Maze For You

Hey!
Do you want a lighthearted adventure that includes a maze? This is a Maze for You!

"Maze for you" is a lighthearted adventure about Ron, a man who loves Clover, a farmer's daughter that is ill. Uh to tell the truth the whole land is suffering after a powerful monsters came there.
Ron can save his loved one by finding some ingredients, the problem is that these items are all inside a mysterious labyrinth. And yeah, he has to enter the place, hoping to be able to come back with the five needed items!

Maze for you (or Maze4U) is a short game (about 20 minutes excluding combat encounters that are motly optional) set on a single map (yes!) and fully voice acted! Yay! This was the part I liked most, since the labyrinth is strangely populated by many weird characters, and as many other games taught us, helping them will help us advancing the quest for the five ingredients.
I admit that I was expecting a bigger and more difficult maze, instead it's quite simple and straightforward. I did not mind this. The ream problem is the rate of encounters, really excessive (only a couple of combat encounters are mandatory, and you do not need to level up to beat them)!


Yes, yes, I am happy! Now what?

But do not worry: Ron is quite capable to escape enemies (you do not need to level up at all, ironically I got one level just when I defeated the final boss!) and he's also pretty strong, but since you have a limited number of resources (not that I needed more, I just used one healing item! But I was a coward, I know (hey it felt like wasting time since there was no way to get something useful from these victories)!

If the combat encounters will not provide anything useful, at least the various visitors of the labyrinth will help us reaching our goal... IF we help them first of course! These are really minor fetch quests, what is brilliant are the various quirky characters and how they are voiced: there is a silly viking, an absent minded wizard and his nephew, a scientist and some others. I especially liked the apprentice (nature mage) for the voice and the wandering hooded man (cloak guy) for his backstory (he is also the only other party member that will help and keep company to Ron for a short while).

Graphically the game uses both rtp and some really well done original assets. I liked a lot the custom charsets and facesets, they merged well with the rest and contribuited to give a distinct identity to this game.


Taste the snow, sucka!

Verdict
I finished this game in less than thirty minutes getting two endings out of three (the refusal ending and the good ending). I had fun, despite expecting a bigger and longer game (due to the "labyrinth" premise), but I do not mind this, even if I more characters and questa, or more time with the existing characters and longer quests would have made the game even more enjoyable, I think.
The only flaw of this game, as I mentioned earlier, is the extremely high encounter rating, that I think it was really excessive. You know what? Even with absolutely zero combat encounters aside from the mandatory ones this would be still a very enjoyable adventure. Yeah. Luckily you can run away because all these combat encounters and I am pretty sure that every other player will do that. The gameplay is quite classic, well done but nothing new or original.

What else? The story is nice, simple but the dialogues are well written and the voiced dialogues really add to the various characters of the game (despite interacting to them for a really short time).

The final rating for this cool short game is 3.5/5. More than tour average rpgmaker game for sure! It is a lighthearted adventure with many bad encounters!
Now, go into the labyrinth and see how it is. Because this is a Maze for You!