Quick Review: The Maze Escaper

I’m not a-maze-d.

Created by Pritesh Singh and released on August 3rd, 2020, The Maze Escaper is, well… exactly what it says on the tin. You escape mazes. Why? How did you end in there? What’s the purpose of the mazes? Why are there robots in the mazes? Why are you also a robot in the maze? Why do you have time powers? There’s little to no context whatsoever.

Oh hey Mister Roboto, how's it goin-
Crap, he's running at me now!

Move with WASD, jump with the Spacebar, look around and aim with the mouse and shoot with a Left-click. The only other ability you have involves slowing down time by pressing the T key, which slows everything down, yourself included; however it gives you time to aim better to kill the other robots. You have Life Points, a number going down starting at 100, and an Energy gauge; shooting and slowing time costs Energy, but collecting silver spheres refills it by several thousands. To beat a level and open its portal, you have to fill the gauge up to a certain value of Energy by grabbing spheres, then find the way towards the exit of the maze, all while avoiding or killing enemy robots. For those, I’ve seen only two types: Red ones, which shoot lasers from a distance, and brown ones, which come close and attack with punches.

Oh great, there's more of those.

Little to no music, yet someone still pulled
the old disco balls out of the 70s.

Music? Pretty much nonexistent. Gameplay? As far as I can tell, it never varies. There’s a second mode focused on survival around a giant maze, but the 30 levels from the base game are, I assume, pretty much the same throughout. The game’s environments also never change; always the same walls, often transparent. Since there’s no way to differentiate any maze walls from each other, your only way of figuring out where to go next is to use the map in the upper-right corner of the screen, which  was shrunk down poorly for the screen so walls often don't appear on it. Sure, the time of day changes, and the sunsets and sunrises lead to a different feel/ambiance in some levels, but it’s still the same damn grey walls. Over and over.

Finally the exit! ...Damn it, I don't have enough
energy to open it. Back into the maze I go!
...*sigh*

Easy to reach the podium when there are
so few competitors.

Really, the lack of substance and the repetitiveness of it all is what sinks this game down. At the very least, the graphics are very good, but it means very little when there isn’t good gameplay to back it up. And it seems most people had the same thought, as the game has leaderboards for each level, so players can compare with others on how many points they ended each level on; Level 1 has seven entries, Level 2 is down to three. Says it all. There’s just nothing to really hook someone into playing further.

For full disclaimer, I actually won this game in a Twitch streamer’s raffle, so I didn’t pay for it. I really don’t recommend you pay for this game, not at its original price tag of 19.99$ USD, not even when its price is cut down by 90%, to 1.99$. This feels like a game made by someone testing the tools to make something basic, but functional. This is Pritesh Singh’s only game for now, as well, so perhaps they are planning to make new games that will better catch one’s attention. I encourage them to keep going.