PrinceWatercress plays Snail Trail - Part 1 of 2

Maze game? Maze game.

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Welcome to a maze game for the BBC Micro. It's pretty simple what you're doing here: you're going from the beginning at the far left side of the maze to the end at the far right side. The controls are simple: Z goes left, X goes right, : goes up, and / goes Down.

When you start a game, you can start from one of four skill levels, with 1 being the easiest and 4 being the hardest. Each of the four skill levels have different colors to them - pink, blue, green and red, respectively - and the harder the skill level, the bigger and more complex the mazes get...and the harder it is to see where you are! You can see the flashing yellow snail that represents you at the beginning fairly well at the easiest difficulty, but as you go into the harder ones, you become a flashing yellow dot. Thankfully, you can tell where you've been just by looking at the black lines that you leave throughout the mazes. But you'll have to be quick, as you only have so many seconds to get through the mazes. You'll have to be very quick to get through the easiest skill levels, but you'll have plenty of time on the harder difficulty levels...if you know what you're doing, that is!

After you complete a maze, you'll watch the next one get generated by the game. If you pay attention, you can somewhat predict where the exit of the next maze will be. Just remember that you always start on the far left and that the exit will always be at the far right.

The controls are pretty good, for the most part, but as you enter the harder skill levels, it's about as hard to line yourself up with the corridor you want to travel down as it is to see where you are at times. Wait for a little bit whenever you tap the directional keys to go back and forth to ensure that you line up before you continue. Other than that, this is the only major flaw with the game that I can think of.

After three mazes in any difficulty, you'll go on to the next one. If you complete three (red) mazes on the highest difficulty, you'll stay on the highest difficulty until you run out of time. I usually consider the game "beaten" when I have completed three red mazes. The faster you get through the mazes, the more points you will get for your time bonus, even if the points don't really mean anything other than a secondary high score challenge.

Despite being one of the earlier BBC Micro titles, I had more fun with this one than I expected to have when I booted the game up for the first time. As hard is it can be at times to see yourself and also line up with the paths you want to take, going through the harder mazes, especially on the hardest difficulty setting, makes for a nice challenge. I ended up spending more time enjoying it than I thought I would and trying to get through three mazes on all four difficulties during that time, too, and it's easy to say that this is one of the simpler titles that definitely earns a spot in the BBC Micro library despite its faults.