Mummy Maze

Score: 4 clocks

Okay, so you’re not Indiana Jones. Heck, you aren’t even Brendan Fraser. You’re a real archeologist--a complete and total wimp. If you meet anything--mummies, traps, small children--you end up bruised and unconscious. What do you do? Run. There’s just one problem--the mummy runs exactly twice as fast as you do.

Mummy Maze is another clever little game from Popcap. Like many of their others, it’s a puzzle game. You try and progress through rooms of a pyramid, each one presenting a puzzle you have to pass. Each room is a tiled square with obstacles and other objects. You start in one place, the mummy starts in another. For every square you move, the mummy gets to move two. The trick is to trap it behind the obstacles so that you can move to the exit.

The nice thing about this game is that every puzzle has a solution. If you’re the type who likes to play free cell because you like solving problems, this is probably a good webgame for you. The levels are randomly ordered--so that you don’t get the same sequence of mazes every time--but each level is created with a predetermined solution. (You can actually view a given solution, if you like, though this ends your game.)

Another nice feature of the game is that it lets you play each level as many times as you want, allowing you to experiment. You don’t have to worry about lives or a time limit--a definite plus. Puzzle games shouldn’t make you replay the same easy levels over and over again just so you can get to the one that stumped you, fail again, and start over.

However, the exact solution nature of the game does kind of limit its playability. There are three pyramids (i.e., difficulty levels) to play through, but once you’ve seen all of the maps, there wouldn’t be much more of a reason to play. In addition, the puzzles get kind of boring after a short time of play. Though the game does get more interesting with the addition of traps and the like later on, it still felt repetitive to me.

Written by EUOL on September 10th, 2002