Before I get into the problem, I want to note that my copy of Maze finally arrived from Amazon, and it’s cool to finally be flipping through it’s actual pages again. The slick cover, and smell of the ink brings back memories from when I had it in high school. Also, I’d forgotten that the pages in the book are actually a light sepia color, and how hypnotizing the textures of the images are. It’s easy to think that there might be patterns in the textures that reveal hidden clues to the maze here and there.
I definitely appreciate the artistry that went into the creation of Maze. It’s one of the reasons why this book is so unique.
Moving on…
So after studying the first few pages and trying to work my way through I decided to refer to my room-connection diagrams again, and see if I could work my way back from page 45 to page 1, and found this little treat…
If you look at all the doors and room numbers, room 45 is one of a small group of pages that are isolated from the rest of the maze. I’ve pulled those pages away from the rest of the spaghetti in the diagram above to point out the issue.
To clarify, you can only reach room 45 from rooms 23, 28, and 17. You can only reach room 17 from room 45. You can only reach Room 23 from Room 28 and Room 45. You can only reach Room 28 from Rooms 23, 45 and Room 32. And You can only reach room 32 from Room 28.
There are no doors with obvious numbers on them that reach to these set of rooms. These 5 rooms are effectively isolated from the rest of the maze. Which means that on face value, there is no way to reach room 45 from room 1.
The good news is that there is something funny about room 17. There is a door, that doesn’t connect with any other rooms in the maze that I’ve found, so to find the real path I probably need to find a door that will go to 17.