Hunt through a pitch-black dungeon where the monsters vanish and only your radar betrays them.
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How to play
You stalk a dark dungeon of corridors, firing down the line you are facing at monsters that shoot back. The tougher ones turn invisible and exist for you only as a blip on the radar, so much of the game is spent shooting at a corridor because the radar says something is in it.
You fire along the corridor you face, so a shot is only as good as your alignment.
Monsters come in tiers, and the higher ones vanish from sight entirely — the radar is the only way to track them.
Two teleport doors at the sides of the maze warp you across to the other edge.
Clearing every monster summons a fast, invisible reaper that flees rather than fights.
The boss occasionally teleports in unannounced and fires on whoever is there.
Two players share the dungeon and can hit each other.
Controls
Desktop: WASD to move, arrow keys to shoot, Q to hop
Phone & tablet: on-screen controls supported on touch devices
Game modes
Single player hunt
Two-player co-op (local or online)
Tips & strategy
Learn to read the radar instead of the room. By the second dungeon most of what can kill you is not on screen at all.
Line up corridors before you need them. Being caught mid-turn in a junction is the most common way to die, because you cannot shoot sideways.
The teleport doors are an escape, not a shortcut. Stepping through puts you somewhere you have not checked, so use them to break contact rather than to travel.
Do not chase the reaper. It is faster than you and it is leaving anyway; the risk is walking into a monster you had already accounted for.
In two players, agree on a direction. Friendly fire is live, and the corridor your partner is aligned on is the corridor you should not enter.
Origins
Dark Maze revisits Wizard of Wor, released by Midway in 1981: a dungeon of trigger-happy monsters, two players who can shoot each other as easily as the enemy, and a radar strip along the bottom that shows where the monsters are.
It had synthesized speech, and it used it to taunt you. The Wizard himself arrives at the end of a level to teleport unpredictably around the maze taking shots at whoever is still standing. Two-player games are famously fraught, because the friendly-fire rule means the safest thing in the dungeon is often your partner, and the most dangerous thing is also your partner.
About Dark Maze
Dark Maze is an original free browser dungeon-shooter inspired by classic arcade maze battlers, adding vanishing foes and co-op for two. No download needed.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
