I made playlists for a handful of rooms (4, 13, 21, 23, 24) and for the Guide, which you can find on Mazecast > Aria’s blog.

Hello Gregor wrote and recorded a bunch of fantastic original MAZE-inspired songs, which you can also find on my blog or by searching for Jump Up and Jam on Bandcamp. (The album is called “Plangent Brio”.)

However, one of my favorite explanations is not temporal. Perhaps there are multiple guides, and multiple groups of guests, that all behave in a similar manner. Thus, the groups in Room 10 and Room 37 are not interacting with their own selves, but with different groups of guests that are in the other rooms and behave similarly in similar situations. The idea of multiple guides does seem odd given the guide’s arrogance about being like the architect of the place and the possibility of the guide’s identity as the singular figure of the Minotaur, but I wouldn’t rule it out, given all the strange footsteps and other sounds and digging activity that cannot be explained entirely by the cat in Room 4 and the handful of apparently stationary and human figures like the musicians.

I admit that the text in Room 13 about the need for great experience to understand “how time works in the Maze” suggests the possibility of a temporal solution. I will therefore discuss the temporal implications further.

What is truly strange is that it is possible to reach Room 10 without going through Room 37, and it is possible to Room 37 without going through Room 10. It is possible to get from either room to the Abyss, or from either room to Room 45 and back to Room 1, without ever entering the other. (The shortest path from Room 45 to Room 1 passes through Room 37, but it is possible to go to Room 45 and back to Room 1 without ever entering Room 10 or Room 37). To me, this casts doubt on the “time loop” interpretation.

Perhaps, when you go back to Room 1 (as is likely from Room 10 as the only other options are wandering the Loop endlessly or going to the Trap), you are actually going back in time to when you first entered Room 1, although you are somehow entering from a different direction this time and with memories you didn’t have before. That would explain why (aside from the fact that the book format requires it) the guests say the same thing every time you enter a room. For example, in Room 1, it says the guests are curious about a ringing sound and where it coming from. If you go through the door directly into Room 20, it seems that the question is resolved by the phone there (especially since it is implied that they heard ringing during the corridor from Room 5 to Room 20 if you enter that way since the ringing is not mentioned in Room 5 but “stops” in Room 20), although it never says that the guests actually figure it out. If you go back to Room 1 having been to Room 20, the guests are as confused as ever about the source of the ringing. Arguably, this is evidence in favor of a time loop interpretation.

Another temporal theory is that this is like a variation on the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Each time the guests enter a room with multiple doors, there is one world in which they leave through one door and one in which they leave through another. However, apparently these different worlds can interact with each other fairly directly. One hole in this theory is that, given the many two-way passages in the Maze, it seems like the groups would bump into each other going in opposite directions on the hallway between rooms.