Compyrinth is a bizarre maze game written in standard C. The idea was to make a raycaster using as few dependencies as possible. The result is a barely-playable, but ludicrously fun maze game. In addition to the classic text-mode version, there's also a graphical SDL version. From the Sourceforge page, there are numerous binary versions available for Windows and DOS, as well as the source distribution, which will compile for any operating system or platform (hopefully).

The binary releases are as follows: DOS (New and Improved!), DOS/DPM (slow), DOS standalone (also slow), Windows text-mode, and Windows SDL (comes in a ZIP file with SDL.DLL). There is only one source available for all operating systems. There is also a readme file available here.

The text-mode game starts up by asking you some questions about your terminal. If the game runs too slowly, quit and restart using smaller numbers. The two screenshots at the bottom of the page use a 40x15 terminal size, and, as you can see, the game is still playable.

After these questions, the text mode and the SDL mode become essentially the same game. The key commands are different between versions, and, in the text mode, you must press ENTER between keypresses. The key commands and all the details are discussed in the README (link above). The object of the game is to find the goal, by walking into the room in which "GOAL" appears in the upper-left corner of your screen, and make your way to the exit. If you reach the exit without reaching the goal, you will know that you are at the exit, as "EXIT" will appear in the upper-left of your screen.

Some screenshots, all original size: SDL mode; high resolution text-mode, for folks with large terminal displays; color-disabled screenshot, for folks who still have black and white displays, or the color version runs too slowly; same as the previous screenshot, but in color. The newest file is an optimized DOS version that runs very smoothly in Windows (practically better than the windows version, except without the color) and there's a screenshot of that here.

As for the website, it was designed by the creator of the game: Mark Burger. The site was designed to be minimalistic, like the game. In fact, I would object to the sourceforge logo appearing at the bottom, but they are hosting most of my projects. Speaking of projects, I also created JFlagCap, a top-down turn-based capture-the-flag game in Java; MAJOB, a bizarre web-browser and text-editor in Java; and Plant-Plotter's Quest, a bizarre hippy environmental game written in C.