Maze Antidote

Oct 2025GameLive

Maze Antidote is a pixel-art horror game I built for my school's Horror Game contest, and it won.

A cutscene sets up the story, then you search a dark maze for five antidote ingredients while monsters hunt you, and carry them back to save your bitten friend.

It's the first repository on my GitHub, from October 2025, and it still runs in any browser.

My first game won my school's horror contest

In October 2025 my school ran a Horror Game contest, and I had never shipped a game. Before writing any code, I wrote a one-page design doc: a top-down maze in the style of Pac-Man, a camera zoomed in so you can only see a few steps around you, a friend dying at the start, and a set of ingredients to bring back before it's too late. Then I built it in Phaser, a JavaScript game engine, with TypeScript and Vite.

The game opens on a story. Two friends in a grocery store spot a newspaper about an abandoned building, ride a bus out to it and walk inside, and in a dark hallway a monster bites one of them. The 38-second cutscene plays before the menu, so the maze has stakes before you take a step.

One run, start to finish

Every run follows the same shape, and two rules keep it scary. Ingredients and monsters spawn in new places each time, so you can't memorize a route. And you hear the danger before you see it: a heartbeat starts when a monster is close, before it's close enough to show on screen.

One run of Maze Antidote

Playing it

Put headphones on, like the menu tells you to.

Step 1: Take the quest
You start beside your bitten friend. Walk up and press E, and they ask for the five ingredients that make the antidote: Phoenix Ash, Mandrake Root, Neural Bonsai Leaf, Nightshade Bloom and Cryo-Essence. The HUD tracks your three lives, a run timer and the ingredients you've found.
Step 2: Search the maze
Seven monsters roam the maze: serial killers, ghouls and bone monsters. They wander until they spot you, then charge. Here the Mandrake Root is right there, with a ghoul just below it.
Step 3: Survive the charge
About two times in three, a charging monster reaches you and you lose a life; otherwise it vanishes at the last second. Half of all chases also throw a full-screen jump scare, with a different video for each monster type. Lose all three lives and it's game over.

Maze Antidote in play: the pixel-art player beside a bitten friend on a stone floor, under the prompt 'Find the 5 ingredients and bring them back here to save me!', with lives, a timer and an ingredient count across the top.

A lit stretch of the maze: the player standing beside the leafy, red-eyed Mandrake Root ingredient, with a pink, tentacled ghoul just below.

A full-screen jump scare in Maze Antidote: a blurred monster face with glowing red eyes and bared teeth, with the HUD showing 2 of 3 lives left.

Watch a run

A run through the maze, with the camera tight on the player and the monsters out in the dark.

Maze Antidote gameplay.

Where everything after started

Maze Antidote is the first repository on my GitHub. The habit that started here, a short written design before any code, is the one I still build with: everything since, from Ippo to Crawft, began as a spec. Two months later I started Ippo, my first App Store app. The game itself is still live and runs in any browser, with nothing to install.

Play Maze Antidote Source on GitHub

My first game won my school's horror contest

Where everything after started

My first game won my school's horror contest

One run, start to finish

Playing it

Step 1: Take the quest

Step 2: Search the maze

Step 3: Survive the charge

Watch a run

Where everything after started

My first game won my school's horror contest

One run, start to finish

Playing it

Step 1: Take the quest

Step 2: Search the maze

Step 3: Survive the charge

Watch a run

Where everything after started