Maze: I Turned the Wrong Way at the Third Corner
I pressed the left arrow at the third turn and knew at once it was wrong. The red dot hit a wall, and the green exit in the bottom right corner did not get any closer. A 21 by 21 board, and I was already lost.
The Wall I Hit
The maze is rebuilt every time. The recursive backtracker algorithm cuts passages so that all cells stay connected: no cut-off corners, a path from start to exit always exists. Sounds reassuring. In practice I stood in a dead end staring at a wall I had chosen myself.
Walls here hold firm. You pass only where there is no wall, and that is the whole character of the game. I walked from memory: two turns up, then right. My memory lied on the third step.
One Step Back
The most useful habit in Maze is stepping back. A dead end is not punishment, it is information: this corridor is checked, cross it out. I started marking the forks I had already visited and stopped walking in circles. A run on the 15 by 15 board took me five minutes instead of fifteen.
I steer with keyboard arrows. On the phone there are arrow buttons under the board, and they are enough. No swipes needed.
What the Demo Showed
There is a Demo button under the board. I pressed it out of curiosity: the built-in breadth-first search draws the shortest path at once and walks the dot to the exit. Next to it my winding route looked like a stroll of someone who went out for bread and came back through the next district.
But the demo did not sting. It showed a short line hiding behind the chaos of walls. Now I look for it myself instead of wandering.
The Restart button builds a fresh maze. I press it once I know the old passages by heart.