Maze walk: a first-person maze on your idle screen

Watching someone else walk through a maze shouldn't be absorbing, but it is. Maze walk in Screensavers by Zaweba puts you in a first-person view inside a newly generated maze and walks you through it until you find a glowing light. Then a fresh maze is made and the walk begins again.

It belongs to the classic pack, and it is the one with the most going on behind the scenes. The maze is never the same twice, the wall textures are made in code rather than loaded from pictures, and the walker follows a simple, reliable rule.

How the walk works

The walker uses the right-hand rule. Imagine keeping your right hand on the wall as you go. You turn right whenever you can, go straight when you can't turn right, and turn back only when you're stuck. In a maze where all the walls are connected, that rule always gets you out eventually. It isn't the shortest way, and that is part of the charm: you see dead ends, doubling back and long corridors before the light appears.

Because each maze is generated fresh, you can't learn the route. That keeps it interesting for much longer than a fixed animation would.

Choosing the walls

There are five wall choices: stone blocks, garden hedge, glazed tiles, wooden planks, or a mix. Each texture is generated in code. Stone feels like an old dungeon, hedge like a garden maze on a summer day, glazed tiles like an underground passage, and wooden planks like something knocked together in a barn. The mix setting changes things from maze to maze.

Your choice changes the mood more than you might expect. In a dim room, stone and planks feel cosy. In a bright office, hedge and tiles look cleaner. The live preview in the manager follows the setting as you change it, so you can walk a few corridors in each before choosing.

Maze size and walking speed

Maze size runs from 5 to 25. A small maze is solved quickly, so you see the glowing light and a new maze often. A large one takes a long walk with many turns, which suits a screen that will be idle for a long time, such as overnight or during a long meeting.

Walking speed runs from 1 to 10. Slow walking is calm and easy to follow, almost like a stroll. Fast walking whips round corners and can feel dizzying on a big monitor, so it's best kept for smaller screens or for people who like a bit of pace. A middling speed with a middling maze size is a good place to start.

Why it looks the way it does

Maze walk is rendered at half resolution and then scaled up to fill the screen. That keeps the processor work down, which matters for a 3D scene, and it also gives the textures a slightly soft, retro look that suits a screensaver. You get the feel of an old first-person game without the PC working hard while you're away.

The app's frame cap, set in Install and options to 30 or 60 frames per second, applies here too. At 30 fps the walk is still smooth, and on a laptop the battery saver blanks the screen when the charge drops below the level you set.

Setting it up and checking it

Choose your walls, size and speed, then press Preview full screen to walk a maze at full size. Moving the mouse or pressing a key closes the preview. When you're happy, Use this screensaver builds it into your profile without administrator rights and opens Windows' Screen Saver Settings, where you set the wait time.

With more than one monitor, you can run a maze on each screen, stretch one across them all, or keep it on the main monitor with the rest black. A maze on each screen gives two walkers exploring two different mazes, which is oddly satisfying to watch side by side.

A couple of pitfalls

A large maze at a slow speed can take a long while to finish, so if you never see the glowing light, you might think nothing is happening. Shrink the maze or speed up a little. And if a fast walk makes you feel slightly seasick when you glance at the screen, that's your cue to slow it down rather than abandon the screensaver altogether.