Game Details
- Publisher: Finish Line Games
- Developer: Finish Line Games
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Adventure
- Pros: Interesting world to explore; a few solid puzzles
- Cons: It ain’t funny; too simple and straightforward
- MSRP: $20
Maize is a mysterious game set in a cornfield. It starts off
by briefly showing some creepy walking corn stalks and only proceeds to get
weirder from there. Eventually you discover the farm and cornfield full of
walking talking corn stalks are all on top of a secret government experimental
facility buiried deep underground. You quickly discover the entrance to the
underground lab, find the keys to get inside, and can start to learn the
secrets behind the strange place you’ve stumbled upon.
At first, Maize has a sort of creepy vibe to it. The music
when you’re exploring the corn maze sounds like a horror game and the brief
glimpses you get of scary anthropomorphic corn walking around make it hard to
judge what kind of experience you’re getting yourself into. It turns out,
though, that Maize isn’t scary at all. In fact, it wants to be a comedy game.
And fails miserably at it.
The problem with the humor in Maize is that every single
joke and gag revolves around someone calling you or someone else either stupid,
idiot, or moron. Over and over and over and over and over again. Somebody call
Guinness because there’s a new record for using stupid, idiot, and moron in a
videogame. From the Russian teddy bear constantly ranting about “stupid
Americans” to the dumb corn with British accents, Maize’s humor is just tiresome.
There are some bright spots to the humor, though, such as finding post-it-notes
all over the facility from two scientists who hate each other and a lot of the
item descriptions can be sort of funny. But it all comes back around to hearing
stupid, moron, and idiot constantly and it wears thin extremely quickly.
The gameplay underneath the stupid, idiotic, moronic humor
isn’t anything particularly special, either, unfortunately. It is a
first-person walking simulator-style game where you just sort of wander around
and solve puzzles with no enemies or danger. It is extremely simple and linear,
though, in that interactive objects and important items are highlighted and you
can’t move forward unless you have picked up all of the key items in an area.
This is kind of nice, honestly, since it means you won’t have to backtrack and
you don’t spend much time being lost as long as you’re very thorough in picking
up every item you see, but it also means the game is very simple. The puzzles
are also pretty simple in the classic adventure game style where each item can
only be used for one specific thing and then it’s gone from your inventory.
Puzzles are almost always pretty obvious about what you need to solve them. And
even when they aren’t obvious, you just use the tried and true “try every item
until something works” method and away you go.
Despite being very simple and linear, Maize does manage to
be strangely compelling. Some of the puzzles can be interesting and exploring
the underground base is quite fun. The way the level design loops around and
connects back to previously explored areas (kind of like the first Dark Souls)
was really surprising and cool. The story takes a unique twist or two along the
way as well, which keeps you playing. I would have to say I enjoyed my time
overall with Maize, but it does have loads of issues.
The presentation in Maize is kind of hard to pin down. Parts
of it look really ugly, such as the corn creatures themselves and most of the
above ground level. Other parts, such as the underground lab, look better and
occasionally the lighting will hit everything just right and actually look
pretty good. Performance is fine overall, but there can be some long load
times. The sound is notable for some fairly good ambient music, but the voice
acting and bad jokes kind of spoil it.
All in all, Maize is pretty disappointing. It is too
simple and straightforward and easy as far as the gameplay goes, but I still
kind of enjoyed it even knowing it is fairly mediocre compared to other
adventure / walking sims of the last few years. The real problem is that its
sense of humor absolutely fails and sours the experience and turns an OK game
into something that is just grating and a lot harder to recommend. Skip it.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
