From the screenshots, it’s easy to think that Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective is a Where’s Wally\Waldo?-type of game, like Hidden Folks. That’s what I thought at first too. But while wonderfully detailed screens, full of charming characters and fun interactions, are indeed present, the game plays quite differently. This is, as the name would suggest, a maze game, where you must figure out how to get from one point to the next. And it’s quite fun, even though it has some frustrating elements to it.
This game is, from what I could gather, a mostly accurate adaptation of the first book in the series of Pierre the Maze Detective adventures. Books that I’ve not encountered before, but after playing this game, I’m genuinely interested in getting them. The story is relatively simplistic, with a classic masked villain, and while it exists solely to get Pierre into more and more wild and exciting adventures, there are lots of fun charismatic characters to encounter along the way. In this regard, it’s kinda like Professor Layton titles, except the story doesn’t even attempt to take itself too seriously and focuses on just being fun and evoking the feeling of adventure.
How does it play, though? Well, the levels are gigantic detailed screens and the architecture, the position of some props and characters on the screen, make up for the “walls” of the “maze” that you must navigate. You rarely get depth of movement on a stretches of the “maze”, instead just being able to go in a straight line. Kinda reminiscent of something like killer7, or if Hitman/Lara Croft GO games didn’t have dots to move between. On practice, this is far from ideal, as any controls you decide to use feel slightly awkward. Sometimes a path isn’t really a path, sometimes you need to move in an unintuitive way, sometimes the interaction prompts don’t appear until you’re in some very specific spot. It’s never extremely frustrating, but at the same time does feel like having some sort of guidelines or the already mentioned dots and moving automatically between those could’ve felt better. But then again, exploring some less obvious paths and finding secrets would’ve been less fun this way, I suppose.
It’s also a bit of a shame, that the game doesn’t really have any of those Hidden Folks-like interactions – you can’t just click anywhere on screen and get a reaction and there are no elements tied to that either. Everything is done by proximity, which is perfectly acceptable for a game emulating tracing mazes with a pencil, but I can only wonder how much additional fun depth could’ve been added to the game otherwise. Oh and it’s also worth noting that at the time of me playing the game, I’ve encountered a few annoying bugs. But with the developers so quickly pushing patches, by the time you read this, they might all be fixed.
Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective is a very simple, but also a very charming title that I enjoyed thoroughly. It has beautiful adventure inspiring soundtrack, wonderful visuals, fun simple gameplay, lots of optional exploration and it doesn’t last too long to start getting boring. Definitely check it out if you get the chance. And I’m definitely going to see if I can find the books in the meantime.