How to play ExitMaze

The complete guide — controls, tiers, hints, and strategy

The one rule

Everyone in a round spawns on the same green pad, dead-centre in the maze, at the same instant. The first racer to reach the checkered exit flag wins. That is the whole game — and everything that makes it fun: perfect fairness, pure navigation, and the sound of your friend taking a wrong turn.

Controls

Desktop: arrow keys or WASD. Press two directions at once to move diagonally — this is strictly faster over a whole race.
Touch (phones and tablets): you get both a D-pad (bottom-left) and an analogue joystick (bottom-right). The joystick supports diagonals naturally; use whichever your thumbs prefer. They are translucent so the maze stays readable beneath them.
Nothing else to learn. One dot, four directions, infinite corridors.

Difficulty tiers and round times

Hosts choose a tier when creating a room; the Daily Maze offers all four every day:

Super Easy (11×11, 60s) — snack-sized sprints. Routes are short and wide; races are decided by a single hesitation.
Easy (15×15, 90s) — the default. Long enough for a wrong turn to cost you, short enough for instant revenge.
Medium (25×25, 150s) — the classic daily challenge. Planning beats speed here.
Hard (35×35, 240s) — a marathon of memory. Use the countdown to lock in the first three junctions.

Every maze is freshly generated per round and deliberately braided — dead ends are partly removed so there are loops and several viable routes, not one memorised corridor. Route choice is a real skill in ExitMaze.

Hint arrows

Nobody should be lost forever. As the round clock runs down, gold arrows appear along the true path from your current position: a short trail after a third of the time, a longer one at half time, and a long guiding trail in the final thirty seconds. They are personal — rivals cannot see your arrows (or your struggles). Strong racers mostly ignore them; grateful racers follow them to the flag.

Scoring and the podium

The round winner earns 1,000 points, the next finishers 800, 650, 550 and so on. After the configured number of rounds the points stack into a final podium — bragging rights included. Add bots from the lobby if your friends are slow to arrive; they navigate honestly, take wrong turns, and lose politely.

The Daily Maze and streaks

Each UTC day publishes four fixed mazes — one per tier — identical for every player worldwide. Race solo against the clock, retry freely; your best time lands on that day's leaderboard for the tier. Finish any daily on consecutive days to grow your streak. Share your result ("I escaped today's Medium in 61s 🔥 3-day streak") and dare your friends to beat it.

Strategy that actually wins

Plan during the countdown. Three seconds is enough to choose a first direction and spot one landmark junction.
Pick the emptier half. Before moving, look at which side of the map has more open corridor near the exit — dense wall regions hide turns.
Commit to routes. Dithering at junctions costs more than the occasional wrong corridor.
Use walls, don't fear them. Sliding along a wall while pressing diagonal keeps momentum through bends.
Watch rivals — carefully. Opponents are visible the whole race. A rival surging left usually means the exit is left; a rival reversing means it isn't.

Playing with friends

Rooms are the heart of ExitMaze. Create one and the lobby gives you an invite link plus one-tap sharing to WhatsApp, Telegram, X and Discord. Tick Anyone can join and your room appears in the public list on the home screen where any visitor can walk in. Prefer privacy? Leave it unticked and share the code.

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