Precision Maze

Trace a narrow corridor from one end to the other without touching the sides. Thirty courses, three corridor widths, and a daily course that is the same for everyone.

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Trace the course with as few touches as you can. The clock runs and breaks ties, but accuracy is what is being scored.

How to play

Put the pointer down at the marked end of the corridor and trace to the far end. The clock starts when you move, not when you press, so there is no rush to get going.

Touching a wall costs you — how much depends on the mode. So does lifting the pointer off the surface: the two are the same event, priced once.

On a keyboard, press Enter to place the cursor at the start and hold the arrow keys to move it. Two at once move diagonally.

Two rules worth knowing before you start

Lifting the pointer counts as a touch. Exactly what scraping a wall costs, and no more. The run stays open and you can rejoin anywhere inside the corridor.

You cannot skip to the finish. The faint lines across the corridor are checkpoints, and the finish does nothing until they are all behind you.

Modes

Steady Hand: Trace the course with as few touches as you can. The clock runs and breaks ties, but accuracy is what is being scored.
Time Trial: Fastest run wins, and every touch adds 2 seconds. Cutting a corner is worth it only if it saves you more than it costs.
No-touch: The narrowest corridor, and one touch ends the run. There is no trade to make — either you get through clean or you start again.
Wide Lane: The same courses in a corridor half again as wide — built for a finger rather than a mouse. Scored on touches, like Steady Hand.
Daily Course: One course generated from today's UTC date, the same for everyone. No best is kept — a gentle course and a tangled one are not comparable — but the day's result and your streak are.

In Time Trial a touch adds 2 seconds, which is long enough that barging a corner is never the fast way round — the corner itself takes well under a second.

The courses

There are 30, in three families. Every one is grown by the same procedure, which cannot draw a corner too sharp to trace or two passes too close together to fit a wall between — so no course in the list is a trap.

Gentle: — square corners and long straights
Winding: — diagonals, and a turn more often than not
Tangled: — the longest courses, turning almost every step

Tips

Slow down before a corner rather than in it. Most touches happen on the way out of a bend, not on the way in.
Watch the corridor a little ahead of the cursor rather than the cursor itself — the same trick as driving.
In Time Trial, a touch costs 2 seconds. There is almost no corner where cutting it saves that much.
If the trail makes the corridor harder to see on a tangled course, turn it off in the settings. It changes nothing about the rules.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your bests, your daily results and your settings are kept in this browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere — there is no account, no server and no leaderboard. The courses are generated on your own device and the sounds are synthesised there too; nothing is downloaded. Clearing this game's data from the panel above removes all of it and touches nothing else on Zerdly.

Frequently asked questions

I lifted my finger for a moment and it counted as a touch. Is that right?: Yes, and it is the same cost as scraping a wall — no more and no less. A trace is one continuous stroke, so leaving the surface has to cost something; but ending the run outright would be miserable on a phone, where a finger sliding off the glass is the hardware's fault as often as yours. The run stays open and you can put the pointer back down anywhere inside the corridor.
I crossed the finish line and nothing happened.: The faint lines crossing the corridor are checkpoints, and the finish counts for nothing until every one of them is behind you. Without that rule, lifting the pointer and putting it down beside the finish would complete any course instantly. The lines are drawn rather than hidden precisely so this never looks like the game inventing a reason.
The wall seemed to catch me when I was clearly inside the corridor.: It should not, and the collision test is stricter than it looks: the whole movement between two pointer readings is checked against the walls, not just where the pointer ended up. Grazing a wall exactly does NOT count — a tie goes to you. What does catch people is cutting a corner: on a bend, a straight line between two points that are both inside the corridor can pass outside it, and that is a real touch even though both ends looked fine.
Can I play without a mouse or a touchscreen?: Yes. Press Enter to put the cursor at the start, then hold the arrow keys — or W, A, S and D — to move it. Two keys at once move diagonally. It is the same course judged by exactly the same rules; the keyboard is not an easier mode.
Why are there three different corridor widths?: Because a corridor a finger can trace and a corridor a mouse can trace are not the same width. Wide Lane is 64 units across, Steady Hand and Time Trial are 44, and No-touch is 30. The courses are identical — only the room you get changes, which is what makes them different modes rather than a difficulty slider.
Does the Daily keep a best score?: No. It is a different course every day, and a fast time on a gentle course cannot be compared with a slow one on a tangled course. It keeps the day's result and how many days in a row you have finished it, which are the only honest things to keep.
Why is there no leaderboard?: There is no server and no account, so there is nobody to compare you with. Your bests live in this browser and nowhere else. We would rather show you your own best on a course than invent a rank.