Maze of Flott (Arcade)

Maze of Flott is a bizarre game. Not in any of the usual senses: mechanically, it's plays like an attempt at making a slightly more involved and complex version of the traditional arcade maze game, and there's nothing overtly surreal about the aesthetic either. What bizarre is the combination of the two. You play as a little red car that drives around cities looking for keys, and avoiding/destroying other cars along the way. You also have a fuel gauge, and there are petrol stations dotted around where you can refuel, which costs money. Also, unlike the cars in Pacar (another, much older, car-themed maze game), in Maze of Flott, your car just moves like any other maze game character, being able to instantly turn 180 degrees and go in the other direction.

Money and keys are both obtained inside buildings. Now, although these buildings appear to be things you'd find in normal cities, like banks, supermarkets, casinos, and so on from the outside, on the inside they actually contain dungeon-like mazes (or maze-like dungeons), full of traps, treasures, and secret passageways. Exactly which maze is in which building is different every time you play, though there are only a few possible layouts to encounter. The keys are also in different buildings each time, and every possible layout has the potential to contain a key.

This means the player has to go into each building and thoroughly explore the mazes within until they find the number of keys needed to proceed to the next stage. This kind of balances out with the fact that every mazes contains lots of treasure, whether the key's there or not, and treasure gives both points and money, and money can be spent to buy back the fuel wasted on going round all these mazes.

The big problem with this game comes in the form of some unfair inconsistency. When you're in the mazes, colliding with most of the traps will take a chunk off your fuel gauge, with the exception being that falling down an open trap door means losing a life. While outside, driving around the cities, colliding with other vehicles is instant death. Furthermore, the vehicles are faster, more numerous and less predictable than the maze traps.

I can't really recommend this game, nothing about it is really interesting enough to be able to overlook its numerous flaws.