This game feels like a student project more than a commercially released game. The assets all feel super low budget (and not in the charming way), and the game basically only does the bare minimum required to be Pac-Man, with a few extremely undercooked mechanics added in an attempt to make it even slightly unique. I seriously wonder why Infogrames even bothered putting this out when they had already inherited the obviously superior Adventures in Time from Hasbro Interactive anyways.

Of course, it's still Pac-Man, and assuming you don't have literally any other way to play Pac-Man, it's fine... is what I would say if this game didn't have the worst sound design known to man. I seriously have no idea how you manage to fuck up the sound design for Pac-Man of all things. Every other game from the past 40 years lifts its sound straight from the original arcade machine, but Quest for the Golden Maze, with it's very high production value, has decided to grace us with completely new sound effects. And surprisingly they all sound like ass. This alone is a feat so impressive that I don't really think I could call this game anything other than "bad".

This feels like something that would be spit out by an AI if you fed it the script of Higurashi and asked it to write a new chapter. Nothing unique or interesting, just story beats from other chapters strung together into something that vaguely resembles a new story. And yet it's all written by a human; a work that truly demonstrates the ability of humans to write something as soulless and vapid as that regurgitated by an AI.
The premise of this being a sort of "worst case scenario" feels like it should at least be interesting in some way, but it feels more as if the writer has accidentally happened upon this through sheer unoriginality causing them to combine every bad thing that happens in the other chapters together, as opposed to any actual attempt at creating an original premise.

It's all so depressing. Practically the only reason anyone would even bother to read this in the first place is out of a desperate attempt to grasp for more Higurashi, to reexperience those halcyon days. This is something that GouSotsu deliberately plays into, to great effect, but here it's all an accident. The writing doesn't play into the idea that it's SUPPOSED to be inane, it's just truly as insipid as the readers desire to experience it in the first place.
A fascinating work, in all of the wrong ways.