Amaze: Double

Amaze: Double is a top-down puzzle game where players navigate a small ball through a series of increasingly complex mazes. The objective is to guide the ball to a portal located at the end of each labyrinth while collecting gems along the way to unlock the exit. With 50 levels featuring teleporters, colorful art, and a calm soundtrack, the game challenges players’ thinking and attentiveness as they progress through ever-larger and more difficult labyrinths using either WASD or arrow keys for control.

Amaze: Double: A Deeply Buried Relic in the Maze of Modern Gaming

Introduction

In the vast, labyrinthine catalog of indie games released on digital storefronts, countless titles are lost to the ether, mere footnotes in the annals of interactive entertainment. Among these forgotten paths lies Amaze: Double, a 2017 puzzle game from the enigmatic Blender Games. It is a title that exists not as a landmark of innovation or a critical darling, but as a stark, almost archeological example of a specific genre’s most basic form, produced at a scale and with an ambition that is both humble and telling of its era. This review posits that Amaze: Double is less a game to be critically evaluated in a traditional sense and more a digital artifact—a perfectly preserved specimen of the ultra-budget, high-volume indie output that flooded platforms like Steam in the late 2010s. Its historical value lies not in what it achieved, but in what it represents: the absolute baseline of commercial game development.

Development History & Context

To understand Amaze: Double, one must first understand the ecosystem that birthed it. By 2017, the digital distribution revolution was in full swing. Steam, once a curated platform, had dramatically opened its gates, leading to an unprecedented deluge of new games. This created a fertile ground for micro-studios and solo developers, but also for a phenomenon often termed “asset flip” games—low-effort titles built quickly with pre-made assets to turn a minimal profit.

Blender Games fits squarely into this landscape. The studio’s output was prodigious; Amaze: Double was released on November 2, 2017, merely one entry in a sprawling series that included Amaze: DT and Amaze: Zero earlier that same year, and Amaze: Untouchable and Amaze: Christmas slated for the next. This rapid-fire release schedule suggests a development philosophy centered on volume and efficiency over polish and innovation. The technological constraints were self-imposed: using a simple, likely pre-built or easily replicable game engine template to create a product with minimal overhead. The gaming landscape at the time was one of extreme contrast, where monumental, narrative-rich epics coexisted with thousands of tiny, hyper-specialized experiences like this one, designed to be discovered by a handful of players for the price of a candy bar.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

Amaze: Double is a game devoid of narrative in any conventional sense. There is no plot, no characters, no dialogue, and no textual lore to uncover. The “story” is the one constructed by the player’s own experience: the solitary journey of a small ball through a series of increasingly complex labyrinths.

Thematically, however, one can extract a pure and unadulterated essence of struggle and order. The game presents a world of absolute clarity—walls are barriers, paths are solutions, gems are objectives, and the portal is salvation. There are no moral ambiguities, no emotional twists, and no symbolic subtext. The theme is the mechanical challenge itself. The ball is not a character with motivations; it is an extension of the player’s will. Its “quest” is one of pure logic and spatial reasoning, a thematic throughline that connects it to the earliest puzzle games and abstract arcade cabinets. It is a game about the triumph of cognition over confusion, a theme it explores with stark, unflinching simplicity.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The core gameplay loop of Amaze: Double is brutally simple and immediately familiar. The player controls a ball using the WASD or arrow keys from a fixed top-down perspective. The objective for each of the 50 levels is twofold: navigate the maze to collect all the “beautiful gems” scattered throughout, which then unlocks the portal, and then guide the ball to that portal to exit.

• Core Loop: Find gems → unlock exit → reach exit → repeat in a larger maze.
• Progression: The game’s promise is that “levels became even greater, they became even more difficult and more interesting.” Progression is linear and purely based on level completion. There is no character progression, no skill tree, no inventory—only the player’s own growing familiarity with the game’s logic.
• Innovation or Flaw: The one mechanic hinted at that moves beyond pure navigation is the “Teleport,” though the source material provides no detail on its implementation. Is it a player-controlled mechanic? A level-based obstacle? This ambiguity is symptomatic of the game’s design philosophy. The systems are not so much flawed as they are skeletal. The UI is presumably minimal, the controls direct and functional. The inclusion of “Achievements” suggests a layer of meta-progression designed to tap into platform-specific engagement hooks, a common feature in games of this type. The game is not trying to reinvent the wheel; it is providing a very specific, well-worn type of wheel to a niche audience that seeks exactly that.

World-Building, Art & Sound

The world of Amaze: Double is a world of abstract geometry. The setting is the maze itself, devoid of context or backstory. The atmosphere is engineered to be “Calm,” as stated in the official description, a design choice intended to facilitate concentration rather than evoke excitement or tension.

• Visual Direction: Described with the phrase “Colorful Art,” the visuals appear to be functional and clean. The top-down, fixed/flip-screen perspective suggests a classic, almost archaic presentation reminiscent of early 8-bit or 16-bit maze games. The art likely uses simple shapes and bright, distinct colors to differentiate between the ball, maze walls, gems, and the portal. This is not art meant to awe or inspire, but to clearly communicate the game state. It is utilitarian.
• Sound Design: The “Calm Soundtrack” is the other half of the atmospheric equation. One can imagine gentle, ambient, possibly synthetic tones—music designed to fade into the background and avoid distracting from the cognitive task at hand. There are likely minimal sound effects: a soft chime for collecting a gem, a perhaps more resonant sound for entering the portal. The soundscape, like the visuals, serves the mechanics without aspiring to be anything more.

Reception & Legacy

The reception of Amaze: Double is perhaps its most telling characteristic. As of its entry on MobyGames, it has a Moby Score of “n/a,” collected by only 7 players, and boasts zero critic or user reviews. It was not a game that resonated with a wide audience or the critical press. Its commercial performance can be inferred; priced at $0.55 on Steam, it was positioned as an impulse buy, hoping to find an audience among players specifically searching for a no-frills maze puzzle experience.

Its legacy, therefore, is not one of direct influence on subsequent games. You will not find mechanics from Amaze: Double echoed in major releases. Instead, its legacy is historiographic. It serves as a perfect case study for a certain tier of game development in the late 2010s. It represents the end of the line for a particular type of game—the direct digital descendant of shareware maze games from decades prior, now repackaged for the modern digital marketplace. It is a testament to the fact that the market had space for such hyper-specific, micro-budget titles, but also that they could exist and vanish without leaving a ripple. Its influence is its existence as data point in the vast graph of indie game production.

Conclusion

Amaze: Double is not a great game, nor is it a bad one. It is a complete game, a functional game, and a game that delivers exactly what its store page promises: 50 levels of maze navigation with gems and a calm soundtrack. To judge it against the pillars of the medium would be to miss the point entirely. Its place in video game history is in the background, one of the countless bricks in the foundation of the digital storefront era. It is an artifact of a specific time, a specific business model, and a specific approach to game creation. For the historian, it is a fascinating, well-preserved snapshot. For the player seeking a deep, engaging, or innovative experience, it is a cul-de-sac in the vast maze of gaming options. Its final verdict is that it is profoundly average, and in its profound averageness, it becomes an exceptionally interesting relic.