MAZEBOUND Review (PC)

A wrong turn in a traditional maize maze wouldn’t cost you much more than a few extra seconds of aimlessly gallivanting around and a minor spell of inconvenience. An error in MAZEBOUND, however, can cost you everything. A simple error in your ways or a miscalculation can often bring dire results—a flock of headless humanoids, a ravenous creature, and a maze that constantly shifts to trap you in the depths of its interwoven world of towering walls. To add, you have a cart to lug around with you—a tediously small container that has the capacity of a flimsy plastic bag with just enough space to hold the bare necessities. But, more on that later.

Suffice it to say, MAZEBOUND isn’t the type of game to point you in the right direction or dangle a beacon over the central chamber. Rather, it’s a game that, like the cult movie franchise Maze Runner, opts to saddle you with an ever-changing labyrinth, a host of deadly creatures, and a reminder that you have little choice but to push on and embrace whatever looms in the dark. It doesn’t tell you how to advance your journey, and it certainly doesn’t force a habit of littering your route with breadcrumbs to follow. Simply, it tells you to survive, and it demands that you keep moving at all costs.

If MAZEBOUND was just about traversing a maze and knuckling in on an exit point, then it wouldn’t be all that difficult to crack. Yet, there’s a layer here that makes even the simplest feat feel like a burdensome mess. Take the inventory management, for example. In most cases, you would have the option to clip your tools and your weapons onto a lofty utility belt to use as and when necessary. Here, though, you have a cart to drag around with you—an inconvenient piece of baggage that, due to its limited space, requires you to carefully consider what to stow away at all times.

The game itself can be played with up to seven friends, which means, if you lack the courage to venture out into the maze on your own, you can wrangle a team and tackle the challenges as an ironclad unit. And I’ll be honest, MAZEBOUND is a game that tends to favor the traditional co-op experience over the solo mode. See, with the labyrinth itself housing a wide variety of curveballs and resource-related constraints, the game does often require you to band together to overcome its limitations. Don’t get me wrong, you can still play the game as a lone wolf, but with the complexion of the issues and the scale of the problem at hand, it can be awfully difficult to unpack, especially if you’re a newcomer to the genre and without the knowledge of a labyrinth-themed world.

I wouldn’t label MAZEBOUND as an easy game. Or at least, not in the traditional sense of the word. Frankly, it doesn’t make a habit of telling you how to make ends meet, nor does it sow small fragments of vital information about the world into the soil so that you might “accidentally” stumble across them. Rather, it gives you a maze with shifting architectural patterns, a scarce supply of materials and consumables—sticks, berries, and scraps of wood, for example—and a frail objective to pursue. But other than that, the game, at least for the most part, chooses to leave you in the dark, with as little as a few branches to rub together for warmth, and a pocket of berries to satisfy your insatiable appetite.

I must admit that, while I did understand the point of the game during the initial play-through, I must have spent a lot of time aimlessly looking for something that would usher me closer to the next phase. And I suppose, for the most part, the journey wasn’t so much about learning about the world through fickle pieces of parchment, but figuring out where to go, and, more importantly, how to stay afloat in a world that, frankly, just didn’t want me. To that end, I’d say I wasted a lot of time to the unnecessary act of digging for information that, honestly, didn’t really exist.

Once I finally grasped the fact that MAZEBOUND wasn’t so much of a story-driven Maze Runner-like game, but a test for the most agile of survivors, I soon started to roll with the punches. The combat was a little messy, and the burden of being lumbered by an irritating cart was a thorn in the backside that, to be honest, I really could’ve done without. Yet, there were brief spells of satisfaction that tied in with the overall process of trying to survive the night. It was certainly frustrating at times I’ll admit, yet I often found that there was always something new to unlock, be it a new path in the labyrinth, a fresh creature to evade, or a better crafting recipe to keep me alive.

From an artistic standpoint, MAZEBOUND never truly amazed me. It had its moments, sure, but for the most part, it was entirely reliant on liminal corridors and dainty textures—a palette that, true to the nature of horror games, was best suited beneath an ominous backdrop with little to no light. Like a maze, then — but with fewer hedges and more towering clusters of dreary blocks and infectious particles of dainty green.

Verdict

MAZEBOUND might not capture a thrilling Maze Runner-like experience with its lack of storytelling capabilities and liminal visual effects, though it does make for a surprisingly gripping survival game, mainly due to its airtight multiplayer functionalities and its scarce resource management system, its eerie ambiance and its oddly terrifying creature designs. Could it make for a greater experience in its chosen field? Absolutely. However, I can spot a captivating survival game when I see one, and MAZEBOUND manages to find its place in the labyrinth as a worthy contender. It might not be perfect, but it is a lot of fun to carve through, and that’s what I’m willing to take away from it.

If tediously unforgiving survival games are to your liking, then you might find what you’re looking for in MAZEBOUND. A brilliant storyline with fascinating character arcs, not so much. But a compelling survival game that has all of the potential to keep you foraging for a light in the dark for an hour or two, yes. Take from that what you will, folks.