Omaze (Playdate)

Omaze is a game of circles. Playing a tiny little orb yourself, you navigate through small mazes where each section is a circle. You move around the edges of these rooms in a ring, sometimes avoiding round dangers, and while there are some blocks and straight lines to vary up shapes, the maze of O’s does feel like a strong fit for the Playdate, the game console’s crank all about control by way of spinning it around and around.

 

In a level of Omaze, your goal is to pass through a range of smaller circular rooms, the entire maze visible on screen at once with one ringed spot serving as the exit. To navigate between rooms, you must get your little white ball to an opening in the edge of the room, a press of the B button letting you hop through the gap and enter the next circle. Your movement around a room’s circumference though is done exclusively by the crank, the player needing to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise to move around the round space appropriately. This sounds more intuitive than it feels, mainly because hopping between rooms can change your orientation. Exiting a room from the top for example will now place you in the bottom of the next circle, and if there’s a pressing danger, it’s easy to think you should move the crank left or right to move in those directions. One of the greatest skills to master is simply not letting yourself be fooled by what might feel natural, the player always needing to keep in mind the rules of clockwise and counterclockwise rotation never change no matter where they find themselves within a space. Once your brain starts to make it almost second nature though, you might be a bit disappointed to find the game isn’t particularly long, not even likely to take an hour to clear unless you really struggle to internalize the movement style.

Thankfully, Omaze doesn’t dry up once you have the crank control down pat, although the game certainly seems to be built with the understanding that you can be prone to forgetting its movement methods. While you will die in a single hit, you respawn at the start instantly after and even the largest mazes never get that big. In fact, even when the screen is filled with a bunch of circular rooms to hop through, it’s fairly likely some are outright red herrings or the game is giving you options on which route to take to get to the goal. As you get to the later levels, you’ll start to face new hazards that test your ability to not just manage your movement, but deal with some very specific gimmicks. Some circles, once you enter them, will automatically start moving you in a direction, but you can press A to alter the direction of the spin. In fact, stalling in these rooms can become important to setting up safe entry or exit, and with how quickly you are sometimes expected to move between rooms, even the time it takes to move a finger from the B to A button can be a factor and so you have to move precisely or you risk taking a deadly hit.

 

Many dangers await you in the circular spaces of Omaze. Some are simple like white barriers you aren’t meant to touch, but then there are spinning lines that keep you moving or other small circles in the room that will chase you the moment you enter. The almost immediate pressure these moving hazards and forced spins can add to moving around mean that you’re still having your reflexes tested even once the crank becomes second nature, and later levels in particular can start to ask for rather rapid actions where the window for success is tight. Omaze’s limited scope means even at its hardest it’s not going to ask for incredibly long chains of precise actions, but coupled with the respawns, you can eventually get the necessary moves down and move along to the next level.

The game’s short worlds do cap off with an encounter with a giant eye, these not necessarily fights but the eye will place down a range of barriers that can flicker in and out of existence or other somewhat unique threats. In the eye stages, you actually move only around one big ring, the player able to pop between the inside or the outside based on which side is safest to travel through. It’s a different enough format to be interesting but not exactly a shake-up in terms of what is expected of you, and it doesn’t help with the fact that Omaze ends up feeling too small in general. There’s no real reason to replay the game, no extra goals to shoot for and worlds have to be played through entirely rather than the player getting to focus on the more challenging ones in isolation. This is certainly why it can feel a bit underwhelming to have mastered the control method only to find yourself at the end, since beyond perhaps replaying the game and seeing how level clears come more easily to you now, it’s a skill you polished without its limits being tested. The levels where timing play a role to success at least give you something to figure out beyond the motion of your little ball, but the game doesn’t escalate far enough to reach the kind of challenges that feel thrilling to conquer.

THE VERDICT: Omaze is a battle against your hand-eye coordination, the mind needing to remember the clockwise and counterclockwise movement under the kind of pressure that can lead to you making mistakes. Internalizing the movement system through the mazes of circles does get satisfying as you can start moving more quickly and can better handle the reflex challenges of later stages, the quick revives also meaning you don’t get tripped up when you react the wrong way. However, the game isn’t long enough to see this style of play make the best use of the training you undergo, the crank movement not trivial once it becomes second nature but the tougher levels are too few to really feel like a payoff to the investment.

 

And so, I give Omaze for Playdate…

An OKAY rating. Omaze’s emphasis on its control method often being the source of difficulty is a double-edged sword. If it is too difficult, players who need more time to acclimate it would get frustrated and quit. The unconditional instant respawns would help but still, it could be hard to hook players long enough for them to train their brain to understand the crank movement. However, once you get the crank movement down, there is the risk of the action becoming too easy, although at least Omaze’s continued insistence on reflexes helps to provide tangible danger and is better for sometimes forcing those moments where you accidentally lean back on what looks right rather than remember the proper way rotation impacts movement. If you get really skilled at its movement though, you never get those kind of trials that can reward that investment, the main adventure swiftly completed and there are no extras to pursue. Possible additions like perhaps trying to set the best time, tackle tough challenge stages, or rapidly clear a small set of stages deathless could give you a space to utilize your new understanding of the game’s movement while also not scaring inexperienced players off since they could be optional tasks. It can currently iterate enough to keep its short length entertaining enough, the different hazards meaning there are still things to figure out and incorporate into navigation. Perhaps continuing down that road with additional levels really could have been all it took to make Omaze a more memorable adventure than one that will likely end before it really feels like it makes the most of its ideas.

 

Omaze calls itself a puzzle platformer, I’ve elected to call it more of an action maze game, but that kind of points at how it can be hard to qualify what’s being tested. Movement is your main concern, but its the relationship between the controls and the spaces you find yourself in that provide most of the challenge. You need to figure out your way to the end of a level, but it’s sometimes more about figuring out how to spin that crank or pass by dangers rather than just evaluating the layout. It almost leans towards something of a frustration game, where conquering controls that aren’t necessarily natural is part of the intended challenge. While the name Omaze really does make it easy to call it a maze fulls of O’s, it’s a bit more complicated than that, just not quite complex enough to make your investment really flourish once mind and body have achieved solid coordination.