There is nothing to say about this game besides how bad it is. Somehow 3 and a half hours felt like an eternity and that's probably because I had to deal with terrible characters and gags the whole time. The gameplay is basically a point-and-click game in first person which sounds fine enough but is just done terribly here. The story is just there and feels like a mash-up of everything you've experienced before. Most of the time when I play a bad game, it just makes me feel nothing, disappointed or bored, but this game just made me feel pain.
One word: A-maize-ing.
A cute, short comedy adventure that's worth a couple of hours of your time
that's a Russian teddy bear in this one
Maize is certainly a game that was made. Simple adventure puzzle solving infused with a sense of humor and theme that can only be described as "what the hell is happening right now?". If the runtime was a little bit shorter, maybe it wouldn't have overstayed its welcome, but in my experience the fun wore out well before the credits rolled.
I never thought I would play a game about sentient corn, but that’s what’s great about games, there’s always an idea someone hasn’t done yet. This is a typical adventure game with puzzles and hallways you wander around finding objects with cutscenes thrown in. The game is simple, funny, and has an ending that will leave a smile on your face.
The game starts out with small funny hints on what to do like “Pressing Q doesn’t do anything” which helps open up how this game is going to be. As you wander around the maze-like cornfield, you realize you need to pick up highlighted objects. Most of them are for puzzles, but some are added to your folio that adds little story bits. Slowly but surely, you will exhaust each area as there are only so many areas for you to explore and only a few items in each room.
I made my way underground to the laboratory where most of the story unfolds. The place is littered with sticky notes of two scientists at each others’ throats and it also helps add to the story of what’s going on. Most of the puzzles were fairly simple as they are highlighted with outlines of what items go where, but the problem here was getting lost all the time. The hallways all look the same and once I searched every new area there was always the problem of missing something. I had to search each room again several times to figure out what I missed, but this is common with adventure games.
The game looks really nice, while it won’t smoke your GPU, it uses the Unreal Engine 4 to bring the game to life. The sentient corn characters are funny, and each character is interesting and has personality. I was surprised the developers pulled this off with a play time of about 5-6 hours. The story kept me pushing forward as I wanted to know what happened to all these characters and why I was there.
Overall, Maize is a great indie game with funny characters, lots of detail, and a funny story worth seeing through to the end. There isn’t much gameplay here outside of picking up items and wandering hallways, but it’s all for an evening well spent.
The game starts out with small funny hints on what to do like “Pressing Q doesn’t do anything” which helps open up how this game is going to be. As you wander around the maze-like cornfield, you realize you need to pick up highlighted objects. Most of them are for puzzles, but some are added to your folio that adds little story bits. Slowly but surely, you will exhaust each area as there are only so many areas for you to explore and only a few items in each room.
I made my way underground to the laboratory where most of the story unfolds. The place is littered with sticky notes of two scientists at each others’ throats and it also helps add to the story of what’s going on. Most of the puzzles were fairly simple as they are highlighted with outlines of what items go where, but the problem here was getting lost all the time. The hallways all look the same and once I searched every new area there was always the problem of missing something. I had to search each room again several times to figure out what I missed, but this is common with adventure games.
The game looks really nice, while it won’t smoke your GPU, it uses the Unreal Engine 4 to bring the game to life. The sentient corn characters are funny, and each character is interesting and has personality. I was surprised the developers pulled this off with a play time of about 5-6 hours. The story kept me pushing forward as I wanted to know what happened to all these characters and why I was there.
Overall, Maize is a great indie game with funny characters, lots of detail, and a funny story worth seeing through to the end. There isn’t much gameplay here outside of picking up items and wandering hallways, but it’s all for an evening well spent.
The only reason the score is this high is that the game is aware that it's shit and that made it kind of endearing. Also, the voice acting is pretty solid and the post-it note conversations between Bob and Ted are usually worth going out of your way to read for a chuckle.
Cordially,
Skikkiks
Cordially,
Skikkiks
Kinda shit, but I got it with my graphics card.
This is the closest game I've encountered to a playable fever dream. I think my overall impression is positive, but it's kind of hard to tell, it felt like I just experienced something very strange. When I wake up, I suspect I'll be unsure if the game was real, but it most certainly was.
I cannot in good conscience call this a good game. But it was a very FUN game. It's extremely badly optimized and very stupid in parts. But it was really enjoyable and a nice way to spend an afternoon. I'd suggest buying it on sale.
This review contains spoilers
I was enjoying Maize, and I wanted to keep enjoying Maize. After 2 hours, I had to give it up.
I went into Maize not knowing what to expect. It almost looked like a horror game, and I was just waiting for something bad to happen. The music is pleasant ambience with some eeriness to it, and the setting is cryptic. Pretty soon, the jokes started to hit, and that's what this game is about. It's a linear adventure in the vein of 90's point-and-click adventure games, where everything you can actually interact with is highlighted, and serves an eventual purpose.
The game itself is a very pretty vehicle for delivering this story and humour, which had been great! For 2 hours. There's great comedy about the meta-game of the genre you're playing in, and there's definitely funny punchlines to putting together puzzles and what the outcome is.
There's a lot of great surrealist humour, even in the situation itself, that is reminiscent of the greats like Monty Python or Kids in the Hall. You're in a weird predicament, doing odd things, with strange material left behind from other humans, and everyone just seems to deal with it.
Humour is of course subjective to anyone who experiences it, and I'd like to explain why the fun suddenly stopped for me beyond bad jokes.
I was having fun with the game, until I felt like I spent way too long in an underground labyrinth of sewer-like walls, or white walls, surrounded by junk. A good joke is that the same type of room was planted into this laboratory, but as a player, it was repetitive and frustrating. I was actually getting motion sickness I don't experience often with first-person perspective. In this case it was because I was running through an environment, swinging around hallways, and disorienting myself trying to remember where my last objective was.
[b]Spoilers.[/b] The second one was the jokes stopped being funny. An hour in, I met [spoiler]the teddy bear and started to read through notes left by the scientist and his venture capitalist business partner.[/spoiler] They were each funny at first, from the situations each of them provided, having a [spoiler]Russian teddy bear follow you around, and the venture capitalist think they're building a theme park out of a scientific experimentation centre.[/spoiler]
This is right when the game pivots to meta-gameplay jokes, funny situations, and absurdist comedy to insult humour. Sure, [spoiler]the lab you're stuck in is so poorly designed and the venture capitalist keeps screwing everything up,[/spoiler] but [i]every single joke[/i] boils down to calling the NPCs you don't see and the player-character "stupid," "idiot," "moron" and whatever else to demean their intelligence. It was funny for the first couple of minutes, but that was the running joke - everyone's a stupid idiot, and that's all I hear.
After a full hour of being called a stupid idiot for the hundredth time in a game designed to make me pick up a unicorn-shaped candle, I gave up. I'll just read the ending, which I'm sure will be a bit of a giggle, but I'm not enduring the boring maze and insult comedy anymore. Like, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is funny in 2-5 minute segments, but this becomes insufferable after an hour.
That all written, I do believe the team does have talent and wits that given another scenario would work. I look forward to Skully and would check that out!
I went into Maize not knowing what to expect. It almost looked like a horror game, and I was just waiting for something bad to happen. The music is pleasant ambience with some eeriness to it, and the setting is cryptic. Pretty soon, the jokes started to hit, and that's what this game is about. It's a linear adventure in the vein of 90's point-and-click adventure games, where everything you can actually interact with is highlighted, and serves an eventual purpose.
The game itself is a very pretty vehicle for delivering this story and humour, which had been great! For 2 hours. There's great comedy about the meta-game of the genre you're playing in, and there's definitely funny punchlines to putting together puzzles and what the outcome is.
There's a lot of great surrealist humour, even in the situation itself, that is reminiscent of the greats like Monty Python or Kids in the Hall. You're in a weird predicament, doing odd things, with strange material left behind from other humans, and everyone just seems to deal with it.
Humour is of course subjective to anyone who experiences it, and I'd like to explain why the fun suddenly stopped for me beyond bad jokes.
I was having fun with the game, until I felt like I spent way too long in an underground labyrinth of sewer-like walls, or white walls, surrounded by junk. A good joke is that the same type of room was planted into this laboratory, but as a player, it was repetitive and frustrating. I was actually getting motion sickness I don't experience often with first-person perspective. In this case it was because I was running through an environment, swinging around hallways, and disorienting myself trying to remember where my last objective was.
[b]Spoilers.[/b] The second one was the jokes stopped being funny. An hour in, I met [spoiler]the teddy bear and started to read through notes left by the scientist and his venture capitalist business partner.[/spoiler] They were each funny at first, from the situations each of them provided, having a [spoiler]Russian teddy bear follow you around, and the venture capitalist think they're building a theme park out of a scientific experimentation centre.[/spoiler]
This is right when the game pivots to meta-gameplay jokes, funny situations, and absurdist comedy to insult humour. Sure, [spoiler]the lab you're stuck in is so poorly designed and the venture capitalist keeps screwing everything up,[/spoiler] but [i]every single joke[/i] boils down to calling the NPCs you don't see and the player-character "stupid," "idiot," "moron" and whatever else to demean their intelligence. It was funny for the first couple of minutes, but that was the running joke - everyone's a stupid idiot, and that's all I hear.
After a full hour of being called a stupid idiot for the hundredth time in a game designed to make me pick up a unicorn-shaped candle, I gave up. I'll just read the ending, which I'm sure will be a bit of a giggle, but I'm not enduring the boring maze and insult comedy anymore. Like, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is funny in 2-5 minute segments, but this becomes insufferable after an hour.
That all written, I do believe the team does have talent and wits that given another scenario would work. I look forward to Skully and would check that out!
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/maize-2016-review/
It’s not very often I come across a decisive game that seems to completely split the audience down the middle. And after playing Maize, it’s pretty easy to see why that is.
Maize is a comedic First-Person Perspective Adventure Game released in 2016 and was developed and published by Finish Line Games. The playable character awakens on an abandoned farm, with no prior knowledge about how they got there or how they got there in the first place. You quickly find that the seemingly abandoned farm is overrun by sentient talking stalks of corn, along with a small Russian stuffed bear named Vladdy with a bad attitude who has to help you throughout the game, along with a science lab located under said abandoned farm.
From a gameplay perspective, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. What few actual puzzles there are aren’t that difficult, but if you’re not in tune with the games sense of humor, some of those puzzles won’t make much sense to you.
Throughout the game, you’ve got your trusty companion, Vladdy, a stuffed bear with a Russian accent. Vladdy is the biggest make-it-or-break-it part of this game for a lot of people. Most of his dialogue consists of being grumpy and insulting things. I didn’t mind him so much, but it’s really easy to see why so many of the people who play this game end up disliking him. He is very much a one note joke. I guess he’s in this game to break up the sentient corn characters, but almost all of his dialogue can be distilled down to “This is stupid, and you are stupid!” in a Russian accent. Most of the other jokes are absurdist jokes and puns. If the game wasn’t so short, there jokes could easily be even more grating.
Even though Maize has a lot of flaws dragging it down, I can’t help but at least get some enjoyment from the game. This game is a very hate-it-or-love-it game. You’ll either be chuckling at the corny puns and Monty Python-esque humor, or be annoyed at the lame jokes, Vladdy constantly telling you how stupid you are, and just how little this game has to offer. There is no in between. Which makes recommending this game very hard. I’d recommend watching the first 30 or 45 minutes of this game before making a purchase.
It’s not very often I come across a decisive game that seems to completely split the audience down the middle. And after playing Maize, it’s pretty easy to see why that is.
Maize is a comedic First-Person Perspective Adventure Game released in 2016 and was developed and published by Finish Line Games. The playable character awakens on an abandoned farm, with no prior knowledge about how they got there or how they got there in the first place. You quickly find that the seemingly abandoned farm is overrun by sentient talking stalks of corn, along with a small Russian stuffed bear named Vladdy with a bad attitude who has to help you throughout the game, along with a science lab located under said abandoned farm.
From a gameplay perspective, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. What few actual puzzles there are aren’t that difficult, but if you’re not in tune with the games sense of humor, some of those puzzles won’t make much sense to you.
Throughout the game, you’ve got your trusty companion, Vladdy, a stuffed bear with a Russian accent. Vladdy is the biggest make-it-or-break-it part of this game for a lot of people. Most of his dialogue consists of being grumpy and insulting things. I didn’t mind him so much, but it’s really easy to see why so many of the people who play this game end up disliking him. He is very much a one note joke. I guess he’s in this game to break up the sentient corn characters, but almost all of his dialogue can be distilled down to “This is stupid, and you are stupid!” in a Russian accent. Most of the other jokes are absurdist jokes and puns. If the game wasn’t so short, there jokes could easily be even more grating.
Even though Maize has a lot of flaws dragging it down, I can’t help but at least get some enjoyment from the game. This game is a very hate-it-or-love-it game. You’ll either be chuckling at the corny puns and Monty Python-esque humor, or be annoyed at the lame jokes, Vladdy constantly telling you how stupid you are, and just how little this game has to offer. There is no in between. Which makes recommending this game very hard. I’d recommend watching the first 30 or 45 minutes of this game before making a purchase.
The first chapter is pretty fine. Interesting, mysterious and funny at times. But as soon as you enter the bunker, everything gets worse.
Ted hates Bob, because Bob is stupid and wastes money. The bear that's your sidekick is using the words "stupid", "idiot" and "garbage" at least two times per sentence. These are all the jokes in this game.
The whole game is about doing a lot of stuff to find one item that's uses at an entire different place.
Ted hates Bob, because Bob is stupid and wastes money. The bear that's your sidekick is using the words "stupid", "idiot" and "garbage" at least two times per sentence. These are all the jokes in this game.
The whole game is about doing a lot of stuff to find one item that's uses at an entire different place.
I that it was funny at points, but overall I don't think this game is very good.
It's novel, though not very funny, and kind of all over the place, though not in a good way.