A-Maze-Ing Beasts: where players get stuck
You start A-Maze-Ing Beasts by accepting it from a student who heard something inside the hedge maze; the reported stall is at the centre, where the thing making the noise can be looked at but offers no further prompt.
A-Maze-Ing Beasts is a campus quest in the Gardens, and it is the single most-viewed stuck thread on the Escape Academy 2 Steam forum in the first two days. The thread has no answer on it. This page explains what the quest asks, where the reported wall is, and the four things worth trying before you conclude the quest is broken.
The report itself is short and specific, which is why it is useful: talk to the student to start the task, enter the maze, navigate to the centre, find the dog making the noises, click on the dog to look at it - and then no further interaction is offered, either with the dog or with the student who gave you the quest.
What the quest is
The hedge maze sits in the Campus Gardens, one of the five areas the developer toured in its devlog series. The Gardens post describes the quest directly: you are helping a distressed student who heard something inside the maze, and the developer jokes about what it might be - a giant wolf, a minotaur, the Loch Ness Monster. You navigate to the centre for a reward.
| Stage | What happens | Where players stop |
|---|---|---|
| Accept | A student at the maze entrance asks for help | Rarely - the prompt is clear |
| Enter | The hedge maze, timed by nothing | Occasionally, on the route itself |
| Reach the centre | Something is making noise | No |
| Interact | The noise source can be examined | Yes - this is the wall |
| Return | Presumably back to the student | Almost nobody gets here |
The reported wall is the fourth row. The object can be looked at and nothing else happens.
Why this is probably not a bug
Four observations, in order of how much they narrow it down.
The quest is a campus quest, not a room. Campus quests in this game have their own state machines, separate from the escape rooms, and the developer's own description of the maze quest puts the reward at the centre - not at a second location. If the reward has not fired at the centre, the most likely cause is a condition that was not met on the way in rather than a prompt that is missing on the way out.
Nobody has posted a completion. In two days, with the thread visible and recently active, not one reply reports finishing it. That is consistent with an obscure solution rather than a hard block, but it is also consistent with a genuine progression bug, and the honest position is that both remain possible.
The developer answers bug threads and has not answered this one. Across the same forum, Coin Crew staff reply to the ball maze physics bug ("we're tracking this one"), the glass rendering artefact ("it's tracked, next patch"), the clown dialogue swap and the local co-op controller problem. The maze thread has no reply. Silence is weak evidence, but it is not nothing.
Physics and state bugs in this build are real and reload fixes most of them. A separate thread reports the chapter 2 ball maze shipping with physics disabled, fixed by closing and reopening the game. If the maze's interaction state failed to initialise in the same way, the symptom would look exactly like this.
What to try, cheapest first
- Leave the maze and come back. Not a reload of the level - actually walk out of the hedge and back in, so the area re-streams. This is the cheapest test and it clears the class of bug the ball maze has.
- Quit to the main menu and reload your save. This is the developer-endorsed fix for the ball maze ("exit to menu and get back in"), and it costs nothing but a walk.
- Re-read the quest text in your journal. The game's journal holds the active objective. If it still reads as "investigate the noise", the quest has not registered the centre visit at all, which points at state rather than at a missed interaction.
- Check whether the student is still at the entrance. If the quest-giver has moved or vanished, the quest state has advanced somewhere you did not see, and the answer is probably back out of the maze rather than deeper into it.
If all four fail, the last resort is the route the developer actually monitors: the support channel linked from the pinned forum FAQ, where a ticket can carry your save file. That is the only route where a save can be edited to unblock you, and it is how the developer fixed a different player's main-story block in a separate thread, offering to edit the save directly.
The maze itself
The route is a hedge maze, and the maze is short enough that wandering solves it. Two habits help:
- Follow the left wall. Mazes with dead ends and no loops fall to the wall-follower rule, and the Gardens maze is one continuous hedge with a single centre.
- Look up. The Gardens are terraced, and the developer's screenshots of the area show viewpoints that look down into the maze. A sightline from a terrace tells you the shape of the centre before you are in it.
Next: the clocktower and the chapter 2 ball maze, or the wider puzzle families if you want to know which kind of room you are in before you start.