Kanna Maze is a game about alternate universes and approximately nine people who get stuck in a place and end up dying a lot. I’ve seen some reviews compared it to the Zero Escape series, which is fitting because it lifts plot elements and scenes pretty much wholesale from 999 and VLR without considering whether or not they make any sense in their new context. This is a mess of a game.
Let’s start with the part that is most objectively broken: the translation. I assume that this was originally written in Chinese based on the developer’s name, but it’s obvious that it was not translated by a native English speaker or by someone who was paying much attention to their work. The script is absolutely littered with grammatical errors, tense issues, and sentences that are horribly out of order. But that’s all standard stuff – Kanna Maze really takes the cake for bad translation by having a few instances of actions being attributed to the wrong character and, in my favorite moment, briefly making up a character that does not exist because a name was transliterated incorrectly. A bad translation is a problem in any game, but for a mystery game that wants you to pay attention to minor details, this level of sloppiness is just not acceptable.
Not that you’d be rewarded for paying attention even if the translation was better. Kanna Maze wants to tell a science fiction mystery story like ZE, but it just doesn’t succeed on any level. The science is messy and largely unnecessary to the plot, and they explain it in just enough detail for none of it to make sense if you stop to think. It all ties into a mystery plot that largely consists of making choices that immediately result in a comical death, but which eventually build up to a big reveal that is almost identical to the big reveal from 999. Kanna Maze seems to forget that it never instilled its NPCs with the ability to remember alternate timelines, though, so the big showdown scene at the end where everyone is discussing events that have not happened and that they could not possibly know about is completely nonsensical. Like all bad mystery games, the reveal also serves to introduce plot holes throughout the script that only get worse the more you think about them.
To top it all off, the character writing is distinctly flat. Our protagonist has an inconsistent personality that makes him seem at best quite unstable, yet the stand-in for VLR’s Phi is totally in to him for no real reason. You’d probably expect their relationship tension to have some plot relevance given that there’s also a childhood friend and crush who stands in for 999’s June, but she is barely present in most of the game and the flirting only serves to build up to the big reveal that Phi stand-in’s true identity has absolutely no relevance to anything. Cool!
Of course, most characters only really exist because somebody had to kill you in a given branch or because they needed a warm body at a particular moment. Multiple characters could be replaced with sandbags for all the agency they have in the plot, and two others seem primarily present to provide quick endings when you make a choice the game didn’t like. Even the characters who do have significant roles in the plot often only matter for that exact moment, which is best demonstrated by one who immediately disappears for the rest of the game after taking a specific action in each branch. You’re not really trapped with a cast of characters so much as a group of plot devices.
If this all sounds very negative, it’s because it is. Kanna Maze doesn’t really have anything going for it other than decent voice acting, a couple of decent chase scenes, and an exceptionally low price point. You can get it for four bucks and finish in four hours, so it won’t waste much of your time, but it’s impossible to recommend unless you’re specifically seeking out a poorly written mystery. You might get more out of it if you haven’t played any of the games that obviously inspired it, but you’d be much better off playing the originals.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: 4 hours to see all the content if you click through the dialogue. It would take a good bit longer if you wait for every line.
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