[h1]Executive Summary[/h1]
The concept just falls flat. There are a number of issues that prevent this game from being fun, but first we'll give a general summary of the gameplay because the store page is rather vague.
I decided to try the game with my group because it was free, but it turned out to be totally frustrating, and writing this review was more fun than the game itself. (Present date is 27 Dec 2025, in case there are some major updates that invalidate this review.)
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
You spawn into a randomly generated square maze on a random outer edge (I'll use the convention of NESW, where North is up). The goal is to find a key and reach the chest which [i]seems[/i] to be in the exact center of the map (and if it is not, it randomly ended up there on the one playthrough where we mapped everything). Once that happens, the game ends — I'm not sure if this is a glitch or not, because the in-game text makes it seem like you're supposed to backtrack to an entrance to escape, but I digress.
The schtick is the information system. Every turn, you can move in a direction, and you will be told if the move was successful (you moved one space) or a failure (you hit a wall). You will also be told this information for every player. So if P1 moves N successfully, there will be black footprints pointing up, and if P2 tries to move E and hits a wall, there will be red footprints pointing right. You can access the entire move log of every player, albeit only 8 at a time (you have to scroll through the history to see every move).
You also have an in-game notepad that tracks the entire 15x15 grid, and you can fill a space in as black to mark a wall.
The goal is to use the information gained from yours and your opponent's moves to figure out the layout of the maze and successfully reach the treasure chest. If you reach it with a key, you win.
There is a fireball staff item whose function is intentionally kept vague. I never found out what it does, but my guess is that if it hits another player it causes them to drop their held items, if any. Another in my group thinks it can blast through a wall. It proved too pointless to even find out.
[h1]Problems[/h1]
Some of these are intentional, others are not, but the viciously synergistic effect of all of them creates an intensely boring and annoying experience.
[olist]
[*] Glitchy initiation behavior
[*] Deliberately [i]very[/i] slow
[*] Given information is too restrictive / clunky
[*] Information recording is too restrictive
[/olist]
We'll tackle them in order.
[h2]Glitches[/h2]
When you first spawn, you are [i]told[/i] that your starting location is recorded. This is simply untrue, and as a result, you can spend literally dozens of moves just trying to figure out where you started. This means that your sole source of recording information, the in-game notepad, is basically useless until you spend a lot of time deducing your starting location, at which point you then need to go through your entire move backlog to figure out where you've been. It's a mess.
A nasty glitch that hit us on our first playthrough was a DC. When the player reconnected, it [b]reinitialized the maze[/b] but did [b]not[/b] tell us. We spent over a forty minutes bumbling around before I realized that the movements I was making were actually impossible. During this time, everybody else was just absentmindedly meandering, totally disengaged.
[h2]Slow Burn[/h2]
You have 60s to make your move, after which it plays a little animation, gives you some appropriate flavor text, and then starts a 5s countdown timer before the next person can take their turn. While you can tell the intention of this delay was to give people time to track the last move and update it in their notepad, in reality it destroys any sense of making progress.
With animation, the fastest anybody can play is about one move every 6s. But keep in mind a move is one space in a direction, and ~60% of the time a new direction will be a wall. Since you start the game not even knowing where you are, if we imagine a 3-person lobby, moving as fast as they can (taking no time whatsoever to process information), after 5 minutes each one will have moved, on average, 10 spaces. Best hope it wasn't a dead end, or you'll spend the next 2 minutes undoing those moves. And if you spend any time whatsoever going over move histories (as I did), halve or quarter that rate. It's unbelievably slow.
[h2]You're Not Given Enough Information[/h2]
As part of the gameplay, you are totally blind to your surroundings and cannot even detect adjacent walls unless you run into them. Combined with the timing issues mentioned above, gaining new relevant information is given in an inconsistent drip format where it's entirely possible that everyone is just backtracking or hitting walls.
There are some features that are supposed to help: if you hit an entrance or another player is within 5 spaces of you, you get special flavor text with your move to alert you to that, but it's just not enough to overcome the vast information deficit you start with.
[h2]Information Recording[/h2]
We've been over the starting space glitch, but it gets worse. The in-game notepad has a binary option for a space: white or black. The borders start black (so presumably those are supposed to be walls), and everything else is white. How do you track your current location? or other player locations? How do you track spaces that are unknown or spaces of interest?
The short answer is that you can't. In my group's let's-figure-this-game-out playthrough, I just used a spreadsheet to track all of that information, using colors to represent space types and text for player locations. I thought about switching to the in-game pad once I knew where we all were, but since I would only be able to fill in walls, the spreadsheet proved superior.
[h1]Recap[/h1]
I gave the game a shot because the notion of a highly-logical deduction game was alluring to me, but a combination of glitchy behavior, incredibly slow gameplay, stingy information, and the near-useless gamepad meant that even I didn't want to play it after we figured things out.
Maybe check back if there's an update — I have a feeling this was a developer passion-project and maybe they'll work through the kinks in the core loop, but it's nigh-unplayable as is.
