Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle reads the subtitle of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book MAZE.
Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000 dollars. The puzzle was solved in 1987, but the book remains an interesting early entry into what fan-site Into the Abyss calls the “Immersive Puzzle” genre. Here I’ll be thinking a little more about how MAZE works as an immersive puzzle, but more specifically how it does that by existing as a book.
Each of the 45 rooms in MAZE consists of two pages across a single fold. On the right-hand page appears an illustration of the room replete with clues, as well as doorways to other rooms in the book. On the left-hand page appears text in which “The Guide” and your fellow travellers discuss their encounter in the room.
As Manson suggests in the “Directions” page at the beginning of the book:
There are any number of clues in the drawings and in the story to help you choose the right door in each room. Clues in a series of rooms may relate to each one another, and may indicate a path. Other clues may refer to a specific door in a single room.
Anything in this book might be a clue.
Not all clues are necessarily trustworthy.
This multiplicity of clues becomes quickly clear upon encounter with Room 1. It’s difficult to determine whether the numbers, the lighting, the symbols, or the words in the first room are meant to clue us in on which door to take. There’s no way to really know if the choices you make in MAZE are the correct ones. The only way to be sure of your path is to attend to both the pictures and the stories and cross-check the clues given. The correct door should be motioned towards through more than one set of clues.
Though you have to use them together to succeed, the texts and pictures of MAZE maintain a strange relationship throughout the book. We never see any of the characters who speak in the stories in the images themselves. We hear them talk amongst each other and purportedly share the same spaces as they do, but we are never able to visually engage with the characters of the text. Because the images never contain any referents (such as the characters) that would guide the image-text relationship temporally, this relationship is left ambiguous.
Since the text is given on the left-hand page of each fold, we are prompted to encounter it first; that’s how English-language readers expect to read a book. We read the story and then look at the picture of the room with the story in mind; but, as we have no temporal markers in the image which correlate to the text, we don’t know whether the picture exists before the contents of the story or after it.
This ambiguity poses a problem for the interpretation of certain rooms in the maze. In Room 26, for example, the story reads: “They objected to my tone, but it distracted them from the real clues … I quickly picked up the bell, ringing it loudly” — “they” being the maze-goers, and “I” being the actively misleading Guide. The savvy reader will pick up on the language of “tone” as hinting towards the significance of the bell. The bell in the picture points towards Room 30, but since we don’t know whether the story or picture takes place first, we don’t know whether this is the “real clue” the Guide picks up the bell in order to interrupt — or whether this bell positioning is a trap set by the Guide after they put the bell back down.
This temporal ambiguity is multiplied by what Into the Abyss calls the “Loop Rooms.” When I first encountered MAZE, I felt very skeptical at the warning on the back cover of the book that “one wrong turn and you may never escape” could ever possibly apply to a book. After all, I have the entire contents of the maze within my physical possession and there’s no real penalty to flipping through rooms at random. Unlike other interactive content (like a puzzle video game), it seemed that I didn’t actually have to solve the puzzles of the book to reach the end — so how could I actually get lost in the book? Manson’s “Loop Rooms” proved me wrong. Of the 45 rooms in the book, 19 are effectively set apart from the rest of the rooms, and, once you enter them, there’s no way to get outside of the 19 rooms. This means that, while you feel like you are making progress, you repeatedly encounter the same rooms, and thus the same stories and pictures, over and over again, until you acknowledgement some kind of vague defeat.
The looping in the pictures forms an interesting labyrinthine architecture. Sometimes you go up ladders to get to rooms and later down slides, in ways that appear coherent spatially but are not coherent in actuality. Meanwhile, the text forms an interesting kind of narrative hodgepodge as each story connects to the next via ellipses that both begin and end each story (except for the Prologue and Room 24). Upon first reading, the characterization of the Guide seems to build over time as you progress narratively through the labyrinth. But, once you enter the “Loop Rooms,” you are forced to encounter the same segments of narrative over and over again. Since MAZE is a book, neither the text nor the images ever change and this sameness is immediately coherent to the reader. MAZE rigidly denies the flippant reader access to the Path to Room 45, forcing a closer reading of its contents and an active deliberation of both text and image.
It is this reconsideration of text and image within the book format which I’ve continually pointed to in MAZE. Though the immersive puzzle book genre never really took off, MAZE’s ambiguous text-image relationship and active refusal of disengaged readership positions MAZE as both an important predecessor to immersive puzzle video games like Myst (1993) and The Witness (2016), and as something fundamentally different. MAZE takes advantage of a certain degree of medium specificity to position the book and its reader in a hermeneutic battle which, if not “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle” is at least “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle Book.”
Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.