The Crystal Maze

The British always knew it: the best TV entertainment is the kind where contestants suffer under the host's baton, and he clearly enjoys it. The Crystal Maze was precisely that kind of viewing in the first half of the nineties — four zones, time challenges, crystals, and a final golden dome full of floating tickets. Digital Jellyfish Design Ltd turned it into a DOS game in 1993.

The game faithfully mirrors the show's structure. The player navigates through various zones — medieval, aztec, futuristic, industrial — and completes a series of standalone logic puzzles in each one. The goal is to collect as many crystals as possible, which then determine the time in the final round. No story, no plot. Pure gaming show in ROM.

The mechanics are varied in the sense that each room brings a different type of puzzle — spatial orientation, logic jigsaw, perception mini-tasks. Controls are simple — mouse and occasional keyboard. Sounds good. But practice is sometimes trickier than it should be — not tricky in the sense of a well-designed challenge, but tricky in the way the player fumbles for three seconds trying to figure out what the game actually wants. The interface sometimes works against you more than the puzzle itself. Paradoxically, that matches the original: on TV, half the contestants' effort was eaten up by misunderstanding the brief.

In autumn 1993, this was a legitimate move — a licensed game based on a popular show that Channel 4 was broadcasting at the time, and we knew about it at least from recordings brought back from England. Today the game stands and falls on whether you actually remember that TV show. The graphics are decent for their time, the music is solid, but the depth is shallow. None of the puzzles will force you to stop and really think for long. It's more a series of short bursts than a proper logical challenge.

Today you'll play it if you remember the show and want to relive what interactive nostalgia looked like in 1993. Or if you're a historian of licensed games, because this category has both specific failures and surprising successes. The Crystal Maze sits somewhere in the middle — it didn't sink, but it didn't stick in memory for any reason other than the TV original. But half an hour spent in the aztec zone won't ruin your afternoon. And that's actually a solid result for a 1993 tie-in.