Mazzle Halloween is yet another construction kit template copy+paste from serial shovelware pushers, Blender Games. These guys do nothing but copy premade game templates and game tutorials, fill out a few things/stamp out basic levels using the construction kit templates, slap on an asset flipped set of sprites/assets, and dump them on Steam and into cheap nasty shovelware game bundles as cash grabs. Trying to get paid for someone else's game templates, assets... at best, this is shovelware, at worst, it's a scam/cash grab.
Although this time the Russian asset flippers at Cute Hannah's Games/Quantum Quiver/Blender Games (how many shell accounts does this guy need to try hide his identity and mislead gamers?) hasn't used a lot of other people's assets here, this is no different from his other shovelware ClickTeam fusion games. The only difference is he's combined the puzzle template from the Poly Jigsaw series of asset flips with the maze game he ripped off from somewhere. You finish the jigsaw (a static picture of the maze) then it switches seamlessly to the maze template flip and you do that.
Needless to say, a jigsaw and a maze worse than the ones in the back of the newspaper, all flipped from ClickTeam Fusion, have no value whatsoever for PC gamers... this is just more nasty Russian cash grab shovelware.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Clickteam Fusion construction kit - the "No-Code" construction kit that "Anyone can make games with!!". Including, you know, people who aren't game developers. Which is a problem. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2024), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Mazzle Halloween is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
