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!
OhItsPep
10 months ago