Remember the old Infocom game Zork? When you first played it, and you didn't know about mapping out the pathways by hand, the maze would drive you nuts! Not nearly as bad as the babel fish puzzle, though.

Actually from the game Adventure (or Colossal Cave or Advent), an adventure game of the elder days that featured fiendishly difficult puzzles such as this one.

It was a blind maze in which drawing out standard NESW maps was useless since paths weren't retraceable by going back in the opposite direction. The label for each intersection was "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." It may have been a directed graph, I forget. Having the big printed cheat map was invaluable in solving this problem.

Also a handy geeky phrase to use in situations where you are completely lost, especially while looking at over-detailed flowcharts or poorly-written reference material.

There were also dwarves that chased you around the maze and threw hatchets at you. Sometimes they would kill you. Chasing the dwarves almost always got you even loster.
You must play advent to truly experience the horror of being faced with this message. You are exploring great underground caverns and have just figured out a way past a huge green fierce snake that happened to be in your way, and you are hoping to eventually win the game, when suddenly a message pops up:

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

It doesn't help at all that the maze is non-Euclidean...

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