There are mazes and there are mazes. When you’ve possible performed ranges in video games which have felt like convoluted labyrinths – a Water Temple in Ocarina of Time, or an Irithyll Dungeon in Darkish Souls III – we’d such as you to consider the final time you sat down and accomplished an precise maze. As in, those you would possibly discover in a puzzle guide. The reply might be ‘not typically’, or some variant on it. 

It’s definitely a distinct segment. Minemaze has determined to personal it, making a compendium of 420 of them, with barely a single mechanic to share between them. There’s no fight, no secret doorways, switches, keycards or warp squares. It’s simply you and a two-dimensional maze: a begin and a end, with winding corridors and dead-ends alongside the best way. The closest Minemaze will get to spritzing the gameplay is by including three gem collectibles into each stage, however they don’t unlock something. In case you’re something like us, you’ll simply depart them by the wayside. 

These 420 ranges are yours for 79p, which might be the bottom £-per-level ratio that we’ve come throughout in an Xbox recreation. However there’s a cause for that, as you might assemble a Minemaze stage with a HB pencil and a few sq. paper. There aren’t even any achievements to unlock, as that is a part of a rising tide of video games on the Xbox Retailer for lower than a £1, all of which haven’t any Reside options in any respect. 

There’s a little bit of variation that’s price noting. There are six worlds right here, and so they characterize barely various things. World one’s ranges are tiny, with barely a number of dead-ends to their title, whereas world six’s ranges will get you reaching for the monocle, as a complete lot of maze is crammed onto a single recreation display. There are solely twenty ranges in world one, presumably as a result of you’ll be able to solely get a lot variation from a maze the scale of a postage stamp. In world six, it escalates as much as 120.

Every world has a distinct color and principal character, however it’s so throwaway that we questioned whether or not to even point out it. They definitely don’t have any influence on the mazes. And that’s it! We’ve completed auditing Minemaze’s contents, and we’re barely out of paragraph 5. 

If we’re being type to Minemaze, there’s a purity to its strategy which may discover it an viewers. By focusing purely on mazes, it permits an off-the-cuff participant to choose it up and full puzzles simply as they’d on paper. And that has its place. 79p isn’t a lot of a threat, both, so a maze-hungry younger’un, for instance, is perhaps completely suited to Minemaze. 

However even then, we’ve got our asterisk. The emphasis on bigger mazes feels a bit skew-whiff. It’s in these screen-spanning monstrosities that Minemaze is at its worst, just because the passages are so small, which makes them laborious to pick on smaller tellies, and they’re a lot tougher to navigate. When your character is small and the corridors solely barely greater, it’s like threading a needle, and it requires a cautious hand. For youthful gamers that’s fairly the ask.  If a larger proportion of the degrees have been on the straightforward aspect, Minemaze might need suited that viewers higher. 

Outdoors of extra informal gamers, Minemaze nonetheless looks like a missed alternative, even at that sub-£1 value level. Private highscores might need positioned households in opposition to one another, making an attempt to outdo instances. The collectibles, too, may have had extra use than simply ratcheting up a complete quantity. Unlocking skins or hats for the little goober might need made progress much less onerous. And did the degrees actually must be gated behind one another? Would it not have harm to permit a participant to play them in any order?

Minemaze units out to do one factor and achieves it, however it’s such a tiny, child step. It’s bought its coronary heart set on being a bumper assortment of mazes, and it does precisely that. Whether or not the world needs one is one other matter, however it makes for a easy sufficient providing: when you’re hankering to finish some mazes that would have been lifted from a children guide, and to fumble by way of them with a pad in your fingers, then permit us to introduce you to Minemaze. 

In case you anticipate extra from a recreation than turning left or proper at junctions, although… effectively, you’ve taken a improper flip at Albuquerque and may in all probability backtrack. Minemaze shouldn’t be the price range title for you.

You should purchase Minemaze from the Xbox Retailer for Xbox One and Xbox Sequence X|S