Picking Up Steam: Maize (PC)

Silliness is an art. Sure, a bit of wacky randomness can earn you some quick laughs, but even when you’re being deliberately absurd, if you want to keep people chuckling, you need to understand some things. Set-ups, punchlines, how to subvert expectations. Unfortunately, the first-person adventure game Maize does not seem to have a good understanding of how to portray its weirdness in a way that lets it last the whole experience, mostly because once it comes up with a joke, it runs it into the ground over and over, to the point the rest of the comedy struggles to try and hold the experience up amidst a deluge of repetition.

 

Maize does sound like it has the set-up for a wonderfully weird adventure, the game all about uncovering the details behind a clandestine government effort that accidentally went awry and ended up creating sentient corn. When you start the game though, it’s actually a tiny bit eerie, it throwing you into a corn field with little context besides some of those corn stalks shuffling off into the distance. You begin to investigate the nearby area, solving some simple puzzles in abandoned derelict farm buildings, but there are some hints of the absurdity to come before the talking corn actually steps forward for their first chat. One of the game’s more effective angles comes in the form of the early tutorial messages that appear on the screen, the messages telling you what to do and later alerting you when pulling a switch or completing a puzzle effects something elsewhere having a bit of a dry wit that feels like a consistent character in itself.

However, once you get to interact with the corn more and start exploring the government facility, Maize dips in quality slowly and gradually, mostly as you realize the game’s creativity is often severely lacking. Maize really settles into telling the same jokes over and over, and not in the way where it could count as callbacks. The corn for example are constantly making the same jokes about taking naps or standing in place for no reason, something that could work if they were introduced to new contexts or the premise evolved in some way, but it feels like any moment they’re allowed to talk will lead back to simply stating they’re going to nap or stand around again. While repetitive, the corn are encountered only on occasion, quiet exploration actually much more common. You do end up helping construct a companion though, a robotic Russian teddy bear named Vladdy, and he is perhaps the game’s worst case of having an idea that was almost funny but having no idea what the follow through should be. Vladdy will help you on occasion with puzzles or comment on things you’re doing, but his humor rehashes the same idea over and over again. If he’s not calling you stupid or an idiot, he’s calling something trash or garbage, and if you’re lucky, he might mention it’s bad because it’s American too. Over and over, the game will have Vladdy speak up just to say something is stupid, and while having an irate straight man works when juxtaposed with absurdity, even the serious character needs to have more imaginative lines to keep things interesting. What’s even stranger about Vladdy’s lack of wit though is the game’s main antagonist, the Cornacabra, specifically is shown to be pathetic and unimaginative because all he can think to call people he dislikes is “stupid”, the game’s writers lacking the self-awareness to see what that might say about them.

 

Maize isn’t all the same jokes repeated ad nauseum, although even some of its better ideas are perhaps ruined through overexposure. Two scientists were behind accidentally animating the corn, Bob and Ted being complete opposites with one being an overenthusiastic doofus and the other an uptight genius. While you explore the facility you’ll find sticky notes left behind by the pair, their only way of communicating with each other since they loathed each other so much they made sure to work opposite hours. Bob’s buffoonery leads to the facility having many cute and ridiculous quirks, like how he found a great deal on a company that specifically designs lobbies so you keep finding lobby after lobby throughout the complex. Ted will always leave sticky notes reacting with indignation, and while his irritation can vary in how it’s expressed at times, it also loses its luster after you read the latest ridiculous idea like gold plated toilets in the shared bathroom that face each other that Ted can only react to with his same old anger.

A bit more consistently effective though are the item descriptions. You never know which items laying around in Maize will be collectibles or important puzzle-solving tools, the game quite aware of this as sometimes you’re able to hold an entire water cooler in your hands like it was nothing while other times something that looks like its relevant to the current puzzle is just cheekily stored in the inaccessible collection of oddities known as the Folio. The items can sometimes give you more details on what exactly happened to lead to the weird situation with the corn and what’s going to happen next with them, but they also include a great deal of odd descriptions that are varied enough to potentially keep you smiling and interested in finding these optional objects. In fact, the off-the-wall descriptions for some items that sound like complete randomness is actually some surprisingly masterful foreshadowing. Near the end of the game, Maize does step up its writing chops a bit as it throws more weird ideas about and starts to apply a stronger structure so characters end up saying things beyond their usual worn out subjects.

 

Maize really is a game about that uneven humor unfortunately, the puzzle-solving in it not that deep partly because the game doesn’t give you much room to figure things out. Objects of importance will have a white outline when you’re near them, making it obvious what you need to interact with, and when it’s time to use an item you found, sometimes the spot you use it on is already apparent thanks to a blatant green silhouette. Some puzzle solutions are a bit funny and they can be completely bonkers because the game all but tells you how to solve them, especially since your inventory is small and quick to use so you could even conceivably brute force it if the game wasn’t already so accommodating. Much of the time, puzzles are more reasons to walk around a space and run into more sticky notes or scenes from the other characters, making it more like a narrative-focused exploration game than one where you’re really going to have to use your brain much at all. Since the notes and item descriptions are the more successful bits of comedy it is at least worth poking around every corner available and the game does do a good job of controlling where you can go so it’s never overwhelming, but generally Maize feels like it is in deep need of someone to look over the script and trim out the time wasted on the same boring jokes rehashed to death.

THE VERDICT: Maize often feels like a silly game written by people who aren’t actually that silly themselves. So often it leans on the same tired jokes of having characters say things are stupid or they’re going to take a nap, and with the puzzles barely requiring any thought to solve, the game needed that comedy to serve as the motivation to keep playing. Luckily, the little bit of mystery on why talking corn exists eventually leads to more interesting and funny notes to read and items to find as well as an effective finale, but you’re really going to have to suffer a lot of Vladdy and the corn refusing to deviate from the one or two jokes that were written for them.

 

And so, I give Maize for PC…

A BAD rating. Maize has its moments where the absurdity clicks, and it has some decent ideas like Bob and Ted’s sticky note bickering that can shift up when they start discussing new subjects like the inexplicable music studio Bob had installed in the top secret government research facility. It will be a game that can make you smile when you pick up an item and find its description is completely different than what you’d expect, but it’s hard to muster a laugh when the game’s go-to joke is having the most common characters repeat the same words like it was some sort of catchphrase. When the narrative text that isn’t even a character is saying funnier things in a scene than the actual character Vladdy, it starts to feel like Maize invested in the wrong areas far too heavily. The script is in desperate need of an outside editor or someone who at least recognizes that saying everything is stupid over and over wears really thin, but at least it doesn’t feel like the writers only thought that talking corn was goofy and tried to lean on that alone. There are glimmers of a more amusing experience, albeit one that maybe should have asked for more thought put into its puzzles so the writing didn’t have to carry the whole experience. When the most difficult thing in the entire game is noticing a piece of tape on a whiteboard you can pick up, it doesn’t speak well for this game’s value as an adventure game, but viewed as a narrative exploration game, you at least get a few decent bits of comedy amidst the more frequent misses.

 

I’m quite glad I played the comedic RPG Deathspank for the Picking Up Steam series as well as Maize, as Deathspank shows you can repeat a joke as long as you know how to reshape it into something new and funny. Altering the context and shifting the punchline away from having Deathspank so in love with the idea of justice lets that comedic game keep delivering entertaining comedy, but it also knows to diversify its humor much better than Maize does. Maize could have definitely been much worse, moments of novelty and the fairly consistent presence of better joke mediums like the Folio items keeping it going despite its self-sabotaging reliance on characters saying the same lame jokes repeatedly. It would really be hard to say anyone should seek out this adventure because of its faults, but it’s not completely miserable if you do go through it, so it managed to dodge an even worse judgment thanks to the good humor that is unfortunately buried beneath the bland jokes that clutter this corny game.