Unnaturally Looping Location

"...shit!"

"None of it made any logical sense. And as Stanley pondered this he began to make other strange observations. For example, why couldn't he see his feet when he looked down? Why did doors close automatically behind him wherever he went? And for that matter, these rooms were starting to look pretty familiar; were they simply repeating?"

— The Narrator, The Stanley Parable

When trying to do anything, free mobility is a big help, but not something people often think about. Most of the time, we can physically get from point A to point B, even if the route is difficult or unusual, and it's said that this journey is better than the destination itself. We take it so for-granted that we can just walk down our hallway and end up where we need to go, that when this expectation is subverted, it can be quite the confusing or even disturbing event.

Enter this place: a location that constantly loops. Going up stairs will just send you back to the bottom step. Opening a door in one room will just lead you back to that same room. Following a single-path hallway will lead you back to the beginning of that hallway. Played right, and this single place can lead to a Mind Screw just by refusing to have a proper destination.

When there's an explanation, it's almost always supernatural in origin, and may even exist just to make the character experiencing it suffer. Like a Time Loop Trap, the person stuck will go insane, but rather than have the loop apply to their life, it applies to the very place they're in, with seemingly no way out unless the forces at work decide to give them one. It may also be an intentional trap set up by someone with Reality Warper abilities. At the same time, it may be a literally repeating set of scenery, or be caused by teleportation shenanigans.

In video games, this can manifest as a puzzle — the player will be stuck in a loop until they figure out how to escape it. In fact, a common setting in video games with fixed top-down views is to have a room with four entryways, where taking the south exit always leads back to the exit, and going through the north, east and western doors in the correct sequence is the key to going through the maze.

Compare with the more mundane Going in Circles. Related to, and often overlaps with, Bizarrchitecture, Alien Geometries and Mobile Maze, but doesn't always; this can also be a small-scale Eldritch Location. May take the form of an Endless Corridor or Absurdly Long Stairway; and likewise, any use of Scooby-Dooby Doors is an example of this. When done in a visual medium, Seamless Scenery is often used to pull off the effect. See also Wrap Around, for when the very edges of a screen are connected, and the Wraparound Background, for when animated backgrounds are repeated for the sake of a budget. Finally, contrast with Non Sequitur Environment, where the weird part is that the environment is changing.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Chainsaw Man: The Eternity Devil turns the eighth floor of a hotel into an infinitely-repeating loop; the Devil Hunters, no matter what manner of exit they find, always find themselves back on the eight floor whenever they enter from another side of the floor. Once the Eternity Devil reveals itself, Denji decides to fight it for several days until it surrenders and allows Denji to kill it, the pain from being attacked by chainsaws for several days having become unbearable. Shortly afterwards, the loop breaks and the Devil Hunters return home, hungry and utterly exhausted.
• Flying Witch: One chapter has a shopping street being replicated endlessly. Turns out it's caused by a magical creature and Makoto's job is to capture it.
• Hell Girl: As Hotaru learns, no matter how far away she walks, she'll always end up back at the entrance of Ai's house.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: The Ghost Alley of Morioh goes around in a loop if someone tries to go back the way they came, always ending up back at the same corner. Likewise, the direction of up is twisted into going back towards the ground. Reimi Sugimoto, who resides there, explains the way to leave is by going in a different direction and keep going straight without looking back, otherwise an otherworldly force will drag them to the underworld.
  • Steel Ball Run: Johnny, Gyro, and Hot Pants repeatedly ride through parts of the same forest. Ringo Roadagain, a Death Seeker, refuses to let them escape unless one of them fights and kills him. Subverted in that the forest itself is not actually looping. Ringo can rewind time with his Stand and he's using his power to disorient them.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Utahime and Mei Mei once encountered a cursed spirit haunting an abandoned mansion that trapped the two of them in one of the floors by having it loop upon itself. While they disappeared for two days, both girls were able to surmise a few properties of the curse and deduce that the loop was imperfect, since every time they returned to the same spot it took them a different amount of steps. They attempted to break the loop by running in opposite directions, but Satoru Gojo destroyed the mansion before they could see if their plan would've worked.
• This happens in the Kyoto arc of Negima! Magister Negi Magi, as Negi and Asuna find themselves walking on a straight path for a long time before they realize they're caught in one of these. Negi attempts to keep going and runs into Asuna from behind. Attempts to escape from the side are fruitless. Negi then tries flying upward and teleports from the ground. Eventually they break the spell and continue onward while trapping the perpetrator inside it.
• Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai: The fight between Palkia and Dialga results in Alamos Town becoming inescapable; the bridge to escape only leads back to the beginning of that bridge, no matter which way it's crossed.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, one of the first hints that leads Homura to realize that the city of Mitakihara the cast are in might actually be a Witch's Labyrinth is that attempting to leave via bus for the neighboring city of Kazamino, where Kyoko is from, just results in them reappearing on the other side of Mitakihara.
• Sailor Moon Stars: When trapped in a magical illusion, the team is disturbed to see that the ruins they're in is set on repeat.
• In Uzumaki, once the town gets consumed by twisters, the townspeople get trapped. Any attempts to leave send them right back to where they were. The protagonists discover this for themselves when they try to go through the hills, somehow circling back around until they were face to face with people leaving the town.

Arts

• One of M.C. Escher's most famous pieces is titled "Another World", consisting of a room where the walls, floor and ceiling all appear to show the same scene (a window opening on a lunar landscape, with a horn or a bird with a human head) from different angles simultaneously. And then someone made a looping version.

Fairy Tales

• In Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "The Turnip Princess", the prince finds himself trapped in an enchanted cave together with several cursed creatures. Every time the prince runs towards the cave's mouth to try to escape, he finds himself back in the deepest, darkest part.
  He could not endure her presence and tried to flee—- but he found he couldn't get out. Every time he walked towards the light he found himself deep inside the cave again.

Fan Works

• In Chapter 54 of The Great Alicorn Hunt, Pinkie Pie is furious at soon-to-be ex-Mayor Fussbudget for giving Mach One a papier-mache cake instead of a real birthday cake. So she decides to recreate the papier-mache birthday cake and force-feed it to Fussbudget. When he tries to escape, Pinkie Pie invokes this trope by warping his escape routes to bring him right back where he started so that he can't escape his punishment.

Films — Live-Action

• The Blair Witch Project: The forest where the witch supposedly lives is heavily implied to be this. At least the main characters travel across the woods by the compass and still eventually end up at the same place.
• The Bridge Curse: Two female students try running down a flight of stairs to a lower floor, only they don't realize they're not going anywhere until they notice the 2/3 sign on the wall, which they passed several times.
• Camp Slaughter: When the quartet attempt to walk out of the camp, they just wind up at the entrance again. Before their car breaks down, they're seen passing the same street sign several times, implying they're already stuck in the loop.
• Cube 2: Hypercube: Jerry mentions that after waking up, he started exploring the interconnected cubical rooms of the hypercube and marking them, but no matter what direction he took, for several hours he always ended up in the same three rooms. The trope is weaponised when one character escapes through a door only to simultaneously attack the person she's fleeing from, using the door behind him.
• In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo finds himself in a subway station. He runs down the tunnel, only to find himself approaching the station from the other way, too soon for the tunnel to be a closed loop.
• Thor: Ragnarok: Once imprisoned on Sakaar and speaking with Korg, the leader of the enslaved gladiators, Thor tries to run around the cell and determine the area's size and shape. But as soon as he disappears around the circle's bend he reappears right behind Korg.
  Korg: Aw yea no, this whole thing is a circle. But not a real circle, more like a freaky circle.
  Thor: This doesn't make any sense.
  Korg: Nah nothing makes sense here, man. The only thing that does make sense is that nothing makes sense.
• In Vivarium, the two protagonists try to exit a neighbourhood filled with identical houses, but no matter which way they turn (or even if they go straight) they always end up at the same particular house.

Literature

• Animorphs: In #13, Tobias and Rachel are flying over the forest when they realize they keep flying over the same patch of forest. Eventually they spot what they're supposed to spot (two Hork-Bajir escaping the Yeerks) and help them. It turns out to be the Ellimist's doing, who later gives Tobias his morphing ability back... but his base form is now a red-tailed hawk. He does let Tobias acquire his old human self though.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel "Toy Soldiers" has the protagonists on a planet fighting a Forever War. At one point they decide to explore the trench system only to find it forms a huge circle with the enemy occupying another part of the same trench.
• The Seventh Tower: One wooden building in Aenir prevents anyone from leaving once they've set foot inside by warping them back. Stepping out through the doorway makes you step into the building. Trying to fly away warps you back to the roof once you land. The only way to get out is by holding onto something that extends in from the outside, such as a rope, and following it out.
• In Ian Watson's sci-fi short Jewels in an Angel's Wing, the protagonists are trapped in a video-game-esque virtual reality. When they complete the final "level", they are put back at the start, making it a Closed Circle as well.

Live-Action TV

• The Good Place: While being tested by The Judge, Eleanor keeps walking through a door in one wall only to stride into the same room she started in. This is also used for misdirection, as the location doesn't always loop which enables the real Chidi, exiting through one door, to be replaced with a substitute entering through another.
• The Avengers (1960s): In season 4 episode 23, "The House That Jack Built", a slowly rotating, long hallway is used to simulate this effect. It's part of several ploys designed to drive Emma Peel insane.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • The episode "Where Silence Has Lease" features an alien simulacrum of USS Yamato (sister ship of the Enterprise) where opening a door on The Bridge leads to... the bridge.
  • The episode "The Royale" traps the away team in an alien-simulated version of an opulent hotel. When they try to leave, the revolving doors simply deposit them back in the lobby they came from.
• Eureka: As punishment for murdering Holly, Beverly locks Senator Wen in a virtual version of the Sheriff's office, bringing her back in to the one-room building every time she tries to leave.
• In Wayward Pines, taking the main road out of the town will eventually bring you back to it. This is a mundane example as the road really is an endless loop that curves repeatedly to confuse peoples' sense of direction.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Life Serial", the Trio trap Buffy in a "Groundhog Day" Loop inside the Magic Box. At one point Buffy tries to just walk out the front door. Everyone is puzzled when she immediately appears in the shop again through the back door.
• Warehouse 13: In "Breakdown", Claudia, Pete, and Myka find themselves trapped in a "clingy house" version of Leena's B&B in the Warehouse. Try to go out the front door, come in at the back of the hallway. Jump out through a window, fall in through the adjacent window. Climb out through the hole Claudia fell in through? Come back in through the fireplace. Turns out actual artifact is a painting fused to the wall, and the only way out is to cut a door in the painting.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Fifth Doctor's debut episode "Castrovalva" sees him and his companions trapped in a small alien village that works this way, courtesy of the Master.
  • The Fourth Doctor's finale, "Logopolis", has a brief subplot where a malfunction (again, courtesy of the Master) seemingly causes the TARDIS to materialize inside itself, such that if you enter the TARDIS sitting in the Console Room, you'll just walk back in the Console Room doors where you started.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor's "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" has the titular villa's floor plan messed with, leading to people in different parts of the house being separated and stuck in different loops.
• The Land of the Lost (1974) is a "closed universe" and works this way. If you ride down the river far enough, you wind up back where you started. If you stand on a mountain and look at the next peak through binoculars, you'll see your own back and realize the whole mountain range is the same mountain, repeated endlessly. Since a sense of being trapped is central to the show's premise, this is all completely appropriate.
• Star Trek: Voyager. In "Twisted" the entire spaceship ends up like this thanks to a Negative Space Wedgie. In one scene, Tuvok and Chakotay walk off in opposite directions down a corridor, only to end up running into each other five seconds later.

Tabletop Games

• In Planescape, this is described as one of the ways that the Lady of Pain's Mazes work. A portion of the city of Sigil loops back on itself and traps the target of the Lady's ire inside. There's always a way out of every Maze, but mortals generally go insane and die before they find it. Immortals generally just go insane.

Theatre

• The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter involves two hitmen waiting in a room to kill a man. At the end of the play, one of them goes to the bathroom just as they get the call that their victim is approaching. His partner takes aim at the door... only for the other hitman who was in the bathroom to walk through it, then the play ends.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: In one side-mission, Ann's search for a missing suspect has her entering a hellevator that leads to a Missing Floor going in a endless loop across a black empty space. She only finds the exit by traversing in the opposite direction.
• Antichamber has some rather weird locations. Some examples of loops include a pair of stairways that both lead back to the same room and a series of T shaped rooms where many of the ends lead back to the start.
• Ashes Afterglow features one of these in the prologue tutorial Nightmare Sequence. You can veer off the main path to go after a fading light, and turn the corner again and again after it with no real result. Turn back, and you'll see you are back at the start.
• This is a fairly common "trick" in The Bard's Tale Trilogy and similar Dungeon Crawling games, used to mess with the player's map-making.
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: The storage crate maze on Pyramid Island is a Lost Woods-style maze where going the incorrect way will take you back to the start, but even going the correct way will have you revisiting rooms that shouldn't be connected to each other. Though the Oldhead guarding the entrance warns you not to think that everything you see in there is reality.
• Digimon World 3 features the aptly named Mobius Desert, a vast desert that appears to be a maze with endlessly repeating areas. In most of the areas, regardless of whether you keep moving left or right, you will eventually ends up back at the same area. In reality, it is a 5x5 toroidal grid, with each corners and sides being the exact same area. The only way to advance to Mirage Tower is to realize it is 5x5, then find the center of the desert, and after that, keep going to the left.
• In The Dreamhold, a spell has been placed on one hallway to go on forever unless the right dispell is known. The stairs in the dim shed are a different example, as there are far more stairs when going up when going down, but they do eventually end.
• In the first dream sequence of Dreaming Treat, Treat finds that the second floor of the hot springs has turned into an endlessly looping hallway. It has no real significance beyond adding a bit of surreality to the dream.
• Duke Nukem 3D:
  • In the episode 3 secret level "Tier Drops", where there are four separate rooms that occupy the same three-dimensional space, but which contain vertical pipes in the floor that you can jump through to wind up falling out of the ceiling in one of the other rooms. The Build Engine is pretty good at permitting such constructs thanks to invisible teleporters and the way it connects individual sectors.
  • The episode 2 secret level "Lunatic Fringe" and the end of the first level of episode 5 "High Times" have another kind of unnatural loop where you have to circle a full 720 degrees to return to your starting point, akin to a Mobius Strip. The first example is due to Alien Geometry, while the other is implied to be because Duke got stoned.
• The Endless Stairway in Enchanter, which you can climb/descend forever without getting anywhere as the whole thing is a magical illusion.
• Epic Battle Fantasy:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4: There's a maze where you need to go through the rooms in the correct sequence to find the exit (and requires you to find the item showing the way even on a New Game Plus).
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The glitch worlds loop with left leading to the right, and up leading to the bottom of the screen, and vice versa. Except for the final Redpine one, where going up leads to an Optional Boss, but all the other sides work the same.
• Etrian Odyssey: One of the late-game sidequests, "Reversal of the Poles", concerns a spatial anomaly on B18F wherein you have to carefully navigate the wide open area or else you get mysteriously teleported back to the stairs. After traversing the correct route (or if you decide to just abort the quest), the anomaly disappears and you can freely explore the floor again.
• The Exit 8 is set entirely within one underground passage that loops around to itself. Players have to choose what direction to walk in based on the presence of "anomalies", in order to reach the eponymous Exit.
• Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon features an endless corridor in an already frustrating level, thanks to one of the "sneaky teleporters" of the game, who sends the party back a few squares with no visual clue. Leaving an item on the floor allow one to realize what's going on. There's no way to ever reach the other end of the corridor.
• Every area in Final Fantasy has a Wrap Around, but only a few interior areas actually take advantage of it to create these:
  • The fourth floor of the Flying Fortress is an "endless" grid of of three horizontal and three vertical corridors in a loop. One can reach the teleporter to the next floor by either going two corridors left and two up or using the Wrap Around to go one right and one down.
  • The desert floor in the Updated Rereleases' Earthgift Shrine is a similarly "endless" area with the uniform sands being broken up by palm trees in arrow formations. The path pointed out by the trees crosses over the Wrap Around twice before reaching the exit, making it longer than a standard dungeon would allow for. The looping nature of the desert also means that the path can be encountered at any point along its length or even passed over without noticing.
• Golden Sun:
  • Golden Sun has Mogall Forest, a dungeon where one screen keeps looping unless you take the right corridor.
  • In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, the interior of Gaia Rock consists of a room with four entryways and a single plant growing in the middle. Walking into the doors at random will lead you back to the same room (except the bottom one which leads back to the exit no matter how many rooms you'd crossed), but using Growth on the plant will cause its leaves to grow into an arrow pointing the right way.
  • Subverted in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, where one maze looks like this trope, but is actually using Cut and Paste Environments.
• One room in the green cavern of The Goonies II just loops back on itself continuously. The way you're supposed to go is through a secret door in the back wall.
• Grim Fandango: The Petrified Forest has one moment where Manny and Glottis will find themselves going through the same pathway no matter which one they take. It's only by using the direction sign that the real exit appears.
• Late in Antonio's fifth season of Havenfall Is for Lovers, Antonio takes the heroine to the abandoned amusement park. There, the Cult of Blood magically entraps them, so that trying to leave the park will eventually take them right back to it.
• Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-: The stairways in the World Within are a variation in that they form one of these in only one direction. Each stairway has a mirror portal to the next one on its upper landing and a solid wall on the lower one, preventing you from traveling backward. The fourth stairway's landing returns you to the first. The actual exit is a floating mirror at the bottom of the fourth stairway, which leads to the Boss Room.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Many games, starting with the first, have an area (usually called The Lost Woods), where Link will return to his starting location if he doesn't take the exact right path. The games vary on whether this is an actual spatial warp, or a representation of getting lost.
  • The Wind Fish's Egg in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has a maze before Link faces the final boss. Assuming the correct pattern was learned at the library, or else Link will be trapped in repeating the same rooms.
  • At the end of a linked game of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, the way to the final boss is through a corridor of one-eyed statues that stare in every direction except the one where you need to go (the directions are random, but sometimes it's possible for the sequence to just be up all the way).
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Disorientation Station consists of several looping identical rooms that are randomly distributed.
• Manifold Garden: A core part of the game's design, with all environments exhibiting this on various scales. The game's website loops back to the top if you scroll down far enough.
• Mega Man: Rock N Roll: The Yoku Devil instigates this during his fight, turning the Bottomless Pit at the bottom of his arena into a portal that leads to the top.
• My House has three of these utilizing the GZDoom sourceport's lineportal feature:
  • The endlessly descending circular staircase around a Bottomless Pit in the Great Hall of the closet labyrinth.
  • An SCP-087-inspired repeating back-and-forth stairway with two doors connecting to each other on the fourth and sixth floors of the loop, another door leading to the third floor from The Backrooms, another on the second floor reached by a fall from the Brutalist House, another exiting from the skybox area of the Bathhouse to the first floor, and the last one on the fifth floor leading back to the main house.
  • The spiral parking garage between the Brutalist House and the Airport.
• The "Endless Staircase" area in Neopets: The Darkest Faerie serves as a puzzles for players. The only way to escape from the loop is to run up or down the stairs in the direction indicated by the pointing Quiggle statues which appear on the staircase landings. If players don't follow those directions, they'll be stuck on a looping spiral staircase inside a swirling starry void, battling low-level Evil Harris monsters that the loop generates every minute or so.
• The Other: Airi's Adventure: The Park loops, if the exit from the top of the screen is taken, Airi re-appears at the bottom, and gets a Confused Question Mark Pictorial Speech-Bubble. The only way forward is to move to the right.
• Pokémon X and Y has the Winding Woods, with a path that can bring you to the same place again and again. There is a specific method to advance to the Pokemon Village, and it involves turning around and go back after entering one of the area, which will transport you to a different area instead of the previous map.
• An in-universe mechanic in the Submachine series, started with the third game, "The Loop", consisting of an infinite number of identical rooms which can only be navigated using a device that shows XY coordinates. Later games use loops in the form of varying screens that repeat until the player finds the one way back.
• The Infinite Cafe in The Pirate's Fate. It's a small room, comfortably furnished with cushions and fine foods and an "Arabian Nights" Days scene visible through a window, as well as several exits. However, each of those exits leads only to a room exactly identical to the original, including the perspective of the view, infinitely. Many of the inhabitants (at least, those that are real) have gone mad from trying to find their way out, and yet they don't actually age or die, just wander. How does one escape? Either learn to accept it as what it is, a place to stop and rest for a while, without trying to escape... or just smash your way out, because it's actually just a Secret Test of Character.
• This is popular in fan made test chambers for Portal 2. This is because the game world is connected together by "world portals" adapted from the games signature mechanic to speed up development. It's easy to take two of these and loop them together to create the illusion of infinity repeating scenery as well as a lot of other bizarre non Euclidean locations.
• P.T.: Besides a few disturbing rooms, the bulk of the game takes place in a building that constantly loops as the player goes through a hallway and eventually comes back to the beginning.
• Ragnarok Online:
  • Hidden Temple map, also known as the aptly named Labyrinth Forest, has absolutely no real pattern in how its 25 areas connect with each other. Players can ends up going into the same area over and over again, so more often that not, opening up an online guide is necessary when going to the map. Other than that, the only good way to escape is by using items or skills that teleports you back to your saved location, or use an item that teleports you around in the same map, hoping you land into the area that has the red marker that signifies an entrance/exit.
  • A harder version than Hidden Temple map, is the Hazy Forest map, which is an instance map, and therefore forbids any form of teleportation within the same map, meaning you literally either walk through, or go home. The kicker here, is that the solution to go through the map actually involves deliberately looping yourself back to an area you already visited, after opening up the next portal there from another area in the map. An online guide is even more necessary for this, considering Hazy Forest has a whopping 75 different areas in it.
  • The Biolab Access Quest features a map that consist of 9 square areas connected to each other, that all looks exactly the same. The only way to escape is by checking your in-game coordinate right as you enter, as this determine which way to go to escape the maze◊. Making it more frustrating, is that the exit has a chance to loop you further instead of letting you exit, which means you have to retrace the coordinates again.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant has a certain hallway in Queen's Garden, that will endlessly repeat its last section until you solve a puzzle earlier in the dungeon.
• Spirit Hunter: NG:
  • In the first Survival Escape, Akira and Ami try to run away from a car that's barreling down a narrow alleyway towards them. However, no matter how much they run, they remain in the alleyway, and realize that some other solution is required to stay alive.
  • The Miroku Mansion is revealed to have a hallway that impossibly loops back around to the Mansion's entrance. Depending on what mask is used to enter the hallway, the mansion changes subtly and offers more clues for Akira and co. to investigate.
• This is a staple of Sonic the Hedgehog's 2D platformer games. It usually manifests as a series of ramps that the player slides down, where the end of the last ramp connects to the first one. Only by jumping off a particular ramp in a particular spot can the player actually continue with the level. Each game adds its own oddities to the formula.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog
    • Labyrinth Zone Act 3 is the initial example of this trope in the series. Its example complicates things beyond the usual level of complexity by making the platform that must be jumped on to escape the loop blocked by a door that only opens if the player jumps off the loop and presses a button to open it on a second platform.
    • Scrap Brain Zone Act 2 also loops vertically, but only the transport tubes loop from top to bottom. Taking a transport tube downward from the beginning of the level causes Sonic to end up taking the upper path along the top of the level.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    • All three acts of Metropolis Zone loop vertically. This is most noticeable at the end of Act 1, where there are vertical corridors that the player falls through and must jump out of at the right time instead of the usual diagonal ramps. In certain places, though, if the player takes a route that reaches the top of the map, that route may seamlessly reappear at the bottom. The multiple routes make use of these with, for example, one route heading upwards, only to mysteriously meet up with a lower one at the bottom of the stage.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles
    • Marble Garden Zone Act 1 loops vertically, and the beginning of the level has a series of steep vertical drops that cover a much larger vertical distance than would otherwise be possible. Later portions of the level use a trick similar to that in Metropolis Zone from Sonic 2, where one route heads upwards, another heads downwards, and the two routes mysteriously combine in the opposite direction.
    • Ice Cap Zone Act 1 uses this a number of times. When playing as Sonic, the level starts out with a snowboarding scene in which Sonic loops vertically five times before the player takes control of Sonic. Later parts of the level have vertical dropping slides, where the player must use an ice platform to break through a wall in order to exit the area.
    • Sandopolis Zone Act 2 uses this multiple times in quick succession in the same level, all while forcing the player to keep sustaining the loop by jumping back onto it to avoid ghosts killing the player. Jumping off at the right point here can be quite difficult and deadly in this.
    • Sky Sanctuary Zone also wraps vertically, to give the illusion that the level is much taller than it actually is. The path through the level involves the player progressing upwards through the level, but it's not immediately obvious that the player actually progresses from the bottom to the top of the level twice.
  • Sonic Mania has one level that does this, where falling out the bottom of the level teleports the player back in the top. Unusually for the franchise, this is justified in-universe by a magical mist teleporting the player around, with this mist being created by the Phantom Ruby, the game's primary MacGuffin.
• The Stanley Parable: In the "Insanity/Mariella Ending", Stanley ends up in a series of rooms that continuously repeat as he walks through them, and where he spends the rest of the ending. Catching onto the impossible nature of everything that's happening, he becomes convinced that he's just dreaming, and tries to wake himself up... only for him to discover that this is Not A Dream, and that he's really, truly, stuck in an endlessly looping hallway... and then he starts screaming for help.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: In some levels, the level keeps looping unless you take the correct corridor out of multiple choices. In some versions, a chime plays when you pick the right one, and a buzzer otherwise; in others, it's just a guess.
  • Super Mario 64: If Mario has less than 70 Power Stars, the staircase leading up to the final Bowser battle will endlessly loop (and also plays a strange melody that seems to endlessly increase in pitch). It is possible to exploit a glitch to get Mario to move so quickly that he bypasses the loop altogether.
  • Paper Mario 64:
    • The Forever Forest in Chapter 3 will take Mario back to the entrance if he takes the wrong turn. The key to making progress is to keep an eye on the surroundings in each section and take the exit that looks slightly different to the other three.
    • In Bowser's Castle, there's one segment containing various passages that takes Mario back to the starting room if he enters the wrong one. The flames indicate the order to enter the passages.
  • A similar puzzle appears in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door at The Palace of Shadow, where entering the wrong door without a lit lantern will send Mario back to the previous room.
  • The final level in New Super Mario Bros. has this as one of its two gimmicks (the other being gravity direction change). Mario or Luigi has to go through specific segments of the final route to avoid looping around them. A chime is used to indicate that you're going through the right parts.
  • The World 2's Castle in New Super Mario Bros. Wii is an auto-scrolling version of this. Mario and his friends have to pick the correct route quickly, because the level won't tell whether the choice was correct or not until the scroll has advanced far enough to prevent players from changing minds.
• In Touhou Project, this is one effect of the Great Hakurei Barrier that separates Gensokyo from the outside world. According to Marisa in Touhou Ibarakasen ~ Wild and Horned Hermit, she once tried flying as far as possible, but the same scenery kept repeating over and over no matter how far she went. When she looked back, she found herself in the same spot she started.
• Maze levels in Transformers: Convoy no Nazo loop unless you take the correct route, with no indication of which that is.
• Unreal Tournament has the titular Fractal Reactor of DM-Fractal - jumping into the vertical reactor causes you to fall downwards into an energy beam on the ceiling. If you are able to look through the portal, you can see the reactor repeat itself several times.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The Tundra works like this. A specific path must be followed to reach the other side, although, every other important landmark can be reached just by walking to the right spot. The Tundra is infinite, except at the bottom, where walking down enough leads back to where exiting to where the player enters the Tundra.
• In When The Darkness Comes, the first trial the player has to face involves going through a door that leads into a creepy hallway, which then leads back to the room they were originally in. The narrator is also confused by this, and tries to make the player by making the doors more and more obvious, which doesn't break the loop at all.
• Many of the "upper" levels of Yume Nikki have unwrapped toroidal geometry, so walking in any given direction for a while will just loop back to your starting point. The Infinite Road in particular will constantly loop on itself—but only if you go east. Going west from there will take you to a completely different location from where you started.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: In a desperate attempt to escape, Pomni enters an exit door that appears in front of her, that takes her to an eerie office area that loops endlessly whenever she passes by a new door, eventually causing her to laugh madly.
• RWBY: In Volume 9, the team ends up in the Ever After, The Wonderland from the in-universe story of "The Girl Who Fell Through the World". They know that in the story, the way to return to their world is at the giant tree in the center of the Ever After. But every time they try to walk straight there, they somehow loop around to back where they started walking a few steps later. The Ever After is forcing the team to interact with each acre before permitting them to continue forward. Weiss tries to brute-force the loop as the rest of the team watches her get increasingly flustered returning to where they're sitting. Then she loses her temper and tries to throw a rock into the loop - that ends comically.
  Weiss:Stupid tree!
  [Smack]

Web Comics

• White Rooms: After encountering Ivan, Andre and Ed leave, traveling in a straight line from room to room, reasoning that if they go far enough they’ll eventually reach the exit. After 55 rooms, they find... the same room with Ivan in it. Rits later tells them that walking in a straight line will always take you back where you started, and he suspects the exit is somewhere in the middle instead.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!: When Bob, Jean, and Voluptua are trapped in the Eldritch Location of the Cone Ship's interior, they speculate on whether this may be the case, Bob even comparing it to a video game. They never get to confirm it, though.

Web Videos

• The Somnovem from Critical Role: Wildemount use this as the Cognouza ward expanded in the Astral Sea, its streets and neighborhoods grew in repeated, fractal patterns, making them difficult to navigate without first creating a psychic link with the city.
• Everyman HYBRID: HABIT refers to Dr. Corenthal's house as being "in flux", as a place constantly shifting in impossible ways that even makes an immortal entity nervous. One of the results of this is that the house can loop, such as Vinnie and HABIT going to try and find HABIT's gun, only to wind up back where they had started.
• "My house walkthrough", created by nana825763 (better known as the creator of "Username 666") utilises this trope as the central theme, with each loop of the house featuring things getting progressively more eerie. This video features some very impressive special effects, which were realised through practical memes, as nana825763 went to great effort modifying furniture in the house and putting together sets which were gradually changed over the course of filming, giving a sense that things were becoming different every time the footage loops.
• Tribe Twelve uses this a lot:
  • In "Halloween Hotel", The Observer pranks Noah by constantly warping him around as he tries to pursue his stalker through the titular hotel. This includes leaving his hotel room, only to be transported back to that hotel room, and running down a hallway that only brings him back to the start of the hallway. This only ends when The Observer decides to stop trolling him.
  • In "Bridge To Nowhere", Noah was mysteriously transported to a place called the "Candelverse", where a dead character from the same-universe series Everyman HYBRID is alive, the evil spirits and monsters have immense power, and the geography is utterly incomprehensible. He tries to get into an apartment complex, only for the stairs to loop him back to the beginning every time, which happens until he gives up.
  • "Pitfall" takes place at the Boardwalk, the location where The Collective's world means the human world, and Noah is told to go up the observation tower. In trying to do so, he gets stuck in an endless loop, where no matter what he tries to do, he can no longer do anything but continuously climb the steps. The only way out of it is to jump from the tower... which does free him from the loop, but also gets him badly injured in the process. As a small nod to what's happening, the chime from Super Mario 64's endless staircase plays in the background.
  • Still stuck at the Boardwalk, Noah's next task is to figure out how to escape, since taking the usual route home only leads to the beginning of the Boardwalk. It takes advice from his future self before he can come up with a way to get out; this, in fact, was the very reason Noah was taken there in the first place, as it was a test to force him to learn what the Collective refer to as "Severance".

Western Animation

• Cartoon Network Groovies: "Circles" parodies Hanna-Barbera's usual Wraparound Backgrounds by turning one into this trope. Barney Rubble, Fred Flintstone, and later multiple other Hanna-Barbera characters are trapped in Barney's house trying to look for an exit, with the others questioning how they got there in the first place.
• Code Lyoko: Sector 5 is made to have rooms that look as identical to each room as possible when a new area is entered, making it akin to a loop.
• In the Wacky Racing episode of Dexter's Laboratory, when most of the racers pass a tunnel, Dee Dee notices most of the landscape on a loop and gets told its due to being a Wraparound Background. Dexter then realizes Mandark trapped the racers in the tunnel and quickly uses his gadgets to escape.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants episode "SB-129", when Squidward sends himself to a Blank White Void, he quickly loses it and tries to find an exit, looping around whatever direction he runs towards.
• Steven Universe: In "Serious Steven", the chamber above the entrance of the Pyramid Temple contains a multitude of hallways, each leading to three boobytrapped rooms, which simply loop back around to the main chamber. Underneath the floor there's another room with loads of little spinning pyramids that make the hallways rotate, powered by a Corrupted Gem stuck inside the obelisk in the center.
• The Simpsons: Played for laughs in "Grift of the Magi", where Mr. Burns opens a Trap Door in his office, and the children that fell down it immediately come out of the ceiling of the same room.
  Mr. Burns: Oh, it's doing that thing again!

Real Life

• Black Holes work on a variant of this; It's widely known that once you pass the event horizon, you can't escape even if you go at lightspeed. The immense gravity of a black hole curves spacetime so much that to go forwards in time is to go toward the center of the black hole. Escaping the black hole requires at best a space-like trajectory — going faster than the speed of light.
• Math problems are sometimes solved using periodic boundary conditions, even if there's no reason for the periodicity.
• If the Universe was finite and boundless, it would be the largest example of this trope given that light would be able to circumnavigate the Universe since having been emitted, producing ghost images of the galaxy that emitted it, and of course the former being unable to escape from the latter.

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