Labyrinth (Game)
Note: This Article Contains Spoilers for the Labyrinth Game
Labyrinth is a videogame by (presumably now defunct) Wonderfling Studios. It was developed to pair with the song Labyrinth off of Joe Hawley's project Hawaii: Part II. It essentially functions as a playable version of the original music video, matching very closely (if not identically) to the style of the "Caldera of Confusion" section of the video for much of the entire game, as opposed to the more beat-em-up style sections in the rest of the video.
History
On August 23rd, 2014 the official Miracle Musical twitter tweeted a date: "12.13.14", the tweet was deleted shortly afterwards [1] On the teased date of 13th of December 2014, both the music video and game released. The music video was directed by Ben Luce who also worked closely with the producers at Wonderfling studios over the course of the game's production.
On April 1st, 2015 an email was sent to those who were subscribed to the ミラクルミュージカル mailing list, which had the title of "Hawaii: Part II" - The Game. The email read:
"Greetings Space-Time Traveler,
In case you missed it, the wizards at Wonderfling Studios hath conjured a Hawaii: Part II video game*
The game has been updated since its initial 12.13.14 release, which accompanied this relatively fresh content:• A COMPLEMENTARY "Labyrinth" music video •
• AN "Isle unto Thyself" music video •
• "Candle on the Water" (A PETE'S DRAGON REFERENCE) •To discover more,
please visit hawaiipartii.com.Kind regards,
ミラクルミュージカル*WINDOWS ONLY. MAC VERSION AVAILABLE SOON.
**DONATIONS ARE SPLIT BETWEEN ANIMATOR BEN LUCE, ミラクルミュージカル, AND WONDERFLING STUDIOS.
On March 31st, 2015 there was a "substantial" update to the game[2] and on September 13th, 2015, there was a second update, allowing for users to play the game on Mac OS X[3]
On December 31st, 2015 an album of 8-bit versions of songs from Hawaii: Part II was released as "Hawaii Partii". A version of the album was originally downloaded with the game, but was uploaded to Bandcamp for purchase. A version of Labyrinth features on the album as: Labyrinth (8-Bit)[4]
On July 22nd, 2017. YouTube user "Albert Q." uploaded a video of them speed-running the game in 17 minutes.[5]
As of 5th Dec, 2018, the game has been taken off the Wonderfling website[6], however it has been archived on sites like TallyAll.
Overview
The game features the four sections from the music video:
- Cave of Blunders / Open Mic
- Caldera of Confusion
- Fortress of Misfortune
- Sea of Regret
There are also secret rooms (that generally function as shortcuts) as well:
- Space Station Level 7
- Murders
- Dream Sweet in Sea Major
The objective of the game is to traverse through all the levels, collect coins, and to get to find end of the level.
Gui
The UI of the game generally consists of a number at the top of the screen (indicating the number of things left to be completed in order to unlock something.) and a particularly unique healthbar design off to the right. Each time the player takes damage, one color on the rainbow disappears, and the face in the middle slowly degrades, until eventually taking any further damage will kill the player.
Soundtrack
The game features various different chiptune arrangements of Hawaii: Part II tracks, which were later officially released as the Hawaii Partii album.
Areas
Cave of Blunders
This area is a cave-themed location, with stalactites and stalagmites dotted around the rocky formations in the area. It also features a banner, announcing "WELCOME TO LABYRINTH". The area also features a few ladders that the player can climb up/down to access different areas, one of which contains a sword that the player can pick up, and instructs them to attack with "Z", hitting the box in front of them, and showing the player that hitting boxes releases coins, which in turn decrease the number at the top of the screen, signaling this is the objective of the area. The same room also features a flashing rainbow-looking orb object that when touched by the player causes them to let out several circles of rainbow colored energy, and heals the player entirely. This orb respawns when the player leaves and reenters the room infinitely.
This area is populated by two different enemies. The first are skeletons, which walk around in various different directions randomly, but can either appear as-is or spawn from piles of bones when the player gets close. The second type of enemy is two ghosts, which simply move back and forth, bouncing between the two walls they're situated between. The area also features various different pits that the player can fall into. However, it seems as if the code for this death is glitched in the sense that once a player falls down in the pit, they do not respawn and the game must be forcibly closed and reopened. This could also be intended behavior, though.
Much like the original music video, this area features a restaurant-looking area with a sign announcing that it is "Open Mic Night!" and a (non-violent) Skeleton shouting jokes from the stage.
Skeleton Dialogue:
- Did you hear about the new corduroy pillows? They’re making headlines.
- A blind man walks into a bar. And a chair. And a table.
- Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
- A plateau is the highest form of flattery
- I would tell jokes at home but I have no body to listen.
- Two fish are in a tank. One turns to the other and asks, “How do you drive this thing?”
Space Station Level 7
This is a secret area that can be discovered when the player breaks all of the furniture in the restaurant-looking area. There is a hint given for doing this when the player swims through the waterfall/small lake in the area, reading: "Destruction of furniture encouraged."
The area features several more pun-making nonviolent skeletons, although their dialogue here is slightly different and, at times, are not even puns. The dialogue also features several different Tally Hall references. (Explanations are marked in parenthesis)
Hidden Skeleton Dialogue:
- You might consider joining the church of gosh.
- It’s no wonder they flung it that far (Reference to Wonderfling Studios, who made this game)
- You know what’s odd? Every other number
- Bismillah! (Possible Bohemian Rhapsody reference?)
- A termite walks into a bar and asks, "Is the bar tender here?"
- Do you have a minute to talk about the squatty potty?
- I once knew a Hairy Krishna
- Do you have a map? Because I’m lost in your eyes.
- What’s green and has wheels? Grass. I lied about the wheels
- I can tell you what works: cheese.
- I just flew in from Ann Arbor, and boy are my arms tired! (Ann Arbor is a reference to Tally Hall's origin)
- That wasn’t chocolate.
- I’m giving away dead batteries free of charge!
- So I said, “that is not MY goat!"
- Is this a party boobytrap?
- …so I says to Sedghi, I says…
- goo goo goo joob (Strangely, a reference to I Am The Walrus by The Beatles)
- I was addicted to soap. I’m clean now
- Toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boyt $H¡†!
- …so I says to Koenig, I says… (Reference to Stephanie Koenig, who did vocals for Hawaii: Part II)
- Yo no soy marinero. SOY CAPITAN, SOY CAPITAN, SOY CAPITAN
- IT'S NOT A TUMOR
- "One reports the news, the other cavorts with Jews."
- "That WAS the igloo."
- A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop
- “The bad news is, we’re out of scalpels."
- Golfers always have two pairs of pants in case they have a hole in one
- Past, present and future, walked into a bar. It was tense
- A video game protagonist walks into a bar and says “ouch"
- Thou art error (Reference to "I am Error" message from Zelda II)
- You must be tired, ‘cause you've been running through this maze all day (Addressing the player character)
- What did the power cord say to the psychiatrist? "I’m looking for an outlet"
- And Jesus says, “I thought you said ‘i-CON-oclasm.’”
- 15 seconds of Boraaaaaaaaa
- But what do you call an American Indian from India?
- Sent from your Verizon 4G LTE Smartphone
Caldera of Confusion
This area has Fire enemies that shoot fireballs, the player can swing your sword to redirect said fireballs. The goal is to eliminate all of the enemies in the room, their number being represented by the counter at the top.
Sea of Regrets is accessed by killing all the enemies, including the first one which normally doesn't shoot fireballs and can only be killed by transporting a fireball from an enemy that shoots them slower and the second to last which also doesn't shoot fireballs by going near an edge and precisely throwing the fireball from the last enemy to it.[7]
There is also a secret involving a hidden sign telling the player to "Feed the statue", which can be done with a nearby enemy by simply striking a fireball towards a gargoyle statue. Doing so will grant the player a ladder very similar to the secret one found in the Cave of Blunders. Entering it will take the player to the secret room referencing the song Murders.
Murders
The secret area for the Caldera of Confusion. It is a small courtyard with various different plants, and a gargoyle statue. The player must make their way from one part of the room to the other without touching a mysterious green material, and if they succeed, will get sent to the next level (Fortress of Misfortune). Touching the green material will simply set the player back to the start without taking any damage. The music that plays in this area is, fittingly, the song Murders re-created to sound like a chiptune track.
Fortress of Misfortune
The final level. This section returns to various differently layered versions of the title song Labyrinth. This level exists in three very distinct segments, making it the most complicated one in the entire game. The first segment is a (relatively) simple chase sequence from a gargoyle, which leads you around winding hallways until you finally reach a ladder at the end. The gargoyle is locked to a specific path, and will not give chase after it reaches the end of the room or if the player manages to sneak their way behind it, which has been proven to be easily possible[8].
The second segment of the level involves dodging the marble spider enemies, fire shooting out of the floor, and erecting several towers that appear to have eggs on top. There is also a "secret" pressure plate (It's actually a section of floor made out of a random checkerboard tile, but it's still technically secret) that opens a ladder that goes straight to the third segment. Otherwise the player would have to erect all of the towers in order to proceed directly to the ending.
The third segment involves the player "dancing" in front of a cage containing the girl the player is trying to save, to the direction of many flashing arrows and to the tune of White Ball. Once the player has done this enough they will find themselves on a boat with the girl, sailing across the sea as the credits play above their heads, going slowly off-screen, and then a smaller, more distant rowboat pulls in from the same side, and returns the player to the title screen, implying that is who we saw there all along.
Sea of Regrets
The Sea of Regret is a very hard to reach area accessed by killing all enemies in Caldera of Confusion (there is one more than what the counter shows). The levels itself is largely barren aside from some sharks to dodge and some on-ground segments to break up gameplay. Ultimately, though, there is no real gameplay to be found here other than survival.
There is another unused version of the level, however, called "waterslide", which features the player being actively forced to move along with the current of the waves, requiring them to dodge the sharks. The code to move the player is, buggy and unfinished. As such, the player will sometimes slide left or right when they aren't supposed to.
The level also features a breakable wall which takes the player to a secret room for the level.
The boss fight is against the Sea Monster. You need to open treasure chests in the right order in order to form the Miracle Musical logo.
Dream Sweet in Sea Major
The secret area for the level "Sea of Regret". The only instance of Dream Sweet in Sea Major being used in-game. A largely empty room with a simple diamond-looking object in the middle, and a vague triforce shape to everything.
Unused Graphics
The following sections contain various pieces of unused content found by datamining the game with Undertale Mod Tool[9].
NOTE: All GIF's used in this article use arbitrary "speeds" and may not reflect the original speed they were meant to be played at when created/played in-game.
- The "Wonderfling" title screen when the game first starts, oddly, uses a gigantic background that is otherwise unused in the rest of the game in order to make the sliding colors inside the logo.
- While the final game has a credits section, there is also a separate graphic that is specific to thanking Coz Baldwin. Presumably this was in use before the final credits sequence was decided upon.
- There is an unused logo in the game for a company named "Magnetic Goat", there is no known information on who/what is Magnetic Goat at this time.
- There is an oddity in the room where you retrieve the game's sword, in the sense that there's some collision in the middle of the void, almost going in a perfect line.
- There are two versions of the credits at the end of the game, one of which is done with text and the other is turned into a sprite. In terms of the final game, the string is used. However, this leaves us with slightly different credits. For the sake of comparison, the two versions of the credits are listed below.
- In the unused room rm_sea_hitboxes there is a large object with a sprite for a sea "monster" creature placed on it. While this is already visible in the image for it inside the "unused rooms" section, the full animation is placed in this section as a gif for
Final Credits: Graphics- Ben Luce | Matt Carmichael - Story Based on Lyrics by- Shane Maux - Music Produced by Ross Federman, Joe Hawley, Bora Karaca - Special Thanks- Coz Baldwin, Sean Donnelly, Rick Lax, Thomas O'Lynnger, Aiko Sakai, Ryan Scott
Beta Credits: Project Lead: Gregory McKnight | Daniel Darvis · Graphics: Ben Luce | Matt Carmichael · Based on a Story by: Shane Maux · Special Thanks: ミラクルミュージカル | Coz Baldwin | Dwight "Theater Kid" Young
- Various names that appear in the beta credits also have unused head icons to go along with them.
Unused Rooms
rm_caldera_1
Appears to be simply another/early level for the caldera area. Has a few oddities like the super skinny path in the top right and the random save point in the bottom left, buit other than that, it's just a regular unfinished/unused room.
rm_caldera_1_1
A VERY unfinished room. It doesn't even use the actual caldera tileset. The tileset used instead is probably a tileset from the studio's other games that was in place before the art got finalized.
rm_caldera_maze
A gigantic maze in the theme of caldera. Contains several rainbow character objects (explained more in their section). Strangely, a screenshot of this level was featured in a HITS news article.[10]
rm_Caldera2
Another room design for caldera. Contains a healing orb, which can only be used once as this room has no way to reload itself.
rm_cave_gargoyle
Very similarly to the final gargoyle chase in the game, this room contains a winding hallway and a gargoyle chasing you. There are only two paths used in this game, the first for the chase in the final game, and presumably the other one was intended for this room as a test of sorts. There are also some missing tiles in the middle of the hallway, but they don't seem to actually serve any functional purpose other than just a visual mistake.
rm_cave_sword
One of the (many) unused rooms that has no tile visual data and just collision. It's completely identical to the final sword room in collision, but the sword is in the middle of the room instead of the small alcove and the rainbow orb is omitted.
rm_cave1
A completely unused room with no tiles. Not much else to say.
rm_cave1_new
The same cave, with tiles. The only oddity here is the object in the top left that's named obj_whitefader, and presumably just fades the screen in from white.
rm_cave2
Average cave with no tiles.
rm_cave2_new
The same average cave with tiles.
rm_cave4
An average cave with (some) tiles.
rm_cave4_new
The same cave but significantly more completed. Contains an instance of the elusive rainbow orb object. This is the only unused area that appears while pressing the Numpad 1 key to skip rooms, so it was probably cut late in development.
rm_cave5
An absolutely massive room, but only a quarter of it is filled with a maze. No tile data. Oddly, the only "cave" room that doesn't have a new version.
rm_fortress_1
A simple fortress-themed maze.
rm_fortress2
Almost identical to rm_fortress_1, with slight tile choice differences and the ladder being moved.
rm_girlpuzzle
A completely massive, and also completely empty, room. Presumably was going to be used for the segment we see in the final game for saving the girl.
rm_level1
Seems to match a style much more akin to Legend of Zelda. A few enemies and some objects designed to center the camera to each room.
rm_level2
The same room, without enemies.
rm_template_sm & rm_template_med
(For the sake of the image servers for this website, I'm not uploading an image for this one.)
They're just empty rooms of varying size containing basic boundary collision with the player placed in the top-left. They presumably just duplicated these rooms and then edited those each time they made a room to save them from constantly re-doing the same initial steps.
rm_Water1
A room from the Sea of Regret series of levels. Level just involves player swimming, and dodging shark enemies that bounce back and forth between the walls, much like the ghosts. Also contains an instance of the ever-so-elusive rainbow orb healing object.
rm_Waterslide
The first of several extremely similar rooms. Contains more sharks, as well as objects that forcibly push the player in the direction of the water's "current". They are somewhat buggy, though.
rm_Waterslide1
Identical to rm_Waterslide except for the addition of a "save point".
rm_zone1
A room that appears to have been barely started before being abandoned.
room0
What appears to be a test room. Collision in this room is not necessarily incorrect, but very oddly placed. This indicates the game's sprite scale was changed at some point along development. Also contains the unused backround from the Wonderfling Studios logo animation.
room13
What appears to be another test room. Contains various enemies, a sword, and a few of the same rainbow text characters.
room44
A different version of the main Sea of Regret stage, but missing the skeletons in all the break areas, as well as the hidden teleport to rm_dreamsweet.
room54
Seriously? (A completely empty room)
rm_sea_hitboxes
This room contains 10 boxes, a sword, and the sea monster sprite. If you hit the boxes with the sword, a Japanese character comes out. These characters are apart of the Miracle Musical logo. When the sword is picked up and all the boxes are hit in the order of the Miracle Musical logo, the Stella Octangula will turn rainbow, and it will send you to the same room Murders will send you. This room is the only one to contain the music track "mindelectric".
Trivia
- The game's internal files contain some particularly funny names, including "bg_blueshit", "spr_fuckboat", "obj_bitchtits" and it's variable "juice", the variable "damned", and the ever-so-clever global variable "hasavagina=false"
- The installer, as well as the game's executable itself, misspell the word "Labyrinth" as "Labrynth", and for an unknown reason is followed by _24, making the full executable title "Labrynth_24"
- The game's healthbar sprite is interally referred to as spr_areola.
- The game has two different and noticeably distinct versions of the skeleton enemy. The beta one shows up in an early version of the main Cave room (the room itself looking almost identical to the final game, except that one of the ladders was placed in the empty cove in the top-left of the cave that is oddly still present in the final version, just very empty), and is named "obj_enm_skeleton". It's AI causes the skeleton to actually have what seems like a "charge" attack, causing an explosion noise each time it swings it's sword. There are even animations to accompany this that aren't used in the final skeleton AI. The oddity when it comes to the skeletons that *are* used is that they are named obj_beetle (possibly suggesting they were at one point another enemy type that simply got reskinned?)
References
- ↑ Hidden In The Sand blog post Hidden In The Sand. 2014.
- ↑ Update #1 Miracle Musical's facebook page. facebook.
- ↑ Update Facebook Post Facebook.
- ↑ Hawaii Partii. Bandcamp. Bandcamp.
- ↑ "Labyrinth (Speed Run)". Albert Q. YouTube.
- ↑ Wonderfling link for the game (broken) wonderfling.
- ↑ https://youtube.com/watch?v=4MVNINhZYMk YouTube.
- ↑ A "speedrun" demonstrating a dodge of the gargoyle (seen around 8:58) [Video] YouTube
- ↑ Undertale Mod Tool
- ↑ "Labyrinth Game Updated With Unheard Hidden Demo (UPDATED)" April 1st, 2015."