Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes

Maxine's Quest opens on a black page with a marquee scrolling "Welcome to Maxine's Quest!" across the top, and it is the first game I have reviewed whose spawn table is a laboratory amplifier. In Live Signal mode, each monster that crawls out of the ring around the arena has been triggered by a spike in an electric current measured on a lab bench in the Southwest, through a hole in a membrane, in salt water. In Random mode, the default, a timer does the same job every two to six seconds.

The game is free, runs in a desktop browser on Phaser 3.87 and comes from Molecular Reality Corporation, a small company that builds instruments for reading molecules with nanopores. The company has described it since 2022 as "both instrument control software AND the portal for all our early game releases." I played the standard version and the "experimental" v2 for an evening each.

How it plays

The player steers Maxine, a red clay imp with two small horns and a wide grin, with the keyboard or by clicking a destination inside a large elliptical arena shaped like a torus. Around its edge runs a ring of 300 vertical lines, one per packet of data, and the monsters emerge from it. Pink oyster mushrooms spiral inward and spit spores every few seconds; touching one destroys it with a chime from a file called good.wav, and that is the player's main way to score. SpinShrooms, yellow with red spots and a grumpy face, cross the arena sideways, and purple DoomShrooms bounce off the walls. Running into either of those, or into a spore, gets a squeak from eep.wav instead. The central pore is worse: it blows Maxine up in a 30-frame explosion before she respawns. A DoomShroom that bounces into the pore is destroyed and counts for the player.

In Live Signal mode the type of monster follows the shape of the signal. The code calls its rule "Simple 2D mapping (tune by feel)." A weak, isolated spike, under 60 percent of the largest recent swing and arriving when fewer than one recent packet in ten had a spike, becomes a SpinShroom. A strong, sustained run becomes a DoomShroom, and any other spike becomes a pink oyster. Each spawn is reported back to the server along with the signal that caused it, so the server hears which mushroom each spike became.

The scoreboard

Two rows of points sit in the top corner, each labeled with a first name, and one of the names is the founder's. Maxine's successes go to the other row. Every time she touches the pore, catches a spore or runs into a SpinShroom or a DoomShroom, 100 points go to the founder. The first row to reach 1,000 ends the level. If it is the player's, the banner says "You win!" If it is the founder's, it says "Slightly less successful." Either way the level restarts five seconds later.

The controls are the instrument

The panel in the lower right carries a voltage knob with three positions, which the code maps to minus 500, 0 and plus 500 mV, and a large switch called the zapper with a three-second cooldown. Both are meant to drive the real amplifier when the game is connected to it. The live current appears in a frame made of clay that the code calls the Clay TV. In v2, which since a May 27 update draws the current as a continuous line instead of vertical bars, an Experimenter Mode toggle blows the Clay TV up to cover most of the screen and tints its frame green, and the voltage presets run from minus 1 V to plus 1 V, with free entry from minus 2,000 to plus 2,000 mV. At that size Maxine's Quest is lab software with a demon in it.

Where it came from

Maxine is Maxwell's demon, the imagined doorkeeper from an 1867 thought experiment who sorts molecules by opening and shutting a gate, and cartoons of the demon gave the company its first name. On the company's message board she describes herself: "I'm a plush doll, as well. Maybe they'll sell me as marketing schwag. We'll see."

The game's ancestor was Spyke Hunter, which the founder has called the company's first "molecular game." Its spikes came from knots tied in a nylon string and pulled through a hole about 2 mm across. In a March post he explained the name as "a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)," and added: "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?" Maxine's Quest itself began as a Python game written with Pygame Zero and was ported to JavaScript; a comment in the function that makes mushrooms still reads "Translate the Python lines to JavaScript."

The plans were always bigger than the game. The company's technical overview from December 2022 shows a control panel with a bias knob, a "zapper stick," a "potion platter," a "Data TV" for the live current and a chatbot called the "brainbot." It promises "solo player, player vs. player, and battle-royale mode a la Fortnite," and proposes writing up results for preprint servers "with author order corresponding to the leaderboard for top experimentalist-gamers."

A companion memo, Early Releases on Maxine's Quest, lists eight titles to be released inside the game, each with its inspirations. Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant cites Gauntlet, Ultima, Pac-Man and Bard's Tale, among others. SARS Odyssey cites Galaga, Missile Command, Defender, Megamania, Star Raiders and Star Wars. Molecules of Mars is "Moon Patrol meets" the Mars trilogy, Genomic Ranger draws on Combat and Gunslinger, and Raindrop Planet on "coconuts, farmville." Poop of the Gods is styled "Tempest meets Qbert but with giant alien space-gods who poop."

Levels

The level menu offers two. Spores and Pores is level 1. Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant is level 7, and in this build it runs a function called setupLabyrinth, which places one horizontal wall and logs "Added wall" to the browser console. Levels 2 through 6 exist in the code and are commented out of the menu: Mostly SpinShrooms, Introducing DoomShrooms, Mushromancer and the Oysters, Mushromancer and the DoomShrooms, and Mushromancer's Spiralling Spores. The Mushromancer is a skull-faced clay mushroom wizard whose "gurk cannon" fires rings of spores. The Dragon Tyrant's sprite sits in the asset folder and appears nowhere.

Anyone who opens the browser's developer tools gets a second game. A comment above a spiral function reads "Somehow doesn't do anything. I'm mystified." Another, on a distance calculation: "Calculate the 2 norm because it's what StackOverflow told me to do. It's just the distance." A speed constant is labeled "For speeding up or slowing down the whole game. Doesn't work yet."