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"Can a Maze Be Thinky?" — FLEB's 40 Free Mazes and How One Extra Rule Transforms a Maze
One piece today: "Are mazes 'thinky'?", published by the puzzle outlet Thinky Games on September 24, 2026. Using FLEB's free 20 Small Mazes and the new 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes, plus the long-running Clickmazes site, it asks how a plain maze becomes a real thinking puzzle. I also checked PC Gamer's write-up, the official Steam page and Clickmazes itself, and sorted out the design tricks that add a twist to a maze.
Inside Toru Iwatani's Philosophy — Build a Maze, Then Hide That It Is One
A study of Toru Iwatani, the designer who planned Pac-Man (1980), built only from his own lectures and interviews. He made a maze game and then drew the maze walls as thin outlines so players would not notice it was a maze. He says to think by subtraction, he gave the same account of difficulty pacing in 1986 and in 2015, and in 2011 he scolded the industry for a flood of very simple games. A man who built the outer limit of simplicity criticising simplicity: this is an attempt to line that apparent contradiction up and read it.
