"Hey, this winged guy wasn't sitting next to me a minute ago..."

In junior high a friend of mine got his hands on this computer game called Labyrinth of Time. I'm not sure why now; maybe his parents thought it was an edutainment game (they wanted him to do well in school and not have a life). Anyway, he let me borrow it for a while and I sort of got into it, and he eventually just let me keep it. So began my odyssey into the Labyrinth of Time.

You're an office worker who leads a boring, gray life. On the way home from work one evening, though, the subway suddenly stops and a winged fellow by the name of Daedalus appears and restores color to your world with an exciting challenge. He's the ghost of the legendary architect, enslaved by the ghost of King Minos of Crete to create a new labyrinth which bridges time and space and will allow Minos to invade all times and places. Daedalus asks you to find a way to stop the mad plot before it's too late, and so you venture into his new labyrinth, armed only with a quarter and a map that fills itself in as you explore.

As you would expect you visit numerous places and time periods while exploring the labyrinth. You can be in a modern fun house one minute but suddenly in a futuristic museum or computerized library orbiting the planet the next. You can be on a modern city street only to find yourself in a maze that's not quite any time or place the next, then suddenly on the steps of a Mayan ziggurat.

The game play is extremely standard adventure game stuff; you use buttons on the bottom of the screen to move forward, turn around, open or close things and use items from your inventory. The graphics and sound are unusually strong with this game, however, with really nice pics just about everywhere you go, and an interesting soundtrack of background tunes. Not all of them are good, but most are great to listen to as you explore a place outside the bounds of time and space. The thing is that they loop, however, and generally you're sometimes forced to sit through a crummy song in order to get to the next good one. Turning off your speakers is kinda detrimental because there's no other way to tell when one tune stops and another begins.

I found Labyrinth of Time fun and engrossing once I got the hang of the interface, even though I dislike mazes in most games. More hardcore gamers might find it too dull or slow for them, though. I think those who appreciate a good graphic adventure will find something to appreciate here, especially the ones who like solving mazes.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/21/04