Maze is a first-person puzzler from Treefall Studios in which you go through mazes and must recover every hidden coin in it. Learn more in our Maze review!

This is a double review for Maze. ThaRaven403 and Ceidz played the game, and this review presents what they both had to say.

 

Maze is a First-Person Puzzle Adventure game. Embark on the journey of a young hero from Mazadon, in search of the all-knowing Oracle! Solve puzzles, collect coins, dodge enemies and traps, and escape mind-blowing labyrinths

Although not present during the game, there’s still a story that’s given to provide you with a reason to go through the mazes. There’s a legendary oracle in the land of Mazadon, and he’s waiting for a hero. His chamber lies behind the labyrinths, and your quest is to get there.

The game is played from a first-person perspective. Other than moving with the left analog stick, the only other movements you can do is jump with the X button and run by pressing and holding down the L3 button – that means pushing down on the left analog stick. You can also place up to three markers with the Square button to help you find your way through the mazes. When you start in the first world, one of the first things you’ll see is a board that tells you how much it costs to travel to other worlds. Each level you complete will give you one coin which you can use towards unlocking more worlds. There are eight levels per world for you to complete, which are easily found by wandering around the corresponding hub.

When you enter a level, your goal is pretty simple; get to the end of the labyrinth. But before making it out of the level, you’ll have to collect ten coins that are scattered around in the labyrinth. If you don’t have them all, you simply can’t exit the level. Some of the levels, in the beginning, will be rather simple, and you will easily find everything and exit, but the more you progress, the trickier the mazes get. Sometimes, because the maze is full of twists and turns. Other times, because the walls are transparent, so you have to search for actual passages that lead somewhere.

During the first few mazes, I literally breezed through them, and I was becoming a bit afraid that the whole game would be like this. After a few extra ones, though, the mazes started to dial up the challenge. There are also a few extra elements here and there like moving platforms or spinning blades that added a bit of platforming to the whole thing. With more than 30 mazes, there’s a couple of hours worth of maze navigation to do, and you can add two other modes to provide some variety to it.

As for the trophies, this is an easy Platinum trophy to get through in an evening, and it doesn’t even require you to complete all the levels the game has. You need to complete at least 18 mazes and specifically the final maze of the game to get all but a few trophies. After that, collecting all the coins for one of the arcade mode levels should be all you need for that Platinum trophy!

 

Maze, from Eli Brewer’s TreeFall Studios, is a first-person puzzle adventure in which you are told that you are the hero the legendary Oracle had been waiting for. As ThaRaven403 mentioned, there isn’t much extra story within Maze. As soon as you are told this, you enter the labyrinths, where the quest takes place.

After a short tutorial showing how the basic gameplay works, you get to the game hub, which allows you to travel to all the available mazes. This first hub allows you to enter the first eight mazes, and once six of them have been completed, you can go to the next world. As for the gameplay itself, it is pretty simple. The left analog stick allows you to walk, and the right one is for moving the camera around. There are coins all over the maze, and they must be collected before the level’s exit opens up.

Being a maze game, I took some time to analyze each level’s design since it’s one of the most important aspects. In the first few levels, the level design was well done, and it was fun to discover what each new maze had to offer. As the game progressed towards the later labyrinths, I thought that the level design became annoying and required a lot of backtracking once the exit point had been found since I was somehow always missing a coin or two. Each level grants you three flags that can be used to remind you which way you went in the different branches of a labyrinth, but that won’t prevent you from getting lost while searching for the last hidden coin.

There’s an arcade mode where you have to collect 20 coins in a maze before the timer runs out. This was a totally different experience as you have to run throughout the whole thing if you want to collect all the coins. There’s also a multiplayer mode where you have to be the first to collect all the coins in the maze to win. I haven’t tried this one myself, but I found the concept interesting as it adds a bit of replay value to a game that doesn’t have any once you’re done with all the levels.

As for the presentation, I liked how each of the mazes had a different look and feel. Some of them took place at night, and the brightness was so low that I had a hard time going through them, and of course, brightness can’t be adjusted in the settings. I also noticed an odd gameplay design since the left D-Pad can’t be used in menus. This didn’t feel natural for a PlayStation 4 game. Something else to consider is that, as is the case for other games you can play from a first-person perspective, you might get motion sickness from this one, so do keep that in mind.

 

Final Thoughts
Maze from TreeFall Studios is a good labyrinth game. We liked the easy to pick-up gameplay and the easy Platinum trophy but thought that finding the last hidden coin(s) in some mazes required a lot of backtracking in some cases.

Price: $9.99 USD

Disclaimer
This Maze review is based on PlayStation 4 copies provided by TreeFall Studios.