Maze Burrow Reviews

https://youtu.be/zQcSBzxi5Gs?si=87rBDSk8jb8_8A2U

A nice Sokoban-like game with a decent number of levels and enough variety of features to keep things interesting.

Maze Burrow is a fun game that's simple in nature but puts plenty of its own twists on its puzzles as the game progresses. Each world consists of ten levels of pushing and pulling blocks with shapes on them to their respective slots, while navigating through tight corridors, as well as obstacles such as switches that move blocks in or out of your way. The end-of-world stages are particularly fun, pitting you directly against the mole antagonists, who attack by periodically throwing projectiles forward, and are defeated by pushing around pipe blocks to redirect their shots back at them. As someone that doesn't have a ton of experience with the sokoban genre, Maze Burrow is very approachable; I've played about four worlds in currently and the difficulty curve has been pretty smooth, several puzzles that stumped me for a bit until discovering a key insight or two. The levels are played in mostly a linear fashion, with occasional simple branching paths; as far as I'm aware isn't any content unlocked by meeting particular move counts or time requirements, but the game tracks your best scores and I imagine there's plenty of replayability for avid players to get their move counts optimized. The game's core movement, menus, and the "undo" / "reset" functions all feel responsive and snappy; I used a SNES-like controller and found the default controls intuitive, but the options allow for rebinding as you see fit, as well as switching between multiple modes for pulling blocks. The game's graphics are simplistic but clear to read, and the music is catchy, without ever being repetitive or distracting.

A good, retro-style puzzle game with some nice twists on the formula to make it worth playing. Block puzzles have been done before, but Maze Burrow has a nice selection of gimmicks and additions to make them feel new. Although the difficulty level is quite high later on, I rarely felt frustrated or incapable of solving the puzzle before me; the difficulty is mostly in figuring out a strategy for each level, and the addition of an undo button makes it far less tedious to get back to where you were. The soundtrack helps as well; it's very upbeat and never feels repetitive, but it's also background-y enough to let you focus on the puzzles. Unfortunately, the game is quite short; I took only about 6 hours to clear the campaign, though there are a few brutal bonus levels that open up once you defeat the final boss. Still, it's definitely worth a play if you're into puzzle games.

I havent played much on steam but I have spent several hours playing this game on the developers other platform; TwitchPlaysPaperMario (you can play this game using twitch chat inputs!). The game has a wholesome retro charm with a perfect learning curve to its simplistic but eventually maddeningly complex gameplay. A real hidden gem! The dev is quick to respond to any requests. One of the best indie efforts you'll come across on steam.

I love this game! Played it on the twitchplaypapermario channel and it was a great experience. Now that I have the real game it's fun to try to solve the rooms as fast as possible with the least amount of moves. Highly recommend!

I've always been a big fan of sokoban (倉庫番, sōko-ban, "warehouse keeper") games. Maze Burrow absolutely captures the purity and playability of these games, all while twisting your brain inside out. The progression is fairly slick and I never found myself feeling held up by the difficulty curve. The puzzles themselves are satisfying, with action puzzler elements mixed in that fit nicely with the pace of the game. Reminds me of Little Magic (SNES) or Power Soukoban (SNES). Rewind and reset feature is slick (you'll be using it alot haha). The number of moves you make and the time each puzzle takes you is recorded - which makes for some odd moments like: 'How the heck did I solve that in 8 moves last time?' The menus, transitions etc. are really fast and let me rip through a bunch of puzzles in one sitting instead of waiting around. Used a keyboard first playthrough and using a PS3 (USB) controller this time around.

First off I am very happy to see this game come out. Sliding block puzzle games aren't anything new but I feel this game adds enough to make it unique and worth the time to play it. When something like paired blocks or teleporters are introduced it's clear there's a lot of potential for difficult puzzles. This game takes advantage of it's own gimmicks well, it doesn't feel like any of them overstayed it's welcome or wasn't used enough. I didn't know what to expect with any level really. Around world 3 is where the puzzles started to get decently tough in my opinion. Most of the time my experience was just sitting back and thinking about exactly what problem I had to get past. And during those moments I found the game to be most enjoyable, especially when I ran into another problem with a creative solution right after. Then there's a few levels where there's so much going on you can't really think about it, rather you just have to play around until you get somewhere. Those levels aren't the best, they show up every now and then. But the majority of levels are the clever type, the level design is really great and the strong point of the game. Every world has a boss level where part of the objective changes and sometimes the focus is on doing things quickly. They feel like proper ends to each world, and the difficulty curve is done most well with these levels. The game isn't super long, I'd say it'll take anywhere between 5-12 hours, maybe 15 if going for 100%. The whole time I had fun with it, mostly because I never felt frustrated. The music didn't get tiring, and I didn't feel like resetting in any level was a huge setback. It's a classic style puzzle game, and it does that well. If you like that then you'll have fun with this game.