Maze Muncher
Mouse and keyboard
- Arrow keys or WASD to steer. A turn you ask for early is held for just over a second, so pressing up two cells before the opening turns you exactly at the opening rather than not at all.
- Space pauses and resumes. Pressing a direction into a wall while you are standing still is refused at once — the board shakes and buzzes instead of quietly swallowing it.
- New deals a fresh circuit. The difficulty control beside it restarts on the level you pick and keeps a separate record for it.
Touch
- Swipe the board to turn. A quick flick of ten pixels is enough; a slow drag has to travel twenty before it counts, and an L-shaped drag asks for both turns because the tracker re-anchors on every one.
- Or use the four arrow buttons under the board. They are finger-sized, they stay put while you play, and they disappear on a desktop so the board gets that height back.
This panel
- F full screen
- M sound on or off
- ? this list
- Esc close, or leave full screen
- The clock stops while the board is off screen
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Best reached
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| Board | Played | Won | Drawn | Win rate | Best | Fastest | Best run |
|---|
Awards for Maze Muncher
- Deep maze Reach the fourth maze in Maze Muncher. —
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About Maze Muncher
Clear every dot before four very different pursuers corner you.
A maze chase is a pursuit puzzle wearing an arcade cabinet. There is no shooting and no jumping: there is a board, a fixed set of corridors, and four things coming for you whose routes you can work out if you know what each one wants.
That is the whole reason the genre gave its chasers different targets in 1980. Four identical hunters queue up behind you and the game becomes a treadmill; four with different aims arrive from different directions, and the skill is in knowing which one you are looking at. The Stalker is behind you, the Cutter is in front of you, the Drifter is somewhere neither of you expected, and the Warden is the reason the far corner is not a rest stop.
The margin is thin on purpose. On Relentless a pursuer crosses a cell in 134 milliseconds against your 125 — a seven per cent lead, which is enough to outrun one in a straight line and nowhere near enough to outrun two. The tunnels and the four pellets are the only other resources you have, and both run out.
Also searched for as
- maze chase game
- dot eating maze game
- power pellet maze game
- retro arcade maze game
- maze muncher online
Whichever name you know it by, it is the same game: it runs in this browser, with no download and no sign-up.
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Tell us and we will check it against the published rules.
How to play Maze Muncher
- Clear every dot in the maze to move on. A full circuit is nine mazes built from three layouts — Ringworks, The Comb and Lattice — cycling round with quicker pursuers and a shorter power pellet One of the four large dots. Eating one turns the four pursuers pale and sends them running from you for a few seconds. each time.
- A dot is 10 points and one of the four big pellets is 50. A prize appears above the pen The box at the centre of the maze. Pursuers wait there before they first come out, and an eaten one goes back to it. twice a maze, once you have cleared 30% of the board and again at 66%, and it is worth 100 points in the first maze rising to 3,000 in the ninth.
- Eat a pellet and all four pursuers turn pale and run from you for a few seconds. Catching one then pays 200, then 400, 800 and 1,600 for the fourth. Its eyes travel back to the pen and it comes straight out again — the pen is a delay, not a removal.
- You start with three lives and bank another every 10,000 points, up to five. Touching a pursuer that is not frightened costs a life, and any uncollected prize goes with it.
- The row through the middle of every maze runs off one side and back in the other. You cross it at your normal speed; a pursuer in it takes 30% to 70% longer per cell depending on the difficulty, so it is the one place you can reliably make ground.
Strategy that actually helps
- Learn the four, because they are four different players and not one drawn four times. The Stalker heads for the cell you are standing in. The Cutter heads for the cell four ahead of you. The Drifter aims at the Stalker's position reflected through yours, which swings wildly as you both move. The Warden walks the four corners and ignores you until you come within four corridors of it.
- Turn back into the Cutter. A reversal is the only turn taken instantly, mid-corridor, without waiting for a junction A cell with more than two ways out. It is the only place a pursuer chooses a direction. — and it puts you behind the one pursuer built to arrive where you were going rather than where you have been.
- Hiding does not work here. A pursuer waiting in the pen leaves after seven seconds whether you are eating or not, and the Warden drops its patrol and hunts you the moment you are four cells away, losing interest again only at eight. A quiet corner is where it is looking.
- Treat the pellet as a shrinking resource. It runs nine seconds on Gentle and four on Relentless in the first maze, and by the ninth it is down to 42% of that. Early on it is a licence to hunt; late on it is an escape route, and chasing a fourth pursuer with it is usually how a good run ends.
- Read the wave. They scatter The phase where the pursuers run to their own corner of the maze instead of hunting you. Each one is shorter than the last. to the corners before they hunt, and each scatter is shorter than the one before — three of them, at full, three-quarters and half length — and after the third they hunt for the rest of the maze. Every change of wave turns all four round on the spot, which is the clearest tell in the game.
Controls
Mouse and keyboard
- Arrow keys or WASD to steer. A turn you ask for early is held for just over a second, so pressing up two cells before the opening turns you exactly at the opening rather than not at all.
- Space pauses and resumes. Pressing a direction into a wall while you are standing still is refused at once — the board shakes and buzzes instead of quietly swallowing it.
- New deals a fresh circuit. The difficulty control beside it restarts on the level you pick and keeps a separate record for it.
Touch
- Swipe the board to turn. A quick flick of ten pixels is enough; a slow drag has to travel twenty before it counts, and an L-shaped drag asks for both turns because the tracker re-anchors on every one.
- Or use the four arrow buttons under the board. They are finger-sized, they stay put while you play, and they disappear on a desktop so the board gets that height back.
Questions
What actually changes between Gentle, Standard and Relentless?
Four things, and a test plays the game headlessly at each level to prove the harder one kills a fixed reference player sooner. Pursuer speed goes 5.1, 6.3, 7.5 cells a second against your unchanging 8. The power pellet falls from nine seconds to six and a half to four. Scatter — the breathing room before they hunt — falls from eight seconds to five and a half to 2.4. And their aim sharpens: on Gentle they steer by straight-line distance, which walls fool constantly, and throw away roughly three junction choices in ten at random; above that they measure the real walked distance through the corridors, and a Relentless pursuer never throws a hunting choice away at all. (A frightened one does: running is not thinking.)
Are the mazes taken from an arcade original?
No. The three layouts were drawn for this site, and every build checks each one against five structural rules rather than trusting anyone's eye: mirror symmetry about the centre column, no dead ends anywhere outside the pen, one connected region with the wrapping row counted as part of it, four power pellets with one in each quarter, and a pen with exactly one door — a wall to you and a gate to them, so nobody can hide inside it.
Do the pursuers cheat, or see through walls?
Neither, and none of them moves at random. Each one is given a target cell and the same single rule: at a junction take the exit that gets closest to that target, and never turn back the way you came unless there is no other way. The difference between them is only which cell they want. The difference between the difficulties is how the distance to it is measured — a straight line on Gentle, which walls regularly defeat, or the real path through the maze above that.
Does it remember a game if I close the tab?
The maze you were in comes back with the dots you had already eaten, your score and your lives intact. You and the four pursuers are put back on your starting cells for the count-in rather than restored mid-chase, because a chase frozen to the millisecond is a position no player could read on returning to it.
How is my best score kept?
Per difficulty, in this browser only, so a Gentle score never lands in the same column as a Relentless one. This is a game you lose in the end, so the score you reached before you did is the result and it stands on a loss — but nought is not a record. The deepest maze you have ever reached is kept alongside it, which on Relentless is the more honest measure of a run.