Maze Runner

Maze Runner — how to play and tips

Maze Runner generates a brand new maze every single level — no two runs are the same, and nothing is ever reused between attempts. Start in the top-left corner, find your way to the glowing green exit in the bottom-right, and grab the gold coins scattered along the way if you can spare the detour. Run out of time before you reach the exit and the run ends there, with whatever level and score you'd built up.

How to play

Mobile: swipe in the direction you want to go, tap any cell directly next to your current position, or use the on-screen directional pad. The tap control is the most forgiving option in tight corridors, since it only commits to a move when you tap a cell that's actually open and adjacent — there's no risk of a swipe being read as the wrong diagonal. Desktop: arrow keys or WASD move you one cell at a time. P or Escape pauses the run, and M mutes sound. Walking into a wall doesn't cost you anything beyond a small rejection sound and shake — you simply stay put and can try another direction immediately.

Scoring and difficulty

Finishing a level pays 200 points times the level number, plus 8 points for every second still left on the clock, so playing fast compounds directly into your score rather than just feeling satisfying. Each coin collected along the route is worth 50 points, and clearing out every single coin on a level before you reach the exit earns an extra 300-point perfect-level bonus on top. You start with 45 seconds on level one, and each level completed grants a little more time back — though never quite enough to offset how much bigger the next maze gets. Maze size grows steadily with your level, starting around 7 columns by 9 rows and expanding up to a maximum of 21 by 25, so the early game is a quick sprint and the later game is a genuine navigation challenge under real time pressure.

Every maze is guaranteed solvable

The mazes are carved with an iterative depth-first search that visits every cell exactly once, which produces what's mathematically called a "perfect" maze: there is exactly one path between any two points in it, with no loops and no sealed-off, unreachable regions. That means you never need to worry about an impossible level — if you can't immediately find the exit, the route is guaranteed to exist, and systematically backtracking out of dead ends will always eventually reveal it. Your recently visited cells are marked with a fading blue trail on the floor, which is there specifically to help you notice when you've doubled back into ground you've already covered.

Reading a maze under time pressure

Because the exit sits at the far corner from your start on every level, a rough sense of overall direction — generally favouring moves that trend toward the bottom-right — will outperform wandering at random, even though the maze's actual path will still wind back and forth to get there. When you hit a dead end, the fastest recovery is to retrace your steps to the last junction where you had an unexplored option rather than re-scanning the whole maze from scratch; the breadcrumb trail exists to make that retracing easy at a glance. Coins are worth grabbing when they sit directly on or very close to your route, but chasing one that requires a real detour rarely pays for itself once you account for the time it costs, especially on later, larger levels where every second matters more.

Why every level feels new

Because the maze is fully rebuilt from scratch at the start of every level, with a new random shape carved out and a fresh scattering of coins, there's no fixed layout to memorize even if you play the game for a long time — the skill that carries over between runs is your ability to navigate and recover from dead ends quickly, not knowledge of any specific maze. This also means two players sitting down to play never see the same sequence of levels, so comparing best scores is a genuine test of navigation speed and route-reading rather than familiarity with a shared, static level set. Combined with the escalating size and shrinking time margin as levels climb, the game keeps presenting a slightly harder version of the same clean problem rather than introducing new mechanics — everything you need to know to play level one is everything you need to know to play level twenty, just executed faster and under a tighter clock.