Labyrinth

"Shooting David Bowie, and so much more!"

After having played several RPGs on my trusty Apple II(Bard's Tale II, Ultima IV,) I wondered what something more active would be like, with lots of mazes and maybe a bit more action. Maybe it would be on a NES. The closest NES game I've found to that is Labyrinth, marginally based on the movie starring David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King and Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, whose brother Jareth is holding hostage. It's a gauntlet of thirteen mazes where you are given thirteen game-minutes to run through them all, pick up treasures, kill and avoid enemies, and unlock the door of the cell holding your brother hostage. As you gain more treasure, you can buy firepower or protection or even more time. In one respect it is generic, but the mazes are intricate enough to keep you occupied for a while once you figure how to start. It isolates one flavor of fun and while it doesn't expound on it, the maze graphics and design and enemies vary enough that it feels quite fun.

However one of the main annoyances in the game is just what is going on at the beginning. You seem to be able to run through several mazes quickly but then you start looping around, and it's not so fun any more. This was particularly nasty for English speakers before a ROM hack translated the game. It's not hard to figure out how to stumble around--you just move, and you can fire in the direction you move, with select opening a menu to use special items. You lose time for each enemy that touches you. The first area isn't really a maze, just a square area with a lake and samples of the treasure you'll get later.

But just north is a break area where you meet Worm, who will reappear in each new area and sell you survival items like the globe(return you to the main hedge area,) organ(call your friends) and scroll(give you more time.) You can also find these lying around, but one thing Worm can't sell are hearts. Give them to Ludo, Hoggle or Didymus, Sarah's friends from the movie, and once one of them has over three, giving him a found heart lets him tag along. They're often lame, and they get lost a lot, but they do give double firepower when they work. Pushing B allows them to move around while you stay put, and you can use them to whack a monster hiding around a corner.

Still, you probably won't have any use for this until you figure the game's structure. North of the path is a maze of hedges. The wise man in the center tells you what to do and which other mazes you can visit--there are four exits from the center, and he explains which one leads where. Each maze has a key that teleports you back to the center of the hedge maze once you get it. Once you get the key, and one of the exits is unoccupied, you gain access to a new maze. You also need to find a coin. If you've got the key, the coin kicks you back, too. If you have the key and coin from one maze, it is complete and another maze may take its place. These are always in the same place in each maze, but it is not always so easy.

Because many of the mazes have underground areas as well, and these areas mesh with the undergrounds from other mazes in a sort of puzzle. So you can see over walls in the top down view and not be able to access certain places. In fact, often you have to go underground and back up to enter a walled off place, and the ability to peek at an area you can't get to yet helps make the game entertaining. Although at first you will have several bogus stairs that lead to dead ends that kick you, not right where you were, but to the start of the maze. While this is in touch with the movie's bizarre logic it's not funny at first when the game's already in a different language.

But that's really the only unfair gimmick. Straight mazes for twelve levels, with monsters taking more hits to kill and deducting more time to hit you and a good mix between semi-linear fighting levels and detailed mazes, would make for a decent enough games, but the maze variety is enough to leave you frustrated with each new one that comes. If compared to an RPG, the overland mazes might be 15x15 with line-walls instead of block-walls. The underground mazes are bigger, but one-way. While the first maze(path/building) is relatively straightforward besides having stairs to climb up and down, the hedge uses the concept of deceptive teleports. Often when you teleport, you can see a difference. But not here. You'll be sent to an area across the map with the exact same borders, and the only way you can know you're somewhere else is if you backtrack and notice the scenery has changed. Of course many treasures are guarded by these traps and in fact many people with untranslated ROMs will bash their heads in frustration over being unable to get out of the Wise Man's sanctum in the hedge maze.

For a quick rundown of the obstacles you'll encounter, the third level is a grassland where valuables are encased inside walls of shrubs or even a lake. The only maze is underground, but you have many pitfall stairs that kick you back to the beginning of the level. The next level is a swamp with the over- and undergrounds closely interlocked, and then you have an awkward spiral where one fork at the start leads to a key and another to a coin, but you need to fight through the monsters. Another maze randomly shuffles your controller directions, and another is a 4x4 block of rooms where stairs act as teleports and mappers need to use stairs they can barely see in the top-down view to work out a full map. Another level opens and closes shrub-doors randomly when you step into nooks, and then you have one maze with buzzsaw monsters coming from above, where you need to shimmy sideways.

Of course the final levels intensify the map making skills you need with the prison covering your brother as a 3-level interlocking maze(what's worse, up is not STRAIGHT up on a map--the stairs wind around) and getting hit can be devastating. This makes for a frantic finale the first time through but when I tried re-playing in a more offensive mindset it didn't work. This took away a part of the game I'd hoped would make it last longer. Fortunately the first trip through, where enemies disappear once run off the screen, provides enough strategy.

Labyrinth is a largely intuitive game that will provide you with solid hours of fun, at least for the first time through, and even with cheat-maps. It works better than the movie, in fact. Mazes are something that can't really be captured by a two-hour movie. The struggle has to feel like more than that, but the illusions the movie tried to capture and failed are ingeniously executed with the use of classic computer RPG teleport tricks and the deviously memorable controller jumble area. All this is great fun to solve, and while the pleasure diminishes once you know how, I find the maps I wrote provide me with enough good memories of the times I spent solving it. And that is not so bad. Because if I felt I really wanted to replay every game I remember fondly, I would never find any new game to add to that pile.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/07