Fractal maze

Story

Here it is:





You need to get from "−" to "+" on top level. Sub-levels A, B and C are exact copies of the top level.

I think it is incredible that it looks so simple. Nothing is hidden, nothing is obscured, the picture is entire maze. You do not even need a computer, there is no complex mechanic, you only need to keep track of your descent stack.

I could not solve the puzzle by just looking at it, so I decided to make a short vim macro to track the movement. I estimated it should take 20-30 minutes, so 10 hours later it actually started working. Here it is, in case somebody is interested: fractal-m.vim. A lot of that time went into ascii rendering of a maze (by hand).

So I had a nice ascii network with reasonably simple rules and virtually no redrawing, but still complex enough, so I have not solved it yet. This souned like an opportunity for a screen0 MSX Basic game.

The game

The biggest challenge was to compress my ascii rendering (which was 32 lines tall) into ≤24 lines rendering which uses box drawing characters. I also had to change naming scheme. Here sub levels have numeric names and exits are letters of the alphabet.