Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light Collector's Edition Review

Game: Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light Collector’s Edition
Genre: Hidden Object, Adventure, Puzzle
System: Steam (Windows only)
Developer|Publisher: Do Games Limited
Controller Support: None
Price: UK £8.50 | US $9.99 | EU € 9,75
Release Date: September 22nd, 2022

Review code provided with many thanks to Do Games Limited.

Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light is a puzzle game in a first-person point of view. Players will have to explore this new, dangerous world to rescue themselves.

The Gameplay and Story of Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light

As a preface to this review, I want to say that I deeply love these types of games. There is something very entertaining about even the worst of these types of point-and-click games, and Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light does a lot of stuff right. That being said, if you don’t love games that fall into this category Hidden-Object Puzzle Adventure, you will not like this one either. But if you already enjoy this kind of thing, keep reading.

A very very zoomed in picture of someone's eyes behind glasses. His eyes are very wide open, staring at something glowing bright pink reflected in his glasses. — It’s here!

The story doesn’t matter much, but I’ll summarise it quickly. Many archaeologists are looking at some crystals they found, and something activates them. They end up sucked into another world and are not heard from again. You are a detective looking for these lost people.

After checking for clues at the dig site, you also come across the crystals and end up getting sucked into the same alternate dimension as the others. Once there, you decide to help save all of the others and yourself by figuring out how the portals between your worlds work.

A maze puzzle flying an airship through a maze of clouds. — Some of the puzzles are a lot more challenging than others.

Along the way, you come across a bunch of puzzles you need to solve in order to find the other Earth people and get yourself home. There is betrayal, intrigue, flying ships, and other fantasy stuff. Everything is pretty and colorful with a strong fantasy aesthetic that is visually appealing.

Artwork of a island split in two and floating in space. The top half is the sunny part, all bright colors and sunlight. The bottom half is dark and only lit by moonlight. — The artwork in this game is interesting and kind of cool looking.

Overall, the gameplay is just like others in this genre; a lot of pointing and clicking on puzzles. There are a ton of different types of these puzzles, ranging from hidden objects to mazes to jigsaw puzzles.

The Animation is So Weird

If you know a lot about these types of games, you already know what I’m going to say here. To cut corners cost-wise, this style of game uses facial motions over static images. This sort of animation gives a surreal sort of motion to the face that makes it look like part of their faces are paralyzed. It rides along the rails of the uncanny valley the entire length of the game.

I understand why Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light and other games in the same genre do this; animating faces in a realistic way is hard. It’s expensive and time-consuming. That being said, this sort of animation style will always look off and a little goofy, which is always weird in a game that is trying to take itself very seriously, like Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light itself.

A picture of one of the characters in the game. She has gray skin, two-toned hair, and is making a worried face that looks just a little bit off. — There is some very Uncanny Valley stuff going on with how everyone’s face moves.

This type of cost-saving animation style makes for some really weird scenes. People driving without ever looking at the road, weird expressions that don’t move people’s skin around, and other things that will be familiar to those who know this style well.

A woman drives a car. — She hasn’t actually looked at the road once in this cutscene.

The Puzzles in Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light

Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light is filled to the brim with all sorts of interesting puzzles. Each seems to be well thought out, and each has a solution that makes sense. In some of these games, I will use a hint to get through a puzzle, and at the end of it, all I can think is, “That was a stupid answer and it makes no sense.” This game had no puzzles like that; I understood the detail I was missing as soon as I hit the hint button.

Shows a hidden item game; players need to find several items hidden among several more items. — Apparently, the whole city of Denver is located in this puzzle somewhere.

All the puzzles in Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light are well-planned and thoughtful. Someone put a lot of time into making sure every single puzzle was solvable and intuitive. I played Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light on Advanced, but I assume that the casual and hardcore mode puzzles are basically the same.

This shows the four different difficulty levels of Maze of Realities. — Players can choose between easy, medium, hard, and custom difficulty levels.

Also, I want to take a second to shout out the developers for having a custom mode for difficulty; how cool of an addition is that? Players can pick their poison, making things as challenging or easy as possible. It’s all about what’s the most fun to you and not some other person’s idea of what should be fun or the “right” way to play. Excellent choice for the Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light developers.

Conclusion

Overall, Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light is great. There is an okay story, beautiful backgrounds, and passible humanoid animations. The all-important puzzles are well done, fun to complete, and players can choose their difficulty when playing through.

The screengrab shows a tree that is half in light and half in the dark. There is a floating statue to each side of the tree. — The cutscenes are actually very pretty.

There are some incredibly silly things in the story because of the animation style, but nothing outside of what to expect with these types of hidden item puzzle games. If you’re here for anything else but the puzzles, you will be disappointed. That being said, the puzzles more than make up for everything else.

Hands hold a ship's wheel, flying an airship through a cloudy sky. — Who lets me drive this thing?

As I said at the beginning of the review for Maze Of Realities: Reflection Of Light if you like this sort of game already, you’ll love this one too. It’s a fun puzzle game with a lot of pretty backgrounds. And that’s all I want from one of the hidden item adventures.

Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.