Echo Labyrinth — Hunted by Your Own Trail

What is Echo Labyrinth — Hunted by Your Own Trail

Echo Labyrinth is played in the dark. You start in the top-left corner of a grid of corridors, thirteen wide and eleven deep in the first labyrinth, and you can see roughly two tiles in any direction. Every step sends out an echo that lights the five-by-five block around you for half a second, and then the dark closes again. Somewhere in those corridors lie three golden threads and a gate that stays sealed until you hold all three. Each step costs one of your eighty-three breaths, and so does every wall you walk into. After the first second, the map is never shown to you again.

What turns this from a maze into a puzzle is what happens behind you. The Minotaur is blind and hunts by repeating your route: at the first depth he stands where you stood six steps ago, and takes one step for each of yours. Seeing costs breath, and being followed is the price of having seen. Turning around walks you into him, so the corridors hold no dead ends: every branch rejoins the maze somewhere. The question of a level is never only where the threads are, but which loop brings you back to them without crossing your own recent trail.

How to play

1. Move with the arrow keys, WASD, a swipe across the board or the pad on screen. Every step costs a breath and echoes, lighting the block around you.
2. Collect all the golden threads, three in the first labyrinth and up to seven deeper down. The gate stays sealed and dark until the last one is yours.
3. The Minotaur repeats your route a fixed number of steps behind: six at depth one, only two from depth five. Step onto his tile and the run ends.
4. Reach the open gate before your breath runs out. Escaping opens a wider labyrinth, with more threads and a Minotaur who follows closer behind you.

Strategies that work

• The labyrinth is lit for about a second when a level opens, and that is the only time you see the whole map. Spend it on the three golden threads, not on the walls: their rough directions are enough to decide an order. The gate is always the point farthest from your corner.
• Count the delay before you turn around. At depth one he is six steps back, so two steps of retracing are safe and the third walks you into him; at depths three and four you get one; from depth five a single step backwards is fatal. Retreating is arithmetic, not instinct.
• No corridor is a true dead end: every branch rejoins the maze somewhere, and that junction is your way out of it. When a thread sits down a side passage, do not plan on leaving the way you came in. Look for the opening that closes a loop, even if it costs eight extra tiles.
• When the tiles around him flash red he is within four tiles of you, and the heartbeat means two. That flash is free information: it shows where your own trail from a few steps ago is lying in the dark. If it lights the corridor you wanted, take the other one.
• Every breath you do not spend is worth twelve points, and a clean labyrinth adds a Perfect bonus of 150 plus 50 per depth, so wandering is expensive. A wasted step costs twelve points, and a wall you walk into costs a breath and the whole bonus with it.

A little history

Echo Labyrinth was written for puzzle-me.com, and it belongs to two families rather than one: puzzles of imperfect information, where a move is also the only way to learn what the board looks like, and pursuit games, where the hunter follows a trail instead of a line of sight. The Cretan myth supplies the furniture, Minos and the Minotaur and Ariadne, but turns it inside out. In the story, the thread Ariadne gives Theseus is what lets him walk out of the Labyrinth alive. Here the trail you leave is what condemns you.

Frequently asked questions