The mercenary I’m watching stalk the corridors of the dank labyrinth is right to be scared. He’s already seen the rest of his party impaled by pressure plate-triggered spike traps, crushed by heavy stone doors, and drawn off the path to the minotaur’s lair by a siren song-emitting statue. Alone in the ever-shifting maze, he continues on his mission to kill the Cretan king Minos’s bull-horned son, Asterion. He doesn’t even realise that he’s about to turn the corner into range of a waiting ballistae.
I almost feel sorry for the sellsword. Almost. The blood bonus I’ll receive for killing all the labyrinth’s invaders with traps alone will make for a nice reward. Maybe I’ll invest the gore in a mulcher or a boulder trap…
Minos is a roguelike tower defense game in which you don’t play Theseus hunting the minotaur, but Daedalus, the labyrinth’s designer charged with protecting the young beast. In the developers’ telling, Theseus is a power hungry opportunist looking to take the throne of Crete, willing to kill the unwanted teenage son of current monarch Minos to get it. Each time you descend another level of the labyrinth, you must face waves of Theseus’ mercenaries; keep Asterion out of their grip and you might just find him a permanent safe haven, but if they kill the minotaur you must start your descent all over again.
Each level of the labyrinth is its own small maze laid out in a grid with several entrances into its corridors and a lair at its centre. Dotted across the grid are trap spots, deposits of gold and gems, a few permanent walls, and the occasional chasm. Except for those fixed features, the rest is malleable and you are free to raise and lower walls wherever you want, shifting the shape of the map’s corridors and chambers.
In the initial preparation phase, you see a group of mercenaries queuing up at an entrance to the maze, a golden thread winding from them to Asterion’s lair. You draw a set of traps like cards from a deck. Spike pits, boulder drops, and ballistae all inflict direct damage, but you might also want poison gas vents and explosive injectors that weaken invaders or turn them into a bomb that explodes on their death. Before inviting the attack, you can freely raise and lower the walls of the labyrinth, place deadly toys on its designated trap spots, and move Asterion through the dungeon, smashing gold and gem deposits and finding a hiding spot out of immediate danger. While you can’t outright block the invaders, as you alter the maze the golden thread will change its shape, always looking for the most direct route to the lair. You can (and should) force the attackers to take a path that goes over the most trap spots.
In the attack phase, the mercenaries enter the dungeon and march toward the lair. Not all attackers are alike – Adventurers are vulnerable to fire, Archers are not. So when placing your traps, you must work out which mercenary will be at the front of the group when they reach a particular trap, so as not to waste one of your limited weapons on the wrong invader. If they reach Asterion’s lair, then they can track the minotaur wherever he is in the dungeon. While he can defend himself – he is a minotaur after all – after a few strikes Asterion will fall, restarting your entire run.
With each wave, new entrances into the labyrinth open, forcing you to juggle multiple parties of mercenaries. You must redesign the layout of the labyrinth over and over, finding ways to move all the attackers into the path of the correct traps. As you kill attackers, you are rewarded with additional toys, but you never have quite enough weapons to comfortably kill all the attackers. Each wave is a fiendish puzzle to be solved, and I found myself frequently scrapping all the traps and placing them in different spots between waves, because what was there before doesn’t fit the new mercenary parties.
A reprieve awaits you at the end of each map, a lobby between levels of the labyrinth where you can spend the gold and gems you’ve found and earned in battle, investing them in permanent unlocks. That could be new types of traps, upgrades to your arsenal, or abilities for Asterion. An early skill for the young minotaur is the ability to break down walls in the attack phase, giving him a way to escape chasing mercenaries or lead them into fresh danger. Upgrades can be powerful, adding a second trigger to a spike trap, for instance, letting it thin down groups of attackers even more effectively.
In my early hours with Minos, as I found when I played its latest Steam Next Fest demo, it’s easy to fall for the game. Though, sadly, it’s not a love that lasts.
By the time I had descended 15 levels through the labyrinth, my relationship with Minos had soured. As you go deeper, you face more challenging enemies and in greater numbers. At first this increasing challenge added to the enjoyment. Archers will attack you at range and they are resistant to fire damage. Fighters are tougher when bunched up with allies and are resistant to boulders. Champions are resistant to ballista bolts and gain health for every nearby attacker. You need to start thinking about the order in which attackers will reach your lair, ensuring you’ve paired the attack to the target’s weakness.
Utility items that let you reorder groups become vital. Say there’s a group of three enemies entering the dungeon and the one at the front is a Fighter, you can put down a Reorder 2 that will send the leader back two places, putting them at the tail of the group. When the new leader steps on the boulder-releasing pressure plate, the rock will roll through the first two party members, netting you a double kill instead of simply slightly hurting the Fighter.
As the parties invading your maze become larger and start to arrive from multiple entrances at once, you often need to direct the different groups to join the same thoroughfare toward your lair. When the groups merge, that work of predicting the order of every member of the group becomes harder. This is important not only because if your trap hits a resistant enemy it won’t kill them, but certain traps, like the deadly door and shifting passage – which slam shut on the third person to pass through them – will break if their target survives. They are repairable between rounds but it costs gold and energy.
As I say, though, that complexity ramp up is initially enjoyable and possible to follow. It’s here, too, where Minos begins to feel like you’re counting cards at a blackjack table. I found myself looking at the traps I had placed in the maze and mentally tagging them to the invaders I thought they would kill, counting down the queues of attackers lined up at the entrances. ‘Four attackers. The spike trap kills you, the fire pit kills you, the deadly door kills you, the backstabber kills you…’ It was only when I got to zero for all the queued attackers that I would let them into the dungeon.
As you go lower, you start meeting still more enemies. There are the Evaders who don’t trigger any pressure plate traps. So, when using the Winding Spike Trap – which only triggers when it is stepped on by the third person – you need to mentally discount any Evaders in the group when counting out which invaders will be killed on the way to your lair. And there are Concealers, who are resistant to both arrows and poisons, while also hiding the path their group is taking through the labyrinth. All of these are manageable, though there is one I actually dislike: the Disarmer. As the name suggests, if they reach any trap they will disable it, protecting every attacker who follows in their wake.
There was a tipping point, however, when the mental load of card counting Minos’s mazes stopped being an engaging challenge and simply became too complex to follow. There were so many more enemies entering the maze than traps in my hand that the only way to wipe out the attackers successfully was to reorder every group into blocks of enemies that shared the same vulnerability. Rearranged, I could hit them with piercing arrows and rolling boulders, killing multiple attackers all in one go. Though, a single miscalculation could see a resistant enemy hit with a ballista bolt, ending the missile’s journey and protecting all the soft targets behind the attacker. That one mistake would create a cascade of errors, because every subsequent trap was placed in the expectation that those arrow-vulnerable enemies would be dead.
While Asterion is a tough fighter, in later levels, with so many enemies, a single error can see an undefeatable wave reach you. Then, as Minos is a roguelike, that miscalculation can send you right back to the top of the labyrinth, undoing hours of play.
There will be many among you who are much better card counters than me, and can handle the mental loads Minos demands of you. But if you can’t, for all of the enjoyment of its early game, it may become deeply frustrating.
Aptly for my deficient problem-solving skills, if this is something the developers wanted to address, I don’t know what the solution would be. More onscreen information, such as the ability to know how long it will take a group to reach a certain point in the maze, would make it easier to plan out your traps, but it might dispel all of the game’s difficulty. Total information works in games like Into The Breach, but it doesn’t mean every tactical game should be 100% predictable. In many games, the fuzziness and opportunity for mistakes is where you find the fun. Maybe then, instead, there needs to be a greater set of options for what you can do as a player when something does go wrong. Snatching a messy victory from a mistake-triggered defeat may be more enjoyable than a clean victory where you’re watching your complex machine of interlinked traps do exactly what you planned. For that, Asterion will need to be more capable, because once your trap sequence is broken, it’s already too late to fix.
So, Theseus, you can have the throne; I’ll stick to Orcs Must Die! for now.