20 Small Mazes is quite a fun hour or so of interesting gameplay. You can play it on Itch or Steam for free. It’s definitely worth doing so, if you haven’t already, there are some very fun variations on what makes a maze in there.

I wish I could like it more but I want innovation in games to be something that can be built upon. I want something that puts down new idioms for design and ideally ones that can be used outside of the game’s genre. 20 Small Mazes is a very cool set of mazes but I can pull very little from it for my own games, especially if I’m not building a maze.

Dr. Pippin Barr’s Sibilant Snakelikes and Greek Punishment series, both playable here, do something similar in providing variations on a standard game pattern but they do it in service of demonstrating games as translations. This is the kind of concept that one can use in building other games, as I have with The Quiet Sleep and Syphilisation. It’s a concept that gets to something deep in the nature of games and how they operate as imperfect codifications of real-world systems.

Of course, not every game has to do that. 20 Small Mazes is very fun and it’s free and very well put together. I just feel that a lot of the innovation that we see in video games is very strongly tied to the context of the game that makes it. If we make something innovative, we might as well do it such that other people can build on what we’ve done.