http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMaze



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You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

>West

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The Maze is that which makes it difficult to get from point A to point B.

Technically, mazes in video games are usually labyrinths. A simple maze consists of nothing more than a series of rooms through which navigation is not straightforward: a simulation of a paper maze or actual labyrinth.

Mazes usually show several of the following traits:

Asymmetric: Rooms that are geographically adjacent do not necessarily connect; moving east from Room 1 goes to Room 2, but turning around and going west from Room 2 goes to Room 3 instead. Traditionally, this characteristic is indicated by describing the maze as "twisty".

Homogeneous: Every room in the maze looks identical to every other room, making it difficult to tell which room you are currently in.

Nondeterministic: The passages are essentially portals that teleport you between rooms at random. It may be possible to simply blunder into the exit by doing this ... unless the maze is also:

Advertisement: Tricky: The only way to reach the desired exit is to follow a specific sequence of directions; taking the wrong path will send you to a random room or straight back to the entrance.

The standard way of solving a maze — a symmetric maze, at least — is to draw a map. But when the rooms are also homogeneous, the player will need ways to identify specific rooms; one standard way, at least in text adventures, is to drop a different item in each room (hoping you won't need those items later, of course). A tricky maze usually incorporates some kind of puzzle which either renders the maze deterministic, allowing the player to deduce the path through it (for example, if a wrong path sends you straight back to the entrance, you can quickly chart out the "correct" path to take by trial and error).

If you're lucky enough, however, you weren't ever intended to navigate the maze blindly in the first place; you're supposed to meet up with an NPC guide and/or acquire directions at some plot point before going in.

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If the maze is not homogeneous, then it's very likely that the correct path to take is the one that is the hardest/takes the most effort to get to.

Many mazes are livened up with monsters, traps, and/or treasure. Some of the monsters may be mobile, others stay put and wait for you to find them. A Dungeon Crawler is a game that consists of only mazes filled with monsters (with occasionally a town area at the beginning).

The Mobile Maze is a subtrope. See also Big Labyrinthine Building, Magical Mystery Doors, Unnaturally Looping Location, The Lost Woods and Hedge Maze.

Not to be confused with the former prison in Stroke Country.

Video game examples:

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Action Adventure

Action Game

Adventure Game

Driving Game

A rare driving game example from Mario Kart 64, in the form of Yoshi's Valley. There are a lot of twisting roads leading to other twisting roads, some longer than others. It gets to the point that the position counter essentially has a seizure trying to keep track of where you are. To the point where the position counter doesn't even show anyone. It's replaced with ?'s until racers cross the finish line for the last time.

Fighting Game

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has The Great Maze as its final Subspace Emissary level. Be thankful you have an auto-mapping feature, as unlike most other mazes you have to explore every nook and cranny and kill every copy character and boss to open the way to the final battle. Once you complete the map, though, you realize it was incredibly simple the whole time. It's a single contiguous loop with a multitude of dead-end "branches", making it essentially impossible to actually get lost.

First Person Shooter

The Doom Mission-Pack Sequel The Plutonia Experiment featured "Hunted" , a sprawling maze of wood walls and automatic doors where the player is hunted down by a pack of eighteen Arch-Viles.

, a sprawling maze of wood walls and automatic doors where the player is hunted down by a pack of eighteen Arch-Viles. In the Descent series: Every single level is a maze'', and a three dimensional one at that, with all the Mind Screwiness that implies. Not only is it easy to become lost, these levels are plagued with secret passageways, hidden traps, and frequently entered Mobile Maze territory. The game does have an automap feature, which fills in rooms as you go, but the later mazes get so complex and twisty that the automap becomes almost impossible to read. The sequels include a Guide-Bot that can... well, guide you, although the more hardcore players can ignore that feature to explore on their own. Descent is one of the pioneers of the six-degrees-of-freedom game, so you don't even have a consistent "up" to orient yourself with. Given how levels are constructed, it's possible to create 4D levels for Descent. Yes, there are user-made levels that exploit that capability.

The randomly-generated Labyrinth in Pathways into Darkness, as well as the Guide Dang It! teleporter maze near the end of the game.

The Stalker games have a few conventional instances of these, mainly underground laboratories. Areas full of anomalies usually form open mazes that require you to navigate around normally-invisible hazards. One notable instance occurs in Call of Pripyat, where an NPC leads you to an objective that entails weaving through a maze of Burner anomalies. Watching how he navigates it in the preceding cutscene reduces the amount of time spent tossing bolt around to decipher their locations.

Wolfenstein 3D has these in spades. E 2 M 8 has a maze of push walls in which a sign is hidden: "Call Apogee, say Aardwolf." This was intended for a cancelled contest. Another maze must be navigated to access the third secret level, which in turn is an homage to Pac-Man.

killer7 has two real ones ( Ulmeyda's boss arena in Cloudman and the Lost City in Alter Ego) and a fake one (in the Freaky Fun House in Encounter).

Maze Game

The Pac-Man series of arcade games all take place in mazes filled with food. Pac-Man World 2's penultimate stage, Ghost Bayou, is a giant environmental maze.

Snail Maze is a game built into certain models of the Sega Master System note To play the game, start up the system without a cartridge and hold Up on the D-pad and the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously. where you guide a snail through twelve mazes within a time limit. Subsequent levels reduce the time available, giving a progressively lower margin for error.

MMORP Gs

Satirised, naturally, by Kingdom of Loathing. One of the optional quests involves a "strange leaflet" which plunges the player into a text-based adventure, in which is a classic forest maze. It doesn't matter which way you go—eventually the game itself gets fed up with the maze and fast-forwards to the bit where you get out. But used straight in the Violet Fog and Louvre puzzles. Thankfully, they aren't too annoying. The Hedge Maze in The Naughty Sorceress' Lair also counts. And more recently, the really nasty volcano maze.

City of Heroes has numerous mazes: whole zones like the Sewer Network and Abandoned Sewer Network, parts of zones like the forests in Perez Park and Eden, and lots of mission maps.

The Labyrinth in Rusty Hearts. Unlike the other dungeons up to that point, the labyrinth is separated into six "rooms", and you can only exit the dungeon after entering six doors, after which you're automatically teleported to the Boss Room no matter which path you take. Later on, you find that the real exit is behind a wall that requires two ballista shots to break down, but you normally only have enough time to shoot one. After acquiring a certain item from Estel, you'll be given enough time to find the right path to destroy the wall and find the way out of the Labyrinth.

RuneScape has quite a few mazes in it. Tarn's lair is a maze with multiple floors and several booby traps. It is harder than a lot of the other mazes because the game only allows you to see the room you are currently in. The game used to have a random event where the player would be kidnapped by a mysterious man and locked in a maze. This was one of the random events that were supposed to disrupt cheaters using programs to play the game for them. It has now been removed from the game. The quest Dragon Slayer requires players to go through Melzar's maze, the house of an insane necromancer where the player must kill enemies to get the keys to the next room and the enemies get tougher in each room and using a key on the wrong door sends you backwards. The Dungeoneering skill is trained by travelling through a massive dungeon with 60 randomly generated floors. The player gets bonus points for unlocking every room on a floor. One of the puzzles the players may find is a maze room where the player must get to the center as quickly as possible or poison gas will be released into the room. Another puzzle the player may find is a portal maze where the player takes damage with each portal they go through. The Tree Gnome Village is surrounded by a hedge maze to keep invaders out. The chaos altar dimension contains a maze that the player has to go through before using the altar unless they teleport directly to it. The chaos tunnels, one of which is a shortcut to the chaos altar, are a massive dungeon of tunnels filled with random enemies from all over the game, connected by portals which sometimes malfunction and send you to the wrong tunnel. The Jade Vine Maze, as the name suggests, is a maze made up of the vines of a plant which the player has to climb all over. The lava maze in the wilderness is a very simple maze that leads to the layer of the king black dragon. They later added a teleport shortcut to the king black dragon so players would not need to go through the wilderness (where other players can attack them), although the fight with the KBD becomes easier if the player does. The quest Sliske's Endgame requires that the player go through an enormous maze called Sliske's Labyrinth that is very difficult to complete without a guide.

In World of Warcraft, the "Endless Halls" portion of the "Riddle of the Lucid Nightmare" is this. By consuming the ashes of a long-dead evil Mogu sorcerer, the Player Character finds themselves in a labyrinth, with the end goal being to bring five colored orbs to the matching runes. Since this labyrinth is randomly generated based on player ID and the weekday, it's deliberately designed so that no pre-made map can ever be made. In addition, one of the rooms is a teleport trap, transporting the player to a random room.

Platform Game

Puzzle Game

Roguelike

The second half of levels in NetHack consist largely of mazes. Players are not driven further insane because these are plain labyrinths, easy to navigate because characters at this point tend to be either in rude health or dead, with breakable walls. Each level has at least one minotaur. Mazes in NetHack aren't as much of a problem because of the top-down view. Much being the operative word. They're still incredibly boring, and go for about 20 long floors. Taking a pickaxe to them is very cathartic. note It's also quite useful for when you go back up. Nobody wants to putz around in a maze with the Wizard of Yendor on their ass.



Role Playing Game

Shoot Em Up

Gunstar Heroes: Black's infamous "silly dice maze" stage, which plays out like a game board and the players take turns rolling dice to advance in rooms.

Sports Game

Cubyrinth in Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games.

Survival Horror

Salazar's courtyard in Resident Evil 4.

Castle Red features an extensive Hedge Maze, which is intentionally disorienting and full of strange and bizarre imagery.

Blue Stinger has a maze of ice blocks in the cold storage area. Unlike most other mazes in video games, it features absolutely no landmarks, not even treasure or enemies. It is possible to bypass it entirely by raising the temperature high enough that all the ice will melt, but going through the maze means not having to face a rather difficult mini-boss.

The final area of Silent Hill, called "Nowhere", is essentially a miniature maze with various locations smashed together from all over the game, and a few doors blatantly not leading to where you entered them from.

There is a small segment on Silent Hill 2 where you are inside of an underground maze with multiple holes that allow you to keep going deeper.

Vanish: You play as a nameless person thrown into an underground water main filled with monsters and constantly changing walls which are implied to be alive. The goal is to find the exit before the monsters catch you.

Visual Novel

Cafe Rouge makes the player navigate from the main locations (home, school, the cafe, and Valon's house) by clicking direction arrows to go from street scene to street scene. The problem is that there are only three different scenes, which frequently repeat, so unless the player memorizes the order early on, it's incredibly easy to spend several minutes floundering around lost whenever the location changes (which happens regularly each chapter). And then, one of the paths includes a chase sequence in which you die if you make a wrong turn.

Non-video game examples:

Anime and Manga

Asian Animation

The wolf camp in Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders has a big maze filled with traps as one of the challenges its visitors are required to pass to make it to the top of the structure. Those taking the challenge are supposed to find the exit to the maze while making sure the balloons on their head (carried over from the camp's previous challenge) aren't popped.

Comic Books

Fan Works

In order to break a world record, Calvin makes one of these, dubbed the Monster Maze, in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series.

Bringing Me To Life, being a partial fanfic of both The Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo, has a The Maze level based off the video game example above.

Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: The second trial Maka and the others face on Cobra Island is a maze. At first, they had to pick one out of four doors to enter the maze and then go through it, which has all sorts of traps and tricks waiting for them. However, some of the group members use their abilities to make the task relatively easier.

Owl Castle, in Sleeping Beetle, is a Genius Loci that turns itself into one of these in order to keep Lydia from finding specific rooms.

The Haunted Mansion and the Hatbox Ghost Fan Verse establishes that the Haunted Mansion's deeper corridors (which the guests are not allowed to go into, for their own safety) begin to twist and turn abstractly, and that there are many, many more of them than the house could possibly contain from the outside. Wander in too deep and you might even end up in the Endless Staircases, which aren't even part of the Mansion anymore  they're a [[Bizarrchitecture Escher-style]] set of stairs that connect haunted locations all over the world and beyond, located in their own pocket dimension. Only the Hatbox Ghost seems to know his way around them.

Cranes: Star City and Gotham's streets are labyrinthine because the architects had a feud and made the streets the opposite direction of each other. It makes getting lost a near-certainty, and telling who is an out-towner a breeze. Magic seems to be involved as well.

Film— Live-Action

The premise of the Cube movies is based on this trope (specifically, of the "tricky" variety). In Cube 2: Hypercube, one of the characters is a game designer, and complains that the makers of the Hypercube stole his "variable time room" idea.

Labyrinth, with monsters, tricky passages, obstacles, trail markings being useless, and a time limit.

In Once Upon a Spy, Big Bad Marcus Valorium has constructed an elaborate maze beneath his observatory headquarters. He uses a Trap Door to drop Tannehill into it where she is forced to play a Deadly Game of Cat and Canary against his henchmen Rudy and Greta, with Valorium guiding his henchmen through the maze while Tannehill's partner Chenault guides her.

Pharaoh: The labyrinth where the priests of Egypt keep the country's gold stores, which they control. The bulk of the plot involves Ramses the pharaoh wanting to seize the gold to finance his war and his reforms, but only the priests know the way in.

During the Light Cycle battle in TRON, one of the enemy programs tries to make Kevin Flynn crash his bike by leading him into a maze-like structure formed from the solid light trails left by the other bikes. Fortunately, given how skilled Flynn is at the game "from the other side of the screen", he's just skilled enough to make the quick turns necessary to get out.

Folklore and Mythology

Older Than Feudalism: The Labyrinth of Crete in Classical Mythology. It was a maze so tricky that even its architect Daedalus himself almost got lost in it. It became the home of the Minotaur, a Half-Human Hybrid monster, which would eat anyone who entered it.

Gamebooks

The gamebook Invaders of Hark features a particularly vexing maze as one of the obstacles between you and the princess It gets that from its predecessor, Badlands of Hark. That gamebook included a lethal swamp maze so treacherous that even the instructions warn you about it, and beating it was one of the highest point awards in the game. In fact, both these gamebooks could count as The Maze altogether - in the first one alone, you could die by making a bad choice in section 1, and beating either book requires you to make some seemingly terrible decisions.



Literature

Live Action TV

Pinball

The theme of Loony Labyrinth is the Minotaur's Maze, which houses a Time Machine.

Software

Of course, there are entire games dedicated to solving mazes. This Java program generates mazes in 4D. Expect to spend half an hour solving a 3x3x3x3 maze.

Tabletop Games

While most people don't see it, the spell Maze in Dungeons & Dragons imprisons someone in one of these until they can figure their way out. Minotaurs are immune.

Webcomics

Western Animation

Real Life