Maze Labyrinth

How to play

Get from the small square to the marked circle. Move with the arrow keys or W A S D, with the pad beside the maze, or by tapping a cell next to you — all three do the same thing.

U undoes a move and R puts it back. H marks the next step of a shortest route from wherever you are standing.

Nothing here can trap you: every maze is connected, so there is always a way on from wherever you have got to.

Rules and controls

• Every maze is connected, and the way out is always reachable.
• The start and the exit are the two cells furthest apart, found by walking the maze rather than assumed from the corners.
• A wrong turn is a step that leaves you further from the exit. It is counted, and it never stops you.
• In Large, one press carries you to the next junction, bend, dead end or exit.
• In the Perfect Maze there are no loops, so backing out of a dead end is the only way to recover.
• The run ends the moment you reach the exit.

Modes

• Quick — A small maze with a few shortcuts. One step at a time.
• Large — A big maze, and each press carries you to the next junction.
• Perfect Maze — No loops at all. Every wrong turn is a dead end.
• Fog of War — You can only see what is near you, and where you have been.
• Daily Maze — One maze a day, the same for everybody.

Tips

• Follow one wall. Keeping your hand on the left-hand wall gets you out of any perfect maze eventually — and only of a perfect maze, which is one reason that mode is worth playing.
• Watch the wrong-turn count rather than the clock. It tells you whether you are exploring or going round in circles.
• In Large, aim at junctions rather than at cells. One press per decision is the whole rhythm of that mode.
• In Fog of War, turn the trail on. Remembering where you have been is most of the difficulty, and the trail is the part of that the game is happy to help with.
• If you are stuck near the end, take a hint. It costs you the best time and nothing else, and it always points somewhere sensible from exactly where you are.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your current maze, your settings and your best times are kept on this device only, and the button under the maze clears them without touching any other Zerdly tool. No account, no sign-in, and nothing about your play leaves the machine you are on.

Questions

Where do the mazes come from?

Every one is carved when you ask for it, from the seed shown in the address of the game. Nothing is stored and nothing is copied from a published layout. The carver is a recursive backtracker, chosen because it measures out as the one that feels handcrafted: over sixty mazes its corridors ran about five and a half times longer than a randomised Prim's, with a third as many dead ends and a route more than twice as long.

What counts as a wrong turn?

A step that leaves you further from the way out than you were. It is measured exactly rather than guessed, using the same shortest-route calculation the hints use — so walking into a dead end and coming back costs you the half you walked away and nothing for the half you walked back. Wrong turns never stop you; they are there so you can see how direct a route you took.

Why does one press move me so far in Large?

Because a twenty-five by twenty-five maze is mostly corridor, and pressing a key once per cell is not a puzzle. In Large a press carries you along until there is an actual decision: a junction, a bend, a dead end or the way out. It stops at bends deliberately — taking a bend automatically would mean choosing which way to turn, and on a maze with loops that choice is a route you did not pick.

What makes the Perfect Maze different?

It has no loops at all. There is exactly one route between any two points, so every wrong turn ends in a dead end and backing out is the only way to recover. The other modes have some of their dead ends opened up into shortcuts, which makes them more forgiving — and measurably easier, because a loop is a short cut.

How does Fog of War decide what I can see?

You can see a little way around yourself, measured through the passages rather than across the grid, so you see down a corridor and not through a wall a single cell away. Everywhere you have already walked stays visible. A radius on its own would re-hide a corridor the moment you left it, which turns a memory game into an annoyance.

Are the start and the exit always far apart?

Yes, and it is worked out rather than assumed. Opposite corners of a maze can be a handful of steps apart if the corridors happen to run that way, so the two ends are chosen by walking the maze twice: once to find the furthest cell from an arbitrary point, and again from there to find the furthest cell from that.

What do the difficulty labels mean?

They come from two measurements of the finished maze: how long the shortest way through is, and how many junctions that route passes. They are worth keeping apart because they are only loosely related — a long route down a corridor is a walk, and a shorter one through twenty junctions is a search. The cuts are the thirds each size actually produces.

Does a hint ever send me the wrong way?

No. It marks the next cell along a shortest route from where you are standing right now, not from where you started — so if you have wandered into a loop it takes account of that rather than telling you to undo work that was fine. A maze finished with hints still counts, but it will not take a best time from a run that used fewer.

How does the daily maze work?

One maze a day, the same for everybody, built from the UTC date rather than your local one. It is always the same size and the same rules so a run of results means something, and it is regenerated from the date rather than stored, which is why the generator version is part of the key.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The carving, the solving, the hints, the sounds and your progress all run in your browser. There is no account, and clearing this game's data leaves every other Zerdly tool untouched.

Related interactives

• Traffic Escape — sliding pieces on a crowded grid, with a way out to find.
• Logic Grid Mysteries — deduction across categories, on a marking grid.
• Path Pairs — join matching letters without crossing, and cover the board.
• Slitherlink — draw a single loop that satisfies every clue.