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Labyrinthine Tasting Notes:

A friend and I purchased this game a while back thinking it would be a fun, spooky experience for us. We played for a little bit, got a bit bored of the story mode and stopped playing. About a year later, the friend decided to challenge himself and get every achievement for every game in his Steam library. That included this game.
After approximately 60 hours of gameplay, enlisting the help of another friend, and copious amounts of shouting and alcohol we have decided to write a review of our experience with Labyrinthine. I have never written a Steam review before, but I was so motivated by how frustrating an experience we had while playing this game that I got those friends together and collected our thoughts. Below are some of the main and reoccurring frustrations we ran into during our playtime.
• Bad procedural generation
o Multiple maps generate too many dead-end branches and monsters don’t move enough to provide the proper ability to exit. Having to camp out at the entrance or in safe areas for extended periods of time runs rampant in this game, leading to lots of dull moments.
o Monster numbers don’t scale with map size vs. difficulty. Extreme Giant maps are actually incredibly boring compared to Extreme medium maps. There is no reason to do larger than medium-sized maps. Item generation does not scale nor do the objectives. Engagement feels very low on larger maps.
o Too many maps start off with long, boring single paths. Lots of dead ends at the beginning of a map that leads to having to sit and wait at the entrance for extended periods of time. The time waiting can vary depending on what monsters are spawned and whether they move out from the single path or not.
o Swamp maps are too large. Does not fit the size description at all. Medium-sized swamps felt like very large or even giant-sized maps.
o Multi-level maps feel half-baked. They do not consider the second level when calculating map size, and there are usually barely any branching paths. It is super easy to be surrounded/blocked off from progressing by a single monster that camps a single spot, which leads to more waiting as previously mentioned.
o Difficulty does not match up. Some maps generate much harder than others. From our experience, some very small and normal difficulty maps have been near impossible while other very large and extreme difficulty maps have been cake walks.
• Enemy Design
o Black Pig – Having this enemy immediately charge makes it near impossible to dodge. Especially on a map with tight corridors such as the sewers.
o Marionette – Is incredibly frustrating to have the marionette drop from the ceiling repeatedly and create situations where we found ourselves back-tracking endlessly.
o Bride enemies should NOT be on two-level maps. Being able to go through walls in all dimensions creates impossible to escape scenarios, especially when climbing or descending stairs.
• Item Consumption
o We feel as though we are not fairly compensated for collecting duplicate cosmetics. Receiving 5 tickets for a cosmetic (which are quite rare to begin with) feels like a slap in the face. A stamp seems to be a more appropriate reward for finding such duplicates. One change that could also be made is varying the reward for a duplicate depending on the cosmetic rarity.
• Grind Feels Tedious
o Bad puzzle design; specifically guess-and-check puzzle. No skill or ability to improve. Just used to waste time in the games. The puzzle made sense in the story mode, however it felt as though it was lazily cut and pasted to the case files. It is also incredibly difficult to do with certain enemies camping (i.e. slow-moving Brides).
• Summary of Feelings
o The game feels buggy and still has an early-access feel. Obvious problems seem missed but would have been noticed with more playtesting. We felt as though this game was more of a chore to engage with than anything else.
o The idea of playing the game was scary enough that we had a player have a nightmare about physically playing the game. Do not confuse this with the game being actually scary. It is only scary the first time you play it, and even then, not by much.

• Here are two examples of bad gameplay we experienced written during the time we were playing. We would have more, but it was towards the end of our Labyrinthine journey when we started recording these.
o Carnival map 11/24/23: Trapped in safe room with no ability to even play the game because two Smileys camped outside the entire time. Can’t outrun Smiley and would not leave, so effectively soft-locked unless we wanted to take a death.
o General choke points (i.e. 12/01/23) Witch kept camping the only path to exit.