The Labyrinth
| The Labyrinth | |
|---|---|
 A generated maze with the entrance at the top left, the exit at the bottom right and a minotaur near the middle | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Engine | HTML canvas, JavaScript |
| Platform(s) | Web browser |
| Release | June 2026 |
| Genre(s) | Maze |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
The Labyrinth, headed Labyrinth of Epic Quest in the browser tab, is a maze game by Molecular Reality Corporation in which the player walks a generated maze from an entrance at the top left to an exit at the bottom right while two minotaurs wander through it. Three lives and no weapon are all the player has. The game is one page of 473 lines of JavaScript drawn on a canvas; it mentions no molecule, no nanopore and none of the company's other games, and nothing in the site's pages links to it.[1]
Play
The maze has 27 by 27 cells of 22 pixels each, a canvas of 594 pixels square, and it is built afresh for every level by the recursive backtracker, a depth-first search that knocks down one wall at a time between a cell and a random unvisited neighbor. A maze made this way has exactly one route between any two cells, so there is one route from the entrance to the exit. Arrow keys or W, A, S and D move the player a cell at a time, at most once every 100 milliseconds. Emoji characters drawn on the canvas serve as the pieces, an elf for the player, the Japanese ogre for each minotaur, a trophy at the exit and a door at the entrance, so their look depends on the device.[1]
The game opens with "Escape the Labyrinth! Avoid the Minotaurs." A hit brings "Hit! 2 lives remaining." and the loss of the third life ends the game with "The Minotaur has claimed you. Press R to try again." Reaching the exit brings "You escaped the Labyrinth!" and a prompt to press R. The screen shows hearts, a level number and a count of steps. There is no score and no clock.
The minotaurs
The two minotaurs start near the middle of the maze, at row 9, column 13 and at row 17, column 14, counting from 0 at the top left. Each moves once every 280 milliseconds, so the player can run 2.8 times as fast. On each move a minotaur has a 35 percent chance of stepping along a shortest path to the player, which the code finds by breadth-first search. Otherwise it steps to an open neighbor chosen at random, the cell it just left included, although the comment beside the line says that it should prefer not to turn back. The second minotaur avoids the cell the first has just chosen, once.[1]
A life is lost when a minotaur and the player are in the same cell on the same frame. The player then blinks and cannot be hit for 25 frames. The constant is annotated "~2.5s at 100ms moves", but the counter falls once for every frame drawn, so the pause lasts about 0.42 seconds on a 60 hertz display and 0.17 seconds on a 144 hertz one. Because the maze has one route between any two cells, a minotaur standing in the corridor ahead can be passed only by waiting for it to move away or by walking into it. The second choice costs a heart and gives a short time in which nothing can hit the player.
Levels
Reaching the exit raises the level number at once, and the screen shows the next number while the message of victory is still up. Pressing R then builds a new maze of the same size with the same two minotaurs and the same chase rate, and the hearts that remain stay. Nothing depends on the level number. The game has no last level, and the count of steps starts again with each maze. Pressing R in the middle of a level, under a hint that reads "R to restart level", also resets the level to 1 and the hearts to three.[1]
Name and origin
In Greek myth the Minotaur, half man and half bull, lived in a labyrinth that Daedalus built for King Minos at Knossos, and Theseus killed it. A labyrinth in the strict sense has one winding path and no choices, as in the pavement of Chartres Cathedral. A grid with branches and dead ends is a maze.
It entered the company's code repository on June 8, 2026, in the large commit that also added Moleculoids.[2] The level menu of Maxine's Quest also has a labyrinth, number 7, Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant, but it is separate work: that level places one wall in a Phaser game, while this page is a single file that names neither Maxine nor the dragon. According to the company's plan, the earlier Python version of Maxine's Quest had a maze for that level.[1]