Not all video games have to make sense in order to be fun. Such is the case with the 2016 first-person adventure game, developed and published by Finish Line Games, 'Maize'. A synopsis of the game is as follows:

After your character wakes up in a corn maze, you walk down the path in front of you and come across a door. It can only be unlocked by a hand, a key fob, and a CD. You character then follows several paths, collecting seemingly random items, plus the ones you actually need, that end up helping your character at some point. Once you unlock the door, you hear a noise behind you and turn to look. Then a voice says 'Hey!' and when you turn around again, your character is faced with a lot of sentient corn looming over them. The corn-guy in the middle says that you have to answer a riddle before you can go beyond the door. He starts to tell one, but then another corn-guy interrupts and soon they are all talking and eventually just let you through without having to answer anything. Things only get weirder from there. Your character figures out that there is an abandoned government laboratory underneath the farm and one of the corn-guys is planning on world domination. And you are basically the only one that can stop him and save the other sentient corn.

My criteria for a worthwhile interesting game is composed of these elements: Unique Title, Easy-On-The-Eyes Graphics, Memorable Music, Good Plot/Story, Decent Characters, and a Conclusive Ending (the last one doesn't apply if the game intends to end on a cliffhanger). I will discuss 'Maize' using my criteria.

Title

What drew me to this game first was the title design and the word itself. The design is rather exaggerated and intense, and would normally imply that the game is of the horror genre. That's what I thought at first when I saw it. But after a certain point early on in the game, you know that it is anything but horrifying. The word itself is interesting, because though it's spelled m-a-i-z-e (another word for corn), it also refers to the term 'maze'. While occasionally dealing with talking corn, your character walks through a few different mazes to find things. I thought this was clever, and it always amuses me whenever a word can have two separate meanings.

Graphics

While not overly detailed, the artists did an extremely good job with filling up background space. If there's not a bunch of corn stalks, there's shelves, piles of discarded trash and paper, several different types of machinery, and many more. Can't have an interesting game without an interesting background. Plus you can tell that this is a modern game as there is no pixelated content. My eyes cannot stand pixelated games (i.e. Minecraft) and if this game had been pixelated, I wouldn't have even looked at it. On top of that, all the characters are well-designed and believable, from the sentient corn to the living scarecrows (yes, there are living scarecrows).

Music

When the characters aren't talking, there's music playing. Because walking around in silence would be boring. The music is quiet and at the same time ominous, making you think that something could happen at any time. It fits and yet at the same time is out of place in the game. It works because your character is in an abandoned laboratory where mutated plants with unknown agendas live, and doesn't work because of how non-serious all the characters are. There are really only two serious characters in the whole game, and one of them isn't even corn! Other than the music that follows you, a specific song was made for this game, called 'Top Secret'. There are two different versions of it; a normal version which is similar to a rock song, and a power ballad version. Apparently the two bosses of the mutant corn project made the song for the corn-guys to help them grow or something. There was even a recording studio in a section of the laboratory.

Story

The 'secret government experiment gone wrong' storyline has been done many times over the years, but this might just be an exception to the cliche. Instead of the mutated corn trying to take over the world and humanity, they just exist and spend their days babbling about random topics while having extreme short-term memory that rivals Dory's from Finding Nemo. Although there is one bad corn-guy that does want to start a revolution, he is the only one that really wants to do it. Other than that, you character is eventually tasked with saving the corn people by request of their queen. Clearly the corn-guys can't manage that high-level of thinking, which is why the queen needs your help.

Characters

What I haven't mentioned yet is that after your character gets into the lab and starts looking around, you put together a robotic teddy bear and stick him with a big backpack with a mechanical arm poking out of it. Once you activate him, he introduces himself as Vladdy, and he is a very angry, Russian-accented little bear who constantly says you or the corn-guys are stupid or idiots. And he says that everything you character picks up is garbage, no matter if what you pick up becomes useful at some point or not. Plus he doesn't even thank you for waking him up, he just goes straight to complaining about everything. As rude as Vladdy may be, he does help you figure some things out, albeit reluctantly and griping all the way. And towards the end of the game, he gets struck by some high-voltage electricity that ultimately kills him, and you can't help but feel sad. He may have been grumpy and insulting, but he was still your friend.

I've mentioned before that there is a bad corn-guy. He has a pronounced lisp, is a bit taller than the others and wears a coat of some kind. He's known only as the Rogue Corn and he is very egotistical and narcissistic, plus he has a habit for leaving a room only to come back and knock something over. As the antagonist, he tries to stop your character and Vladdy from completing your quest to save the corn people. But as he is only slightly smarter than the other corn-guys, he's a rather poor villain. Although he did manage to imprison the queen in order to take over. Other big things he did include revealing to you that you are not human, but in fact, a living scarecrow. This surprised me because usually it's a human character that's out of his element. Plus he managed to hop on a drone (that had originally come with others to destroy the whole place) and threatened to blow everyone up. A boss fight could have happened, but instead all you had to do was throw something at his head and he spun out of control and crashed. All-in-all, he tried, but the Rogue Corn was ultimately a pathetic villain.

The other corn-guys you interact with occasionally are called Jim, Bill and Fred. They always walk around as a trio and talk about the oddest things. Sometimes, in their own unique (ridiculous) way, they help you by telling you what you should do next. For example, at one point they come to you and say that 'you should take a shower'. They don't mean that literally. There is a vent in a shower area which you have to crawl into in order to find the queen and also to see what the Rogue Corn is doing. Jim, Bill and Fred indirectly told you to sneak around. You don't really see them too often, and I think that's because they really, really like to take naps. They are very dense, remember.

And now, the queen. She is called the Ruby Queen, and she is the only sane corn of the bunch. While the two male bosses were working with all the stupid corn people, one of their co-workers, Helen, created the Ruby Queen so that the corn people wouldn't be completely directionless. The queen is a gentle but firm ruler who says 'we' instead of 'I' simply because she's a queen. She wants the best for her people, and her goal is to get them to the 'promised land'. Admittedly, she is one of the more likable characters that you like right from the start, and not one you have to warm up to.

Last but not least, though we don't see them, the humans are interesting as well. There are four notable humans in this game. I already mentioned Helen, but I should say that she was the only smart one as she (via reports) said that the mutating process was all wrong and that's why the corn people were all dumb. The two male bosses are Bob and Ted, and your character learns about them via the sticky notes they leave each other.

Bob spends more money than should be allowed, and on stupid stuff too, such as fish, unnecessarily complicated security measures, multiple lobbies, wanting to make the secret lab a tourist attraction, and humongous statues of himself (compensating for something much?). Needless to say, Bob is as dumb as the corn, and Ted absolutely hates it. Ted actually wants to get scientific work done, but because of Bob's reckless spending, he's not doing as much as he wants to. He constantly calls Bob a moron and tries to keep him on track, to no avail in the slightest. Ted is a workaholic and always calls Bob out on their money woes.

The last human is a man named Fernando. He was an assistant that (apparently) liked to torture the corn people. Though the corn people have been proven to be stupid, they are very aware of when they hate someone, and manged to take revenge on Fernando. They told him that connecting himself to an electrical spire would give him superpowers, which he proceeded to do and ended up killing himself. If that thing can kill a robot teddy bear, of course it can kill a human. Remember when I said that your character needed a hand to open the door at the beginning? Yeah, you used Fernando's hand, which wasn't skeletal like the rest of him for some reason (video game logic at its finest).

Ending

Your character is able to save the corn people in a way. Apparently there was a rocket underneath the farm as well, and the 'promised land' the queen was talking about was in space. You manage to start the rocket and watch it blast off, but there ends up being a problem. The fuel hatch was open, as one of the corn-guys forgot to to close it (too busy taking a nap, most likely), and the queen managed to say that they were all idiots before the rocket exploded. The ending music plays as popcorn starts to rain from the sky, making it a rather bittersweet ending. All that work and they all die in the end. Would you eat that popcorn knowing that you've talked to the corn that it came from?

Rating

4 1/2 out of 5 - Very weird, very entertaining, worth playing over and over. Loses half a point because of the ending (most gamers don't like having to work hard for no end reward).

By the way, the corn people all had British accents. Know why? They're Cornish!