Dot Maze

Overview

Dot Maze is a maze-chase game built on one golden rule: you never stop moving. Your runner glides through a neon lattice of corridors eating dots, and the only control you have is which way to turn at the next intersection — plus a panic reverse that snaps you 180 degrees on the spot. Against you work four wardens with genuinely different brains: a red chaser that beelines for your current tile, a pink ambusher that aims four tiles ahead of wherever you are facing, a cyan drifter that wanders on coin flips, and an orange guard that holds the far corner until you stray close and then joins the hunt. Four corner pellets flip the entire relationship for six seconds — the hunters turn blue, slow down, and become 200-point targets. A wrap-around tunnel on the middle row offers a jailbreak when the net closes, and a starfruit worth 300 points appears at the center after every 35 dots. Six mazes, each a fresh lattice with new stub walls, three lives, no mercy.

How to Play

Press Start Run and the runner immediately glides left. Arrow keys do not move you directly — they queue your next turn, which executes the moment you reach an intersection where that direction is open. Space instantly reverses your direction, queued turns be damned. On touch screens, tap a pad direction to queue a turn and REVERSE to flip around. P pauses, R restarts. Eat every dot to clear the maze and advance; the HUD counts what remains. Power pellets in the corners trigger hunt-flip; eat blue wardens for 200 each. An unflipped warden touching you costs a life and respawns you at the bottom center with two seconds of grace. Clear maze six and the run is yours.

Tips & Strategy

Learn to read the pink warden, because it is the one that kills careful players: it aims ahead of your facing, so the worst response to a pink ambush is continuing straight — reverse or turn perpendicular and its prediction collapses into empty corridor. The reverse button is stronger than it looks: because wardens commit at intersections, a mid-corridor 180 breaks their pursuit math entirely, and it costs nothing. Work the maze in quadrants and finish each quadrant's dots before leaving; loose dots behind warden territory are what force the desperate late-game raids that end runs. Spend power pellets deliberately — the best time is when two wardens are already close, since the flip converts certain death into 400 points of hunting. The tunnel resets pursuit but deposits you at the far edge with wardens between you and unfinished dots, so treat it as a circuit reset, not a shortcut. And when the starfruit appears, glance at warden positions before detouring; 300 points is never the trade for your second life on maze five.

What Makes It Distinct

The personality split is the game. Four hunters running four different algorithms means you are never solving one pursuit problem but four overlapping ones, and the reverse button exists precisely because prediction-based hunters deserve a counterplay that is not in the original formula. Every intersection is a small bluff against four different opponents at once.