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Stickman Maze

by J Nash (October 14th, 2010 at 4:44 pm)

Game: Stickman Maze. Publisher: Clownbox. Author: Chan Yuen Pang. Supports Openfeint. Free (with ads). Play the game.

If Stickbloke Maze were any more minimalist, it’d evaporate when you clicked Play. There’s nothing at all to it except the stickbloke and some mazes. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Openfeint leaderboard said, “You won,” or, “You did not win.”) They don’t even bother writing the name in full — it’s just “Maze!” with a neutrally posed stickbloke.

I have now been playing Stickbloke Maze for a tragically consecutive number of hours.

The one bump to playing the game (which might explain its colossally miserable rating in the hideous iTunes Shop) is that the brief instructions are hopelessly misleading. (This is largely because of the wonky translation, which I like to think was humourlessly imposed by Apple when the game characteristically arrived with no explanation at all.) We now pause for a Podgamer Public Service Bonus.

PODGAMER PUBLIC SERVICE BONUS

Stickbloke Maze is a slide-the-squares puzzle game, a bit like those horrid plastic number novelties with 15 grooved tiles and an empty space which would enthusiastically redistribute the pieces as you tried to force 6 into place, except with a simple but ingenious tweak: each row or column moves as a single piece.

Here, for example, we can only move the top left bit of ladder vertically (because of Stickbloke) and the bottom ladder sections horizontally as a single piece (because of Stickbloke and the star). (Now what? — T Williams.)

This means that if you have, say, a row with a bit of ladder in the leftmost square and a bit of ladder in the rightmost square, then regardless of how many empty squares are between the two you can’t move that row horizontally at all. (Each bit of ladder would fall off the outside edge.) You have to juggle one bit of ladder up or down out of the row to free up the other, with a lot of criss-cross planning.

(Except of course there’s a bit of passage underneath in the same column thwarting the diversion. Now peer at the maze until your pupils graduate.)

A couple of other rules are thrown in — red blocks are immobile, crossed-out passages can’t be walked through, the target square is fixed as is whichever square the stickbloke currently occupies — but it’s the No Peasy Gaps bit that makes the game infuriatingly crafty and tricky and sinisterly fiendish. Y’know — it makes the game.

(Double Podgamer Public Service Bonus: the grey squares are spaces. This fooled me for ages because I thought they were squatting stone plugs or something, but no — they’re the bits you move things into. Cough.) END OF PODGAMER PUBLIC SERVICE BONUS.

So, obviously, the quality of Stickbloke Maze is in the 32 puzzles. About eight of them merely introduce each new element. (One unexpected concession to modernity is that if you beat a level, you can play either of the next two.) The rest are patently impossible in that marvellous way where you can rapidly infer the answer, start pushing blocks around, get roughly halfway and jam, spot your silly mistake and smoothly unravel your entire plan until you’re beaming with satisfaction at your progress but have in fact exactly recreated the beginning of the level and returned your stickbloke to the entrance.

Your turn. (This isn’t even halfway through the game.)

(Stickbloke himself is appropriately a tiny emperor of underplayed mime: he’s either standing patiently, mildly shrugging if you try to point him through a failed path, sauntering unconcerned to his destination or briefly celebrating upon gathering a star. You will inexplicably come to dread disappointing him. DO NOT DISAPPOINT STICKBLOKE.)

There’s no timer in Stickbloke Maze, no move limit, no achievements or secrets: either you get your stickbloke to the target star in each level, or you don’t. The pecking and sliding fits the iThing so exactly you don’t even notice and, as far as I can tell, about 7.7 people in the world know it exists, all of whom hate it. Stickbloke Maze is a good puzzle game I like lots, that is free, on the iThing.

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