📘 How to Play Big Maze

Big Maze is a three-dimensional exploration game set inside one enormous maze. Your goal is the rainbow exit — but coloured locked doors, sleeping monsters, pits and pushable crates sit between you and it. The game was designed for a child who cannot read yet: there is not a single sentence to read inside it, everything is explained with colour and pictures, and walking is the only thing you ever have to learn.

1. Pick your character from the menu. The knight, wizard, archer and explorer all walk at the same speed — only the look changes.
2. Walk with the arrow keys, WASD, or by dragging your finger on a phone. Direction is the only input — keys, doors, levers and crates all react the moment you touch them.
3. The arrow above your character always points where you need to go. Getting lost is not really possible.
4. The map on the right fills in as you explore, but the rainbow exit is marked from the very start, so where you are heading is never a mystery.
5. Walk over a coloured key and every door of that colour opens at once — you never have to walk back and touch each door.
6. When you reach the exit your stars are counted and the next, larger maze begins.

👶 What to expect at ages 5-11

The game asks a child for one thing: to match the direction in their head with the direction on the screen. For younger children that is exactly where the first difficulty appears — the map sits on the right, so "is right on the map my right?" becomes a real question. That is why the camera never rotates: the map and the screen always face the same way, so a child cannot lose their bearings. The second skill that grows here is sequencing. Seeing a locked door and thinking "I need the key first, let me go back" is a genuine planning step for a six-year-old, and it usually clicks by the second or third maze. Because there is no timer and no lives, taking the wrong turn is exploration rather than punishment.

🏠 At home and in the classroom

Sitting next to them, ask them to look at the map rather than the screen: "where is the rainbow, where are you, which way do you need to go?" Those three questions turn the maze into a puzzle. With two children, let one read the map while the other walks — a single game becomes a two-player task. In class, put it on the projector and hold a quick vote on "left or right?" at each junction; it is the fastest way to make direction words and map reading concrete. Drawing their own maze on paper afterwards makes a natural follow-up activity.

💡 Tips

• Ran into a locked door? Do not worry — the key of that colour is always somewhere you can already reach.
• If a monster catches you it only pushes you back two squares and then falls asleep — you do not have to run, waiting is a valid plan.
• Push a crate into a pit and the pit fills in so you can walk across. Push it the wrong way and the maze is still solvable; you only lose the shortcut.
• If nothing happens for nine seconds a firefly arrives. Deliberately standing still to call it is a perfectly good tactic.
• The faded areas on the map are the parts you have not visited yet — that is usually where the stars are hiding.

🧩 As the maze grows

The maze is a ring of four regions: forest, ice, sand and crystal. There are only three gateways between them, each locked in the colour of the region it opens, and the matching key always sits in the region before it. That gives the game a natural order and means a child is never left wondering where to go next. The first maze is 25×25 squares and later ones grow to 49×49, with more monsters and more kinds of obstacle. Every maze contains at least two genuinely different routes to the exit — two children playing the same maze do not have to take the same path.