before you learn respect. Bonus icons appear in the mazes’ centres for the brave, and the escalating speed across levels turns the final mazes into something approaching organised panic. This is a score game with real structure: zipped percentage, bonuses banked, lives spent only when the devil’s patrol and your route fatally agree.
Conversion quality
The ColecoVision version keeps the four-maze layout, the zip trails, the pitchfork transformations and the devil complete, which is no small achievement given how much of the game exists off-screen at any moment. The presentation is bright and legible — filled paths read clearly against unfilled ones, Pepper and the Eyes are distinct at a glance, and the intermissions and bonus tallies of the arcade survive in spirit. As with Lady Bug, the pad’s diagonals-free maze movement suits the game, though the cross-maze chases will test your direction changes: plan turns a corridor early and the stick behaves.
Sound is classic Exidy punctuation — movement ticks, transformation stings, and a general air of escalating alarm. What impresses most, decades on, is the density of ideas: this is a maze game about territory rather than consumption, with a power-up system, a multi-screen map and an unkillable nemesis, all in 1982. It makes an instructive shelf-mate for Lady Bug. The two games share a genre and a console, yet want opposite things from you: Lady Bug rewards patience, doors and spelling; Pepper II rewards nerve, territory and speed.
Who it is for
Pepper II is the maze game for players who found the famous ones too tidy. Its mazes are bigger, its enemies ruder, and its best moments — the last path zipped with the devil a corridor behind you — are pure arcade theatre. It was never as common as the system’s headline titles, which kept it a word-of-mouth favourite among ColecoVision owners, and that reputation is deserved: this is deep catalogue ColecoVision, the kind of cartridge that justifies owning the machine beyond its famous five games.
Four mazes, four temperaments
The linked-maze structure deserves a closer look, because each of the four mazes plays a different role in a good run. Treat the first maze as your bank: zip it fully and early, while the Eyes are slow, and it becomes safe territory you can cross without thinking for the rest of the level. The middle mazes are the contested ground, where pitchfork timing matters most — the correct doctrine is to take the transformation as a route-clearing tool rather than a scoring spree, spending its seconds on distance rather than kills. The final maze is the devil’s parish, and the professional approach is unglamorous: short excursions, zip the nearest unfilled paths, retreat before the patrol pattern closes. Players who try to finish it in one heroic sweep will meet the devil at the exact midpoint of that sweep, every time. Across all four, the unfilled path display is the game’s conscience: it always shows you exactly how much courage you have left to find.
Exidy’s maze, Coleco’s muscle
Pepper II’s arcade parentage gave it a distribution problem in its day — Exidy’s cabinets were never as widespread as the big Japanese makers’ — which makes the ColecoVision conversion historically important: for most of the game’s eighties audience, this cartridge was Pepper II. Coleco’s handling of these licences is the system’s quiet legend. Again and again the pattern repeats: an inventive, under-distributed arcade game, converted completely and marketed to exactly the audience who would never find the cabinet. The result, four decades later, is a library whose deep catalogue is disproportionately strong — and Pepper II sits near the top of that catalogue, a maze game that still feels like it was designed next year.
For collectors and first-time angels
Pepper II sits in the sweet spot of ColecoVision collecting: scarcer than the launch staples, common enough to find without a saga, and possessed of box art that promises exactly the cheerful menace the cartridge delivers. Its manual is worth having — the four-maze structure and the devil’s rules reward a read before your first credit. New players should resist the game’s own invitation to chaos and play their first levels as zip-filling exercises, completing one maze at a time and treating the pitchfork as a fire extinguisher: present, comforting, and for emergencies. Speed comes later, and the game supplies it whether you ask or not. What lingers, sessions in, is the game’s unusual fairness: Pepper II’s mazes always show you the whole problem — every unfilled path, every patrol, every exit — and ask, politely, what you intend to do about it. The devil asks less politely.
And a footnote for the score-chasers: Pepper II’s bonus structure quietly rewards completionism over survivalism, because the fully-zipped maze pays in a way cautious partial clears never match — which means the game’s bravest strategy and its highest-scoring strategy are, unusually, the same one. Cartridges that align courage and arithmetic that neatly are rare in any era, and it is the deepest reason this one keeps its hold on the players who find it.
The verdict
A big, frantic, cleverly structured maze chase, faithfully converted and still capable of raising your heart rate. Pepper II is one of the ColecoVision’s finest second-wave cartridges — and the devil is still waiting in maze four.
Score: 8.5/10 — Four mazes of beautiful panic, with a pitchfork for emergencies.