The Stack

I’ve made it to the third maze. Despite a considerable time spent exploring, I have yet to find a single room — not even the save room, with the result that I have to restart from the save room in level 2 every time I run out of health. (In case I have not yet made it clear: This is not a friendly game.) Let’s look at the patterns established in the first two mazes and assume they hold through for the rest.

Each maze starts and ends with a fight against a monster on a bridge. Coupled with the fact that you can’t save between mazes, this means you wind up doing two bridge fights in a row. The maze-start monster and the maze-end monster are distinct, but there seems to be only one maze-start monster (a troll with a club) and one maze-end monster (a squat, grinning, vaguely lizardish demon with a flail), just palette-swapped and possibly with increasing health. The maze-start monster can’t actually defeat you, because the price of defeat is always being ejected from the room with slightly less health, and before you’ve entered the maze, there’s nothing to eject you to. All it can do is block your way indefinitely.

Every maze I’ve seen has the following rooms: the save room, where you can save the game; the shop, where you can exchange the gold you find scattered through the maze for items needed to solve puzzles; the exit with its aforementioned bridge fight; and seven challenges, for a total of ten rooms per maze, matching the Steam blurb’s claim of “five hellish levels of treacherous tunnels with more than 50 raucous rooms of gameplay”. Three of the challenges yield items you’ll need to exit the maze. The other four are just obstacles, blocking the path to sections of the maze. One of the obstacle rooms seems to always be a special arena fight that you need an item from the store to win. All challenges disappear after completion, turning into just more corridor.

There are occasional locked doors in the maze, not leading to rooms, just blocking the way until you collect a key lying in a dead end somewhere. One locked door shortly before the exit is special: the key is provided by a sort of toll taker who reaches a very long arm from a nearby barred window, demanding all the gold in the maze (less the price of all the items in the shop). In this way, the game motivates you to explore the maze thoroughly, as coins could be anywhere. Then it trolls you by including long, winding, trap-filled sections that don’t hold anything worthwhile at all.