Fake doors beyond instant failures

On the face of it I had a simple goal with this puzzle. I wanted to make a labyrinth puzzle where the fake door was explicitly designed so that it wouldn’t immediately give itself away to someone who was experienced with labyrinth puzzles. So essentially making a path and walls at the same time as figuring out what would be the best way to block a fake door. Somewhat difficult to keep all three in mind at the same time but I managed to achieve the end result…albeit by accident! (a little frustrating since what i’m trying to do is build a toolset so it’s not as useful, but I can at least analyse and talk it through.

A really simple example of this is the labyrinth here. The two entrances on the left and right are the correct ones and the fake one is at the bottom of the puzzle. The way the two walls constrain that entrance make it so the player can’t both go for the corner cell on the bottom left and through that tunnel right above the fake door. It’s a throwaway fake door that is instantly found out if you start from there.

So the labyrinth at the start of this post is what I came up with. I wanted to use it to figure out a toolset over time but I kind of got a really good fake door that doesn’t immediately fail so it’s useful to analyse that. So the fake door in the puzzle is the one on the left hand wall. There are two key areas in this labyrinth and their walls which ultimately make traversing through this door impossible.

This first area with the ‘S’ like wall structure is very constrained and throws a lot of players out. You have to enter through one side and exit through another. But it also transposes you to another row on the grid which can be disorientating when you are traversing through. This area and wall structure constrains the fake door because it’s placed near the labyrinth walls and so you need space to travel around it.

This line shows the kind of space that’s needed to traverse the ‘S wall’ and still keep the entrance/exit open. However, there is another area and its walls which constrain the space around the fake door where it’s not immediately shut down but it might take players a while to figure out that it doesn’t work.

So this area has three walls which constrain the path from the fake door in a very specific fashion which is shown below.

Cell at the front door is obviously taken. Then the path must immediately move to the corner and out one cell to the right. Because of the wall on the right edge of the area it must go into that corner cell then move down one. This has the effect of taking away the free space that’s needed to traverse the ‘S wall’. Also the corner wall section at the bottom of this red area prevents another solution from forming too.

What we finally get is a group of four cells which lie at the cross section of these two areas and serve to indicate the impossibility of this door as shown below. There’s just not enough space after the player moves in from the fake door to traverse the ‘S wall’ after they take the cell in the top left part of this area.

A rather long explanation with lots of pictures but there’s something really fundamental to understand here that lies at the heart of designing labyrinth puzzles. Because fake doors can really aid in confusing and lengthening the player’s time in the labyrinth, these questions are crucial to getting better at this form of puzzle. I’m looking forward to figuring this out more and maybe using more diagrams in the design process to segment out areas of the grid and understand what’s going on more.