Mazeworld – Farfetch Software - 1994 - First time playing?: Yes!

This is just how the game starts, I didn't misplace the screenshot of the title screen or anything, there isn't any title screen to Mazeworld unless you count a wall of text explaining that the game is shareware before you're thrown in the deep end. There's a pair of flying googly eyes, there’s a disembodied cat face chasing them around in circles, there's some snails in a corner, figure the rest out yourself. This immediately made it clear to me that Mazeworld was going to be… interesting.

I'm genuinely at a loss of how to go about reviewing this game in my usual fashion. I don't think anything I could say in a single paragraph could really convey what the hell Mazeworld is. It's kind of a first-person puzzle adventure game in the guise of a rudimentary first-person shooter, but instead of shooting things with a gun you shoot energy balls made up of the metaphysical concepts of creation, destruction, affirmation and negation that influence the world around you and I feel like I'm losing my mind already. This game is compellingly surreal and weird and fascinating, but also, quite frankly, absolutely miserable to play. Finicky, unforgiving and maddeningly obtuse. Oh, there's also no sound effects or music. That’s possibly a compatibility issue for all I know however.

The central mechanic of Mazeworld is those previously mentioned energy balls, which serve both as FPS weapons and also like commands in an adventure game. Destructive energy is used to kill enemies and destroy certain objects, or even have certain objects take on destructive attributes, such as making lava lamps stun enemies that attempt to walk through them. Creative energy is used for turning on objects in the world and also for initiating new conversations with NPCs. Affirmative and negative energy is used to answer yes or no questions in conversation, but can also have effects on objects in the world as well, such as using negative energy to close something. It’s an interesting idea, maybe not fully explored in this game which is very short and more relies on difficulty and obtuseness for its length rather than like, having more than five levels. They’re also a pain to aim, as the projectiles fired are slow and it seems to be a coin flip as to if the projectile shot will travel in a straight line or instead zigzag across space. I couldn’t figure out anyway to consistently make one specific kind of shot or the other happen, as far as I can tell it’s random. Firing any of these projectiles drains your energy metre on the right side of the screen. Your energy regenerates automatically over time, but getting enough peace and quiet to be able to have it fill back up is rare.

How do you play Mazeworld? Well, the entire game is controlled by the mouse, which means movement, shooting, selecting what projectile you want to fire and talking to NPCs are all reliant on your mouse. Also, a reminder that old Macintosh mice only have a single mouse button, a limitation that Mazeworld is designed around. So, moving with the mouse is similar to the way movement with the mouse works in Wolfenstein 3D, however in Mazeworld the movement is far less smooth and precise. You can’t strafe either, so your movement is limited to back and forward and turning left and right, tank controls style. Clicking will fire whatever projectile type you have equipped, but clicking and dragging is how you switch the equipped projectile. So, if you want to equip the destructive projectile, you click and drag your mouse diagonally up-right. Creative, Affirmative and Negative projectiles are mapped to up-left, down-left and down-right respectively. This control scheme is, well, it’s awful. In the middle of combat, when you’re trying to move out of the way of enemy attacks and also shoot back at them, you’re likely to accidentally click and drag and unequip your single damaging projectile, that being destructive energy naturally. But then also, if you click and drag in the opposite direction of your currently selected projectile just a little bit as opposed to moving it far enough to select the opposite projectile, then you’ll unarm yourself and can use the mouse button to instead talk to NPCs. This is needless to say far more than a single button control scheme is suited for.

All of this doesn’t really accurately convey what Mazeworld actually is like to play. Yes, the control issues are a problem, but after hours upon hours of playing this game I did manage to adapt to them as best as I could. The thing is, if you had Wolfenstein controls that were smooth and precise, I actually don’t think that Mazeworld would be much easier. To hopefully paint a better picture, let me walk you through how the experience of playing Mazeworld goes. Spoilers ahead if that bothers you, but honestly I do not recommend going to the trouble of playing this game in the first place.

So, you start out and the googly eyes are being attacked by the Eshire Cat. Immediately, you’re in danger here because the Eshire Cat is fast and hard to hit and can kill you instantly by swallowing you. Throw some destructive energy at it until it flees, and you’re introduced to George, the invisible man that those googly eyes belong to. If George doesn’t join you, start over immediately because you need him. George is your partner throughout all of this, offering advice and serving as a translator when you talk to other NPCs. I’ve had one instance where I scared off the Eshire Cat but George still didn’t talk to me, so that’s something that can happen. I don’t know if the Eshire Cat eats him if you take too long or if he doesn’t show up if you use the wrong energy type or what.

Now that you’ve got George, you can go and talk to the local snails. Mazeworld, as it turns out, has a lot of lore, and the snails are here to dump it all on you all at once. Okay, so the gist of it is that there’s two antagonists at odds with each other. There’s Mordaine, who wants nothing but power and to seize control over all creatures in the Mazeworld, and there’s The Dark King, who instead desires destruction of the Mazeworld and throwing all into darkness. The Dark King’s attack put a halt on Mordaine’s plans of conquest, but now, after an event known as ‘The Sundering of the Ways’ severed the remains of the Mazeworld from the Dark King’s realm, Mordaine has resumed his attack on the Mazeworld, destroying the outer walls of the world to let in the creatures of darkness to wreak havoc. The snails refused to submit to Mordaine, and as such were attacked by Mordaine’s forces, with these three snails being the only survivors. Now the snails’ home is overtaken by amoeboids and they want to know if it’s safe to enter the northern areas to access the energy fountain. Say no, because if you say yes they will march headfirst into amoeboid vore and the game becomes unwinnable.

What you instead need to do is go into the northern areas yourself to clear out a way for the snails. Even getting in the northern area requires some puzzle solving as the way in is blocked by lava lamps that repel anything that tries to walk past them. You'll need to use affirmative energy to turn off the repelling effect (not negative energy like I thought would make more sense for turning something off, but okay). The amoeboids are invulnerable to your attacks and damage you quickly. Eventually I found some red lava lamps that explode when you shoot them with destructive energy, so I lured an amoeboid to the red lava lamps and killed it with splash damage. There weren't enough lava lamps to take out all of the amoeboids blocking the way to the fountain, so there was still one left, but then I discovered that the amoeboids were incapable of crossing past lava lamps you light with creative energy, so I blocked it behind the lava lamps and then used affirmative energy on the snails to let them know it's safe to cross. The snails then made their way to the energy fountain which made them glow in the dark, after which they ate their way through the room filled with amoeboids that was blocking my entry to the next level.

As I figured this all out and finally made it to the next level, I felt not satisfaction, but dread. Because what I just played was obtuse, confusing, filled with beginner's traps that lead to dead ends that make the game unwinnable if you do the wrong thing, finicky thanks to being so heavily based around slowly and carefully luring amoeboids into traps, and also extremely easy to die in thanks to the Eshire Cat being a one-hit kill and the amoeboids being able to very quickly tear through your health from max, all the while you're struggling to adapt to the clumsy control scheme. The dread I felt was from the understanding that this is just the tip of the iceberg and every level is going to be like this, but what I played was also fascinating and unique and I knew I couldn't back out now. I had to see where this goes, if the first level alone has me fight a bootleg Cheshire Cat, make friends with a pair of googly eyes called George, have snails inform me that they have been on the receiving end of a genocidal war campaign and then help them get access to a magic fountain by blowing up amoeboids with exploding lava lamps so that the snails can start glowing in the dark and gain the power to consume the remaining all-consuming amoeboids. Mazeworld is awful to play, but the experience is one of a kind, for better or for worse, and even though I did not have fun, even now I still kind of respect it for just, well, being Mazeworld.

Unfortunately, the game has also more or less peaked with this first stage. The second level decides to one-up the amoeboid herding in being the most finicky puzzle in the game. You are in a Pac-Man maze filled with shades, robed creatures of darkness who extinguish light around them and deal damage to you just by being in your presence. With a bit more exploring, after lighting some lava lamps you'll discover the oracle, a giant floating orb that's here to help you in this level. The exit to the next level is blocked by shades, but you can lure them away from the exit by using the light projectiles that the oracle shoots, which irritate the shades and cause them to follow where the projectiles are being shot from to snuff the light source out. The oracle however is nowhere near the exit of the level and is shooting its projectiles into a wall. What you have to do is find, pick up and position smaller orbs littered across the maze. The orbs have a gravitational pull that influences the direction the oracle’s light projectiles travel in. So, you need to make a trail of these orbs leading from the oracle to the exit of the level, in order to guide the projectiles to the shades guarding the exit. This is already pretty finicky to try and do in first-person as opposed to from a top-down view, but the controls make it much worse. You pick up orbs by walking into them, after which you balance them on your head. While carrying the orb, if you either move too fast or bump into a wall or object, you will then drop the orb. There is no way to manually pick up or drop the orb, you have to carefully and slowly carry each orb individually across this massive maze while moving slowly and constantly having to pick the orb back up every time you lightly brush against a wall, and then carefully positioning them by moving fast enough to drop the orb, after which you likely will have moved the orb out of position by trying to drop it. It's painful.

So, level 3. You enter a cave in a wall that takes you to a dark maze where you enter a red door frame and then bam, the Dark King is right there, you just stumbled into his domain. He's mildly irritated by your presence but doesn't seem to register you as a threat and just leaves you be and says the way forward is open. Who isn't content to leave you be is the Eshire Cat, who is back for revenge. You can't fight the cat this time, you have to run. Making it through the confusing dark maze is a pain at the best of times, and the pressure of having a cat tailing behind you trying to devour you the entire way certainly doesn’t help. But eventually I stumble out of the cave only to discover that outside the cave’s exit is an ambush of shades in numbers too big for me to be able to just run past them without dying. Turns out they chased after you when you went through the portal to level 3. There’s no way out of here, but if I go back in then I get eaten by the cat, so am I at a dead end? I explore everywhere in the dark maze and the room with the dark king to try and find an exit, try every kind of energy on every enemy and NPC present, but nothing works. I wonder if there’s a way I can distract the shades in level 2 for longer to delay their ambush, but that ends up being a dead end too. I’m out of ideas, so I end up wandering back to level 1 to see if I missed anything there. Mazeworld isn’t entirely linear, and you can return to previous levels by simply walking back through the teleporter you came out of.

In the starting area of the game where you first meet George, you can find four blue pyramids at each corner of the room. Shooting these with affirmative energy turns them from blue to white, and once they’re all lit up they open up a door in the middle of the room. This lets you access, uh, let’s call it level 4 even though this could be the second level you play. There’s a guard here called Midnight Blue that won’t let you pass, but by using creative energy on him you can learn that he is only doing this because of Mordaine suppressing his free will via usage of a Control Sphere located deep in the maze of this level. The maze here is massive and filled with enemies. There’s rats, and there’s seahorses and there’s lovecraftian tentacle monsters, and they all want you dead. They do all die in a single hit from your destructive energy, but they’re also hard to hit as a result of the controls and how slow and inaccurate the energy projectiles are, which results in the seahorses being the worst to deal with since they have the smallest hitbox. Worse than that however is that the enemies infinitely respawn, and they seem to be able to respawn anywhere. I’ve had instances of enemies spawning behind me in a dead end for instance. You’re never safe anywhere, which is a problem when you can only recharge your energy by waiting, which these enemies are not keen on allowing.

I still don’t have much of an idea of the layout of the maze, as it’s hard to take in landmarks when every wall is the same blue wall and you’re also under attack 24/7, but George has got your back here as he’ll let you know if he thinks you’re going the right way or not, in addition to giving you descriptions of what location you’re currently in. I actually really like George a lot, he’s a genuinely charming character. Part of that is absolutely the fact that I just find his design funny, but given how hostile and confusing Mazeworld is, it’s nice to not be alone in it all and have a companion that, while not entirely clued into everything going on, still knows more of the world than you do and offers another perspective to help guide you and give you an idea of what to try next. In general, the NPCs of Mazeworld are a highlight for me. They’re weird and funny and help to flesh out the surreal world just a little more. In spite of the goofiness, they also hammer home just what a bad state the Mazeworld is in right now. Based on their dialogue, the world wasn’t always this desolate and empty, but the attacks of Mordaine and the dark king have left it in this hostile empty void state. I get the sense that this was more of a whimsical Alice in Wonderland type world prior to the attacks that turned it more into something akin to Mortis Ghost’s OFF.

Eventually George guided me to a long corridor that led to a room with two angry starfishes, one red and one green. The green one follows a predetermined path while the red one lunges at you and instakills you if you try to cross the room. Eventually I figured out that if you follow the green starfish as closely as possible (but not too closely or else it’ll instakill you too) then that seems to keep the red starfish off of you. And with that, we’re at the control sphere, aaaand I can’t do anything to it. I try every energy type and they either do nothing or send an instakill invincible seahorse ghost after me that I can not escape. But, uh, the exit to the next level is open behind it, so maybe I can just ignore the sphere for now and carry on?

Oh, I guess Lips is here now.

Say hi to Lips, everyone.

So, this is another maze filled with infinitely spawning enemies to fight. Unlike the last one however, this one is a teleporter maze, adding even more confusion to the whole thing. The only enemies here are eyeballs and jellyfishes. These enemies are harmless on their own, but if an eye has line-of-sight, then every jellyfish in the nearby vicinity will rush you and melee attack you to death. That might make it sound easier than the last maze since the enemies here can’t fight you on their own, but it ends up actually being harder just because of the sheer overwhelming numbers of enemies here. Not only are they dangerous, but there can be entire hordes of them blocking passage through corridors all the while you’re struggling to keep your energy metre filled enough to actually be able to defend yourself. I can not overstate how miserable it is dealing with infinitely respawning enemies while you're lost in a complex maze and have no idea where the hell to go.

What follows is a scene with a talking giant brain, and I think nothing better exemplifies what the hell Mazeworld is in a single screenshot than a giant brain monologuing to you about freezing entropy itself, all the while Lips is just staring at you blankly the entire time.

If you let the brain keep monologuing, it will spawn an infinite amount of enemies to kill you. If you shoot it once, then it will beg for mercy and offer to help you. Do not shoot it more than once or else, yep, unwinnable yet again. The brain will then teleport you to Destiny’s Gate.

This is it, the finale. Activating the gate will restore the Mazeworld, but it will also bring out Mordaine at his full power for the final showdown. Destiny’s Gate connects to and opens up everything, so not just the light that the Mazeworld lost but also to the realm of the Dark King. After telling me that I have failed to undo the evils of the past, Mordaine sends me into the darkness of Destiny’s Gate out of my control and…

Damn it.

Yeah, I should have figured as much, given that I never took care of the Dark King or the Control Sphere. But now I’m at a loss, every avenue I’ve tried seems to lead to a dead end. I can’t do anything with the Control Sphere and I see no escape from the Dark King, and I’m getting desperate. So, yep, it’s time for me to admit defeat and look for a guide. I figured this would be a futile effort, but much to my surprise I found another blog by the name of Almost a Famine that has played through the game on Apple IIGS. Yes, Mazeworld was originally a 1992 Apple IIGS game by the name of Mazer II, and Mazeworld is simply a remake of that game for Macintosh. Honestly, even if it doesn’t make the game any more fun to play, the game is fairly impressive for Apple IIGS hardware. Anyway, Almost a Famine has a review and full playthrough notes of Mazer II, and thanks to them I was finally able to figure out what I was missing: You need to use negative energy on the gate to the dark realm (aka the cave in the wall) to close it after fleeing the Eshire Cat and while you’re being ambushed by the shades, which causes the shades to vanish.

I hate this puzzle because I wanted to say this is nonsense but the more I think about it, it kind of makes sense and makes me feel like an idiot for not thinking of trying myself. See, prior to the Eshire Cat’s attack, there was a torrent of green particles flowing through the dark maze being cast by the Dark King, which I now realise is affirmative energy. That’s what is keeping the gate to the dark realm open. If you try to close the gate before encountering the Dark King and getting chased by the cat, then it will simply open back up due to the Dark King’s affirmative energy reopening it. The affirmative energy torrent stops once you talk to the Dark King, so now it can be closed, and since the shades are creatures of darkness, sealing off the source of darkness thus removes the shades from the Mazeworld. I was misdirected by the Dark King saying “the way is open”, which I thought meant that there was a new opening somewhere I needed to escape through, and also if I thought anything was the gate to the dark realm it would be the big red doorframe as opposed to the crack in the wall, but of course the snails at the start of the game did say that Mordaine got access to the dark realm by destroying a wall in the Mazeworld, so everything is in place for you to figure this out, as long as you put two and two together about the green pixel torrent being affirmative energy. I think the more annoying part of this to me is that due to the panic of being sandwiched between encroaching shades and encroaching Eshire Cat, you really do not have much time to think about puzzle solutions before you’re instantly killed. I suppose that’s standard if you’ve played enough Sierra adventure games to be used to that kind of thing.

Back to Destiny’s Gate, time to finish this.

Oh, I died again.

Oh right, the control sphere.Use affirmative energy on it after sealing off the dark realm, which now allows you to select what creature you summon through the control sphere as opposed to it always being the invincible seahorse. Cycle through the creatures until Midnight Blue shows up and then destroy the sphere. This makes Midnight Blue, uh, telefrag it, I think? And now everything’s in place.

Once again, Mordaine shows up, but now the Dark King comes out of Destiny’s Gate as well. The showdown between them could destroy the remnants of the Mazeworld entirely. The solution is, uh, enter Mordaine’s body and then shoot the Dark King until he dies? I’m not sure I really get this solution. With that, we’ve done it George! The evils of Mazeworld are defeated! Now, to see our destiny and enter the gate!

... I really should have expected it would end like this.

Well, that’s Mazeworld. I don’t recommend playing it at all, but this isn’t a Weekend Warrior type situation where the game is bad and the gameplay is boring and it fails at absolutely everything it tries. Mazeworld is experimental, innovative, endearing and creative enough that I can hardly call it boring, and its world is honestly charming and something I’m glad I got to experience. I’d still say it’s the second worst game I’ve reviewed for this site, but in spite of that I’m going to look back far more fondly on Mazeworld than I will look back on Weekend Warrior. And hey, there are sequels. Maybe they will refine the ideas present here!

I hope.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 27th June 2025