Smiley face tries to escape a maze
With a clever little title like Amaze, you might have high hopes for the game which has been graced with such a name, but unfortunately it seems as if the designers used up all their imagination a bit too soon. We're thus left with a playable but less than spectacular game which does pretty much what you would expect from the punning title. In the typical fashion of eighties/nineties games development what we have here is a low rent maze game which stars a bizarrely happy face (shades of Pacman perhaps?) who for reasons unexplained and inexplicable, must make its way through a giant and perplexing (guess what!) maze that is filled to the brim with ever re-spawning enemies. Your sole task is to find the exit for the smiley face while avoiding or taking out the bad guys and avoiding the various traps which also stand between you and freedom (although what a smiley face would do with freedom when it seems to be enjoying itself anyway is another mystery that remains unsolved). The game is all very crude stuff, reminiscent of the likes of rogue-likes such as Rogue or early adventures like the Kroz series, with everything represented by basic ASCII characters and which means the game has little in the way of true personality. The gameplay however is reasonably compelling, with the same kind of appeal as the aforementioned titles so if you enjoy that sort of thing, you should find this of interest. There's a lack of depth but a great deal of challenge so if you are seeking something to test your reflexes, this might be what you're looking for.
