History Main / TheMaze

* Who can forget that ''VideoGame/{{Myst}}'' maze that revolved around sound cues? Unfortunately, the solution to the sound cues in question are from a ''different'' age, so it is entirely possible that you've never heard those cues before. If you don't have a save game outside of this age, you have to brute-force the maze.
** Luckily, the maze is constructed in a way that a bit of trial and error will allow you to figure out what the sound cues mean, even if you didn't hear them in the other age.
** You should've seen its beta iteration. Cyan had initially planned to create a walking maze instead, complete with walkways crisscrossing at different levels, stairways, and pointing compasses. They changed it to the Mazerunner system above due to not being able to fit the massive amount of screens it would take onto the game's single CD.

* Much of ''VideoGame/ChipsChallenge''.

** ''VideoGameSuperMario64 DS'' has a hidden level where the player can face a certain boss to free and unlock Luigi for use in gameplay. The player must follow a certain pattern to reach him, but [[OneOfTheseDoorsIsNotLikeTheOther the player can hear where the boss's laughter is coming from.]]

** In ''Twilight Princess'' there's also the room full of falling floor blocks in Hyrule Castle. Listen carefully and you'll hear ghost rats, which clues you in to what you need to do: [[spoiler: use your wolf senses to kill the rats, and follow the pointing ghost soldiers]].
** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaLinksAwakening Link's Awakening]]'':
*** To get to the final boss, one has to conquer the homogeneous maze in the [[spoiler:Wind Fish's egg]]; completing the trading sequence reveals the solution.
*** The Mysterious Forest had a tricky and asymmetric maze part protecting the key to the first dungeon. However, only ''one'' room exit was rigged. If you try to exit north to the chest containing the key, the Raccoon will tell you that you're going to get lost. If you continue anyway, you'll end up in a completely different area of the forest. [[spoiler: Using some Magic Powder on the Raccoon will help you solve this puzzle]].
** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOracleGames Oracle Of Ages]]'' has an outdoor version that is asymmetric and tricky: a trio of mischievous fairies are scrambling space in the area, and you have to find them to get them to return it to normal so that you can reach the exit. ''Seasons'' has an homogeneous maze in a wood past the Tarm ruins.

* The villa stage of ''VideoGame/{{Castlevania64}}'' has a nasty hedge maze you have to run through while being chased by two animate hedge animals and a Frankenstein's monster armed with a chain-saw. Of course you only have to explore about an eighth of the maze and, if you know where to go, will likely get through before the chain-saw monster even shows up. ''[[GuideDangIt If]]'' [[GuideDangIt you know where to go.]]

** ''Super Mario 64 DS'' has a hidden level where the player can face a certain boss to free and unlock Luigi for use in gameplay. The player must follow a certain pattern to reach him, but the thing is, [[OneOfTheseDoorsIsNotLikeTheOther the player can hear where the boss's laughter is coming from, removing the challenge.]]

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).

* The ''Fanfic/HauntedMansionAndTheHatboxGhost'' FanVerse 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.

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** The Pokemon hack ''VideoGame/PokemonSnakewood'' takes this UpToEleven with Madio Cave, of which the main area is a room with about 8 cave exits and a couple ladders, which for the most part just lead to a different entrance in the exact same room. If they don't, they'll either lead you to a room with 4 ladders which have a chance of leading you back into the room from earlier, or an identical version of it with a different tileset. Oh, and if you don't have the Flash HM, have fun trying to navigate the whole thing with reduced visibility.
* ''VideoGame/EarthBound'', like all of its takes on {{RPG}} tropes, has a very strange version of this. The major maze in the game takes place inside of a man who was converted into a gigantic, living, humanoid dungeon.

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* ''VideoGame/Wolfenstein3D'' has these in spades. E2M8 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 ''VideoGame/PacMan''.

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* Where do you expect a game called ''{{VideoGame/Grow}} Maze'' to take place on ?

* ''VideoGame/{{Wild ARMs 3}}'s'' final dungeon had many sections that were basically guessing which door was the right door. Getting it wrong would send you to a random room, usually the beginning of the maze itself, but after staring at the background while randomly guess which room was what for about 10 minutes, it becomes surprisingly easy to get disoriented. Also, the bonus dungeon, The Abyss, is basically around 120 floors of mazes in where you have to collect all the blue crystals (restores VIT and ECN both) on each floor in order to unlock the teleporter to the next floor.
* The bonus dungeons in ''VideoGame/{{Wild ARMs 5}}'' are giant mazes with the exception of Cocytus.

** ''YsVLostKefinKingdomOfSand'' has a ''Zelda''-style sandstorm maze which requires the Sage's Eye to navigate. On top of that, the sandstorm also causes you damage, and you can't use both the Sand Mantle and Sage's Eye at the same time.

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

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* The House of Gemini in ''Manga/SaintSeiya'' is an infinite corridor that warps time and space. If you're lucky, you'll find an "exit" that drops you at the ''entrance'' to the House once again. The only way to escape is to either ignore everything your senses tell you and charge headlong into a wall, or somehow defeat the master of the House --the Gemini Gold Saint himself-- so the illusion ends.

* [[ComicBook/TheSandman Destiny of the Endless]]' realm is the [[https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/File:Garden_of_Forking_Ways_001.jpg "Garden of Forking Ways"]], [[EldritchLocation a fluctuating landscape which warps four-dimensional space]], traversed by forking paths, where tresspassers are doomed to wander around until their deaths. SelfDemonstrating/{{Lobo}} and ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} are the only ones who have managed to navigate their way out of the Garden in ''ComicBook/TheLordsOfLuck'' storyline, and it was only because Lobo's superpower is the ability to track down people across the universe, so he ignored the shifting geography and zeroed in on Destiny's presence... and because Destiny actually ''wanted'' to meet them.

* ''VideoGame/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' features what looks like a maze that is both Asymmetric and Homogeneous. [[spoiler: You're inside Arthur Dent's brain]]. Dropping anything to mark a path results in that item vanishing forever [[spoiler: and resulting in a NonstandardGameOver once you're out]]. There is no actual path--the solution involves [[spoiler: going through five rooms without getting stopped by an electrical synapse, then removing Arthur's common sense when it appears.]]

* OlderThanFeudalism: The Labyrinth of Crete in Myth/ClassicalMythology. 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 HalfHumanHybrid monster, which would eat anyone who entered it.

* ''VideoGame/{{Ys}} 1'' has not one, but two asymmetric teleporting mirror mazes in its VeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon. Sometimes you have to go back into the mirror you emerged from to proceed. The SFC version of ''Ys IV'' also had a tower with a mirror maze.
** ''Ys V'' has a ''Zelda''-style sandstorm maze which requires the Sage's Eye to navigate. On top of that, the sandstorm also causes you damage, and you can't use both the Sand Mantle and Sage's Eye at the same time.
* ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphonia'' has a maze area in the Palmacoasta Ranch. Interestingly enough, the way through the maze was to go on the path with the least foes.

* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestV'''s bonus dungeon has one of these.
** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestI'' and ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIII'' both featured an area that had an infinite loop hallway. Dragon Quest was in Charlock Castle if you took the wrong staircases on your way to fight the Dragonlord. Dragon Quest III had an easily avoidable one in Floor 1 of the Navel of the Earth that really only became a problem if you deliberately went that way.

* ''Spellcasting 101'' had a corn maze where each room had a letter printed on it. [[spoiler:you had to spell THISWAYOUT to continue]]

* Perhaps the most glorious example of this is Managua, a city of roughly two million with nothing as much as ''street names'' for all but major arteries. The city is neither laid out along a grid nor does it follow any other discernible logic ever since an earthquake knocked down what used to be downtown in 1972 and the city has been sprawling into the countryside ever since. Locals navigate by "landmarks" (in fact even the postal system works this way, so a letter should be addressed X blocks south Y blocks east from this and that rather than Z-street) which may include ''traffic lights'' and it is surprisingly common for people to give directions by landmarks ''that don't exist anymore''. Oh and you can't rely on any subway map because Managua has no subway and the buses only got a (semi-official) map in the mid 2010s when some volunteers put the data into Open Street Map.

* ''ComicBook/WonderWoman1942'': The Red Panzer forces Wonder Woman to run a basement maze with a homing missile chasing her.