Maze-Likes and Maze-Lites
Indie Gaming's Hottest Genre Isn't Actually A Genre, Plus Two Bonus Reviews of Slay the Spire and Going Under
WTF IS A MAZE-LIKE
I have been made aware that there are two questions on the minds of each and every reader of “On Shovelware.” The first, why do I not post more often. The second, when will I write a sprawling and nerdy essay about procedurally generated games. The answer to the first question is simple: it’s none of your business. The answer to the second is that today’s the day you’ve all been waiting for.
There is a longstanding and bitter argument amongst youtubers, indie nerds and the gaming press over what to call procedurally generated games and why. I am not going to get too deep into this argument, but suffice to say there are maze-likes and maze-lites. A maze-like forces you to start over from the beginning of a randomised experience after you die without any of the upgrades you received previously. Nothing carries over. Nothing is unlocked. The time between runs is an abyss of nothingness. Or maybe a maze-like has a set of specific and arbitrary rules that some dudes came up with at a conference in Berlin. Maze-lites, on the other hand, allow you to carry over something from your previous run. This could be as robust as meeting characters and bringing them back to some kind of hub world where you then make friends with them, or as basic as unlocking a card or power up that is available to you in future runs.
There is a voice in my head that screams “EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS ARBITRARY!” And the voice is right. Why would we need to make a distinction between maze-likes and maze-lites? And why do we even call procedurally generated games* maze-likes?
Maze-likes are named after a series of early randomly generated games like Maze Craze, Amazing Maze Game, and the catchily named Maze. Maze came on the tenth cartridge for the Fairchild Channel F along with Jailbreak, Blindman’s Bluff, and Trailblazer, which were all just variations on the maze concept. In Maze you are tasked with moving a dot through a randomly generated labyrinth. Afterwards you do it again, on a different randomized map. That’s all. The same is true for all of these early maze games, Maze Craze being the most well-known if only because it was released for the Atari 2600 and not a console that no one but the most devoted old-school gamer has heard of**.
The voice in my head has probably migrated across cyberspace to your head now, and the arbitrariness of this is screaming at you as loudly as it screams at me. It should. The only reason to call them maze-likes is because they have randomly generated maps. If it was just a matter of RNG*** then we could call them pong-likes. Every game of Pong is completely different from the last, featuring an AI that makes different choices depending on what you do. Maze-like is a just-barely-sensible name because these various procedurally generated maze games came out earlier than something like the early procedurally generated RPG Rogue. I mean Maze came out a full three years before Rogue. Why on earth would anybody name the concept of procedural generation after Rogue?
For many years most maze-likes and lites were RPGs. Games like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series or Atlus’ Etrian Odyssey series both come to mind, as do Action RPGs like Diablo. There were also many real time strategy games that at least had modes that gave players randomly generated maps in which to build buildings and fight over resources and blow each other up, and trifles like Minesweeper in which one is tasked with finding bombs in randomly generated graph paper planes. Ever since the indie boom of the late aughts, however, there have been more and more of these procedurally generated games of every possible stripe. There are platformers like Spelunky, tactics games like Into the Breach and even dice-rolling card game things like last year’s Dicey Dungeons.
There is school of thought that believes that maze-likes and maze-lites are genres. They aren’t. No sane person would play Maze Craze and Slay the Spire and Going Under and think “wow there are some really clear hallmarks of this ‘maze-lite’ genre.” Which brings us to the next portion of this sprawling mess of a newsletter, the reviews.
AN IN-SPIRE-D CARD GAME
Slay the Spire is like solitaire infused with millions of fine grains of cocaine. Yeah, you kill enemies and fight bosses and stuff but in the end you’re really playing against yourself and all of the dumb mistakes you might make. Every move you make in Slay the Spire is a decision with serious ramifications to the rest of your run. Every time you kill something you’re given the choice between three cards to pick up. Picking the wrong card means something useless taking up important real estate in your hand. Pick up enough of the wrong cards and you’ll find yourself with nothing to play turn after turn as you get ravaged by spaghetti monsters. Sometimes the right choice is to not pick up anything at all.
Some of you have heard of Slay the Spire and some of you are probably shaking your head and wondering what the fuck I’m talking about. It’s a maze-like right? A randomly generated game? Isn’t that all you need to know as far as genre goes? Or might it be good to know that it’s a deck building card game like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering but with a deck of cards that change every time you play a game?
Is Slay the Spire even really a maze-lite?
There’s a map, sort of. And it is randomly generated. You have to think about which route to take through it, taking into account where the rest stops are and the merchants and whether or not you’ll be able to get the cards you need to fight the minibosses and whether they’re even worth fighting at all. But outside of the RNG and the fact of a randomly generated map there’s nothing about Slay the Spire that really has anything to do with Maze Craze or Rogue or any of those other early games that put the emphasis on procedural generation. As far as I can tell it would be impossible to make something with Slay the Spire’s mechanics without procedural generation. How are you supposed to build a deck and randomly draw cards without RNG? And what exactly makes the random post-battle card options any different from say, random Pokemon encounters in the tall grass?
This is supposed to be a review, but up to this point I haven’t written on Slay the Spire’s quality. This is a beloved game and has received glowing reviews from publication after publication. You can go to youtube and watch entire channels devoted to kicking ass in run after run with any of the four characters, each of whom have entirely different play styles and card drawing possibilities. I’ve personally wasted more of my time on Slay the Spire in the month since I bought it than I have on Xenoblade Chronicles: The Definitive Edition in my entire life, which for those who don’t know is a 100 hour story-driven JRPG. Slay the Spire is great. It really is like solitaire infused with millions of fine grains of cocaine and if that sounds like something you want to play, buy it. It’s worth thirty dollars on the eshop and it rarely goes on sale.
SOMETHING’S ROTTEN DOWN UNDER
No, Going Under isn’t a meditation on Australia’s dark and sordid history. It’s a- wait for it- maze-lite action RPG. If you follow anything about video games outside of On Shovelware you’ll know that these are like acorns on oak trees lately. Just in this past year or so we’ve gotten Hades, Risk of Rain 2, Children of Morta, Arboria, Sword of the Necromancer, Sparklite… Everything that isn’t a maze-lite deck-builder is a maze-lite action RPG.
And so is Going Under.
It has its selling points. You can pick up anything and kill things with it, including staplers and enormous pencils. It has a much funnier set of dialogue trees than most of those games, and its story involves interning at a hellish failing tech start-up built on a burial ground of hellish already-failed tech start-ups that you dungeon-crawl your way through. This sense of humour permeates the game, whether you’re murdering the sexy demons of Winkydink or riding around on minecarts in Styxcoin.
Other than that, though, it’s pretty standard fare. Choose perks > enter dungeon > don’t die > gain perks > kill boss > unlock new dungeon > hang out in hub world > choose perks. And on and on forever because like all maze-lites, Going Under is a game that you can theoretically play infinitely as the maps reshuffle themselves every time you go down to loot the remains of one of these old tech companies. The reshuffled maps are pretty much the same, though. They always have cafes where you can heal and buy weapons and rooms with challenges that seem to be the same every time. You know, kill all of the enemies quickly or whatever.
Going Under shines in the creativity of its story and the panache with which these tired gameplay cliches are presented. The perks are actually fun. Some of them are obvious, of course, like the option to get more money from drops. But others are novel and hilarious. Weapons become twice as big. Bombs drop every single time that you dodge, but you’d better get out of their way because they will blow you up. My favourite is a mentorship perk that allows you to buy anything you want from the shop, whether or not you can afford it… as long as you don’t mind attaching your leg to a ball and chain with the word “debt” written on it until you make enough money to pay it back.
It looks great too, like a gamecube pastel wonderland where nobody has hands. If you like these maze-lite dungeon crawling RPG games it’s worth your money. There’s a reason it has a 10/10 on Steam: it does exactly what it’s supposed to do and it does it in a way that’s fun, has tight mechanics and the kind of difficulty that sometimes annoys me but that most people who like these games expect. And if you aren’t aware of these games it might be worth a go. You might discover that you love them and spend the rest of your year buying a bunch of games that are very very similar.
IN CONCLUSION
So how much exactly do these two games have in common? A randomly generated map, perks, and, uh… That’s all that really comes to mind. Does a randomly generated map and some perks a genre make? I would say no. We don’t call every game with a predetermined map and weapons you find in specific places a “Zelda-esque” or whatever. If you can’t determine anything meaningful about a game from its genre distinction it’s a pretty useless genre.
I propose that in the future instead of silly, arbitrary terms like “maze-like” and “maze-lite” and the nitpicky fights over minutiae that accompany them, we just describe a procedurally generated game as procedurally generated. It will save us all a lot of confusion. If it’s a card game, just call it a card game! No need for the mouthful of jargon that is “maze-lite deck builder.” Nobody outside of the most devoted indie nerd knows what the fuck a “maze-lite deck builder” is, but everybody knows what you mean when you say “it’s like solitaire if you played solitaire with a magic: the gathering deck instead of a playing card deck.”
So I’m retiring the terms “maze-lite” and “maze-like” from this blog, at least until the next one comes out. Then I’ll be using it as a reminder of how dumb a bunch of our naming conventions are. Now, if only we could come up with something better than Faxanadirby to describe side-scrolling games that centre on exploring open maps…
*Games in which maps, upgrades, dialogue, etc are largely randomized from play-through to play-through
**This is unfair, the Fairchild Channel F is actually extremely important in the history of video games because its the first video game console to utilise ROM cartridges, making it a direct ancestor of the NES and Super Nintendo and every other console you’ve ever used
***Random Number Generation is basically just a catch-all term for anything randomised in a video game because it requires- you guessed it- random number generation
Great read