Mazemaze

MAZEMAZE is a first-person adventure game set in a surreal, fantasy world. The protagonist awakens in a mysterious space after jumping from a building, finding themselves guided through a maze-like corridor filled with various objects and puzzles. Players explore these maps, find key items, and progress through a story that features psychological elements, with the game’s ending changing based on how many hidden dogs are discovered. The gameplay is designed to be intuitive and relaxed, without quest markers or time limits, blending exploration, puzzle-solving, and a narrative that touches on themes of psychological distress.

Mazemaze: Review

A surreal journey through the corridors of the mind, Mazemaze is a brief, bizarre, and deeply personal indie artifact that defies easy categorization. It is a game less concerned with conventional mechanics than with evoking a specific, dreamlike mood.

Introduction

In the vast and ever-expanding universe of indie games, a title can achieve notoriety not through blockbuster budgets or mass appeal, but through the sheer, unadulterated force of its singular vision. Mazemaze, a 2023 release from the enigmatic developer known only as Lu, is one such artifact. It is a game that begins with a suicide and unfolds within a labyrinthine purgatory, a experience that is at once unsettling, contemplative, and oddly mundane. Its legacy is not one of universal acclaim, but of a cultish curiosity—a strange, small puzzle box discovered in the back alleys of Steam. This review posits that Mazemaze is a flawed but fascinating piece of outsider art; a first-person walking simulator that uses its low-fi aesthetics and surreal narrative not as limitations, but as the very tools to explore themes of depression, guidance, and the search for meaning in a nonsensical world.

Development History & Context

To understand Mazemaze is to understand its creator. Lu operates as a prolific one-person studio, having published a bundle of over 20 idiosyncratic games on Steam, including titles like HOLEHOLE, DogDogDog, and HELLLLLCAFEEEEE. This vast portfolio suggests a developer driven by a compulsive need to create and share small, experimental digital experiences rather than to refine a single product to market-driven perfection.

The game was built using the KMY engine, a tool that appears to be Lu’s own creation or a deeply obscure framework, further emphasizing the developer’s outsider status. The technological constraints are self-evident and seemingly intentional. The game’s requirements are minuscule (an Intel Core i3-4340 and 8GB RAM), and it can even run on legacy operating systems like Windows XP, signaling a development philosophy divorced from the graphical arms race of modern AAA gaming. Released on June 17, 2023, into a landscape dominated by massive open worlds and live-service titles, Mazemaze stands as a stark counterpoint: a short, cheap ($0.99), and intensely personal project that values concept and atmosphere over polish and scale.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative of Mazemaze is minimalist yet profoundly heavy. The official description states bluntly: “One day, the protagonist jumps off a building and finds themselves in a mysterious space.” This is our entry point. The player-character has attempted suicide and awakens not in an afterlife of clarity, but in a bewildering maze.

This liminal space is presided over by a guide, described in user reviews as a “voluptuous cow girl.” She is a surreal and potentially off-putting figure, a blend of anthropomorphic fantasy and overt sexuality that immediately establishes the game’s strange tone. Her role is to prompt the player to “proceed through corridors,” but she offers little concrete explanation for the world’s rules or the player’s purpose. The goal is simply to explore, find objects, and progress.

The narrative is not told through cutscenes or expository dialogue, but through environmental vignettes. Player reviews on Backloggd mention encountering “a little vignette of three people,” suggesting the game explores fragmented memories or aspects of the protagonist’s psyche. The most crucial narrative mechanic is the search for dogs. The game explicitly states that “the ending will vary depending on the number of dogs found.” This transforms the canines from mere collectibles into symbolic anchors of hope or connection within the bleakness. Finding them becomes an active choice to engage with this strange world, a small act of seeking light, which the game rewards with narrative closure.

Thematically, Mazemaze is a blunt exploration of psychological distress. The maze is a metaphor for a troubled mind—confusing, repetitive, and inescapable. The cow guide, with her “revealing clothing” and “potential sexual content,” could be interpreted as a manifestation of base desires or a distorted memory of a real person. The blood and surreal horror mentioned in the content warning point to a journey through trauma. It is a game about what comes after a moment of ultimate crisis: not answers, but a confusing, meandering path through the aftermath where meaning must be painstakingly assembled from found fragments.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Mazemaze proudly adheres to the core tenets of the walking simulator genre, stripping interaction down to its bare essentials. The gameplay loop is intentionally simple and relaxed:

• Exploration & Object Finding: The primary verb is “to walk.” The player navigates a first-person perspective through a series of corridor-based maps. Progress is gated by finding specific objects, a mechanic borrowed from hidden object games and classic adventure titles. The puzzles are described as “intuitive and not overly challenging,” designed to facilitate flow rather than create frustration.
• The Canine Key: The only significant gameplay variable is the optional hunt for dogs. This introduces a sliver of player agency, allowing them to choose their level of engagement with the world and directly influencing the narrative payoff.
• User Experience: The UI is undoubtedly minimal. The developer emphasizes a “relaxed gameplay experience” with “no quest markers or time limits.” The player is untethered from modern gaming’s ubiquitous HUD elements, left to simply exist and observe within the space. The control scheme is likely direct and simple, perhaps just movement and interaction.

The game features only 3 Steam Achievements, typically a sign of a very short experience, perhaps achievable within an hour. The inclusion of Remote Play Together is a bizarre and almost humorous feature for such a solitary, introspective game. The gameplay is not Mazemaze’s selling point; it is a functional vehicle designed solely to deliver the player into its unsettling atmosphere.

World-Building, Art & Sound

The aesthetic of Mazemaze is its most defining and divisive characteristic. It is a game of stark contrasts.

• Art Direction: The game utilizes an Anime / Manga inspired art style, but filtered through the low-poly constraints of the KMY engine. The result is a surreal, low-fi look that feels both cheap and intentionally dreamlike. Visuals are likely simple textures and basic 3D models, creating an uncanny valley between childish simplicity and mature themes. The figure of the cow girl, central to the experience, embodies this dissonance—a cartoonish concept rendered with a deliberate, jarring sexuality.
• Setting and Atmosphere: The setting is a “mysterious space” of corridors—a non-place that feels both endless and claustrophobic. The tags players have assigned on Steam are telling: Atmospheric, Surreal, Psychological Horror, Cute. This bizarre cocktail of descriptors is precisely right. The game juggles a looming sense of dread with moments of odd charm (the dogs) and outright bizarre imagery (the cow guide). It builds a world that feels like a dream you’re trying to remember upon waking; the logic is just out of reach.
• Sound Design: While details are scarce, sound would be critical in such a sparse game. The audio likely consists of minimal ambient noise—the echo of footsteps in empty halls, perhaps a sparse, haunting soundtrack—to heighten the feeling of isolation and unease. The sound of finding a dog or an object would serve as a crucial auditory cue in the absence of visual guidance.

Reception & Legacy

Mazemaze exists in a fascinating niche within the critical ecosystem.

• Critical Reception: There are no professional critic reviews on aggregator sites like MobyGames or Metacritic. It is the definition of an under-the-radar title, ignored by the mainstream gaming press. Its reception is purely a phenomenon of the user-review sphere.
• Commercial Reception: On Steam, it has achieved a “Mostly Positive” rating from 54 user reviews, with 79% positive. This is a respectable showing for such a oddball, low-cost project. It found a small but appreciative audience.
• Player Reception: The player reviews that do exist are illuminating. On Backloggd, where it holds a low average rating (2.4/5), the comments capture the divisive nature of the experience. One user calls it a “very standard experimental indie game, that could be described as pretentious,” but praises its “weirdo outsider” charm. Another review is brutally succinct: “I just liked that we got to see the cow’s fat booty.” A third suggests it’s more coherent than Lu’s other work (HOLEHOLE). This spectrum of reactions—from analytical appreciation to base titillation to straightforward confusion—perfectly encapsulates the game’s effect.

Its legacy is not one of direct influence on bigger titles, but as a prime example of the raw, unfiltered creativity that the digital distribution model enables. It represents a strand of game development that is personal, uncompromising, and unconcerned with traditional metrics of quality. It will be remembered not as a classic, but as a curiosity—a strange, brief, and haunting postcard from the edges of what video games can be.

Conclusion

Mazemaze is not a great game in any conventional sense. It is technically rudimentary, narratively opaque, and incredibly short. Its artistic choices, particularly the sexualized cow guide, will be immediate deal-breakers for many. And yet, it is an important game. It is a pure, unvarnished expression of a singular vision, a work that uses the interactive medium to simulate the feeling of wandering through a fractured psyche after a traumatic event. Its value lies in its authenticity and its bravery to be exactly what it is: weird, uncomfortable, and hauntingly memorable. For those with a taste for the obscure and a tolerance for the avant-garde, Mazemaze offers a unique, fifteen-minute journey that is well worth the dollar of admission. It is a definitive verdict on its own terms: a small, flawed, but unforgettable artifact of indie outsider art.