Maumau and the Labyrinth

Sadly has heavy hardware/software problems. Does not wanna work.

I liked this game, I like dungeon crawlers and this is a decent one, the "adjacent mechanics" and it's related art it good if you get the free patch. My actual issue is that the technical quality of the writing is abhorrent. Most people into this "genre" give such things a pass, but bad writting does hit this game hard: the plot gets hard to follow, the comedy never gets a chance to land, no "character voice" during interactions (I'm NOT talking about voice acting here), the special scenes are stiff AF, and the game explanations are hard to understand. Hard to know if there was something good in the original to get lost in translation, but it's clear it never got a chance. I eventually dropped the game because trying to read everything was giving me a headache.

To get the obvious main negative points out of the way first: the art is kinda low resolution, the fullscreen/window sizing is very finnicky, the scenes don't have great pacing, and the english translation should get some help. But... if you like the 2.5D dungeon crawler gameplay and the artstyle anyways, it does hold up enough to keep coming back. Exploration and map design is decent, and once you get past the intro arc the story & map options open up quite a bit. (and yes I'm using the patch)

Borked on new Proton versions under Linux. Proton 7 and older work, but all character and enemy textures are missing. There is no proper resolution scaling, so the game looks blurry full-screen. UI is extremely ugly and obtrusive, with a giant interface for moving your character, despite keyboard controls allowing you to move without using this interface; it seems like it was designed for touch screen rather than PC. No controller support. Hard to gather whether I'd like the game if I didn't have these issue.

an interesting dungeon crawler

maze