The Maze Gallery

This game occupied all of my play time today. It's really quite large, which is fitting for a game with 34 contributors. Most entries are puzzleless, so it's not so never-ending as Cragne Manor, but it has a similar variety of experiences.

This game feels like a text version of MeowWolf. MeowWolf is an unusual art exhibit that exists in at least two locations (New Mexico and Texas). I visited one with a group of students and happened to live next to the second one that was built. It's a kind of art museum that has a central theme (a family's two-story home, recreated inside of the museum, has been affected by twistings in space and time, leaving clues behind as to the family's fate) with a variety of unusual and bizarre art rooms connected by creative things like tunnels behind refrigerators or cast iron spiral stairways. Each of the art rooms is just (as I understand it) given to a local artist who decorates it in any way they like, from sculptures of meat robots to videos of beaches to a secret club venue for bands to play in. The whole thing is an elaborate maze.

This game has the same feel. You play as someone stuck in The Maze Gallery, which is a bizarre exhibit. You pass through rooms filled with moving inkblots, eggs painted like clowns, vicious fashion designers, tiny paintings etched on rice, and more.

Some of the 'exhibits' are actually encounters spread throughout the game written by single authors, like a series of diary entries or a loving couple that shows up time and time again.

Parts I especially liked include some of the (Spoiler - click to show)presidents, the four humors, the de(void), the clown alley, the talking paintings, the wing of bad art, and Jo's cafe.

The only time I really encountered friction was in a maze-like part where you need to pick the right path from three options. I didn't distinguish that it had a separate ruleset from the rest of the park and couldn't figure out it's mechanism, so my experience was mostly a voice getting more and more frustrated and annoyed at me until I got kicked out.

The consistent css and art style and placard images managed to keep the tone remarkably consistent. A game like this usually feels very distinct in voice, but this one could almost conceivably have been written by one very creative author. The poetry segments and Zizi!!! are perhaps the most distinct.

I was hesitant at first that this game would be impossibly large, but it's in a fairly compact 4 act structure and not all content is visible on first play. I got lost once, but looking at a directory showed me the path forward.

I felt satisfaction at reaching the ending and enjoyed feeling more oriented in life, in a way; like the game presented a wide variety of viewpoints and feelings and gave me more of a sense of where I am mentally in relation to a sea of others. That was even a theme of one of the rooms, where (Spoiler - click to show)a mirror shatters representing you and you can only grab for some of the pieces, holding onto what is most essential and hoping that you grabbed what was important.

There were several other wonderful parts of the maze that I wasn't able to fit into this review (like the Hungry room and the ladder and so on) so thanks to everyone that participated!

A confession: I copied and pasted the above.

So yeah, this is a potluck-game, much like A Death in Hyperspace in this competition, or Cragne Manor. Maze Gallery has differences from both of those – it’s in Ink rather than Twine or Inform, and we’re dealing here not with sci-fi mysteries or Lovecraft pastiche, but a sightseeing trip through a fantastical museum, plus its size and number of contributors put it somewhere in the middle of the relatively-compact ADH and the luxuriant sprawl of CM. But by its very nature it has similarities, too, mostly that its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is that it is made by divers hands: there’s always something new around the next corner, and indeed given the open-endedness of the theme, even knowing the name of the room you’re about to visit likely won’t clue you in on what’s to come, but on the flip side, despite a few recurring characters and the epilogue’s valiant attempt to call back to key sequences, the game can feel somewhat scattered, ending because there’s no more content rather than because the experience has hit a climax.

Of course, that’s how museum visits go – you leave because you get tired or because they kick you out – and Maze Gallery leans into its conceit. Your journey starts in an atrium with an information desk (well, disinformation) offering audio tours (well, headphones plugged into potatoes), with a handy directory helping you to plan your visit (except that a disconcerting percentage of the rooms just have ???s marked, and a disquieting number of passages simply lead off-map without any indication of where they end up). You didn’t exactly choose to come here – maybe it’s all a dream? – so your first consideration is to get out, but while the place is rather odd, it’s never (well, rarely) threatening, so might as well sightsee on the way to the gift shop, right? And while the disinformation desk greeter isn’t much help, chortling at the lie they tell you, the game’s authors at least are at pains to make your visit a pleasant one: there’s a map to help you trace your progress across the game’s four acts, with fast travel available whenever you run into a hub room with one of those directories, a goals list keeping track of the tasks you’ve taken on, and an inventory listing the objects you accumulate as well as the impact this place is having on your sense of self (I escaped minus my name and with my teeth rearranged; could have been worse).

From there it’s all about stumbling from one exhibit to another in search of the exit. The map allows you to orient yourself and make a beeline for freedom if you like, in which case the game would probably run about an hour, but I found myself at least popping my head into every room, which wound up taking closer to three. Partially this was from wanting to be able to review the game while doing justice to the anthology format – I didn’t want to miss any author’s contribution, though from the final credits it seems like many wrote more than one room – but also because it’s hard to see a name like “Wing of Four Humors” or “Dead President’s Exhibit” and not want a peek. And Maze Gallery does a good job of rewarding curiosity, with a wide range of experiences on offer – there are classic art spaces where you examine a few nicely-curated objets, installation pieces you can clamber around and inside, labyrinths that take some thinking to navigate, social areas where you can converse with museum staff or other visitors and learn more about their problems, and some that present gentle puzzles, beyond functional spaces like the cafeteria and the aforementioned gift shop (I never did find a bathroom…)

While each author has put their own stamp on the material – there are a few areas that don’t make a big deal out of the fact that they’re written entirely in rhyming couplets, for example – there’s definitely a consistent aesthetic of whimsy, with the amount of threat undergirding it waxing and waning according to preference. A representative excerpt:

"Only dim refractions filter into the gloom. A sea snail the size of a sheep dog notices your presence and begins a mad scramble away at 12 centimeters a minute. At the end of the tunnel there is an old oak door that shows no sign of being aware that it is, in fact, in the ocean and not inside a stately manor. Chiseled into the stone above it are the words, “Doll Room”."

It’s a canny choice of style, since it’s sufficiently broad to allow for variation while still feeling coherent. Admittedly, this approach to prose does lend itself to the occasional moment of overreach:

"Twinkling fragments of sapphire, a moon of opulent opal, and stars of brilliant pyrite swirl betwixt the lamp’s now-copper borders…. As if to beckon the ephemeral, a melodic voice of silken song seeps from around the turning of the hall."

Similarly, some of what’s presented is a little lame, like “a sculpture of David, but it’s Bernini’s, not Michelangelo’s, and he’s wearing a party hat”. But some of the images here are striking:

"Emerging from the ombré walls are dull bronze casts of outstretched hands and legs, a car-sized head half-submerged in the wall with mouth open and gasping for air. A colossal shiny torso covers one entire wall. In the light, you notice deep wrinkles on the sculptures, so detailed that you can see scatterings of freckles and pronounced pores. One of the hands even has a diamond ring.

"And how can you not love the cute mice dressed up in red jackets and busbies (there’s a picture)?"

…this review risks devolving into a guided tour, which would undermine the fun of properly wandering around the place, so let me just say those examples stand in for a great deal more, most of which I enjoyed a medium to high amount. For all that, I did find myself a bit weary in the last hour or so of the game. Partially this is due to the fact that I found navigating through the gallery somewhat disorienting – the lack of compass directions or an ability to translate the rectilinear visuals presented on the map with the options you’re presented with in a particular room, which sometimes didn’t align with my mental pictures, meant I did more wandering around than I think was intended, even accounting for the out-and-out mazes (it’s funny that I had this experience just as the intermittent forum discussion about how different players relate to different navigation systems – so I’m definitely aware that this choice that didn’t work so well for me might actually be a plus for others).

Beyond that, while the act breaks and map do a good job of letting the player know how much game is left, there’s not much of an organic sense of progression, unlike say Cragne Manor where you gain momentum in the back half of the game as you see how the puzzle chains are starting to resolve and getting a new item can lead to an “aha” that provides a key to earlier barriers that had been stymying you. There are some things that pay off in the Maze Gallery, items you collect in early rooms that get used to good effect later, but the surrealistic nature of the Gallery meant that I couldn’t really predict what would or wouldn’t be useful later (and in fact I finished the game with a lot of unused items as souvenirs of the visit).

I also think the game could use a few more showstopper rooms, like the slaughterhouse bathroom in Cragne Manor – there are some rooms that are intentionally low-key, but none that feel like they’re taking a big big swing and providing some contrast for the medium-scale locations (admittedly, the Clown Alley comes close, but it’s sequenced a little late in the path, and only has a few moments of interactivity, so it didn’t wind up energizing me as much as I’d hoped).

With that said, there’s real pleasure to be had in the charms the game does have to offer, especially the characters: while the nature of the locations was that most of them were places to experience and then move past, there were some stories that stuck with me, like the young blob looking for some kind of self-definition whose anxious parents wanted to help without overstepping, or the bat and the pig who metafictionally quizzed me about narratively significant events while sharing gossip about inter-departmental politics at the Gallery. It’s a lovely potpourri, and my complaints are likely primarily just a symptom of playing Maze Gallery as part of the IFComp firehouse rather than at the more leisurely pace that the material deserves – those comparisons with Cragne Manor above should probably be taken with a grain of salt since my feelings about the game would be vastly different if I’d tried to speed-run my way through its bulk. And after all, nobody likes to be frog-marched through a museum!