This is pretty amazing. I've only looked at it briefly so far, but I plan to examine it more thoroughly now that I have more of an understanding of the scope involved. The thing I notice most while having the original pictures on one side of the screen and your pictures on the other, is that in your drawings, certain aspects seem to be given priority; that makes me look at that aspect in the original drawing. So it's like I'm going through while following your notes that happen to be neat drawings. This is really cool.

When I was a kid I went through a phase where I got a bunch of puzzle books, including many like this, out of the library. I don't think I had "The Maze", but I remember playing a few like it. I regretfully inform that my skill at them has not tremendously improved in adulthood, meaning I have no idea how to solve it. So the riddle of the maze, and your secret room have eluded me for now (I'll certainly take another try at it at some point!). Nevertheless, what I enjoyed about these kind of puzzles were the oddball, Wonderland-style environments, and this satisfied that itch very well.

Your art adds to that experience a lot. I found the way the art changed and evolved as I explored to be pretty interesting, and ended up exploring the maze to see the art rather than solve the mystery. I think your illustrations make it feel much more alive, and I prefer them to the original, honestly - it has a lot more character and reflects the nature of the maze more, especially how the rooms are so different from each other. Also, in many puzzles, I often feel like there's a weird tension sometimes between creating a space that only exists to be solved, and a space that feels like a real artefact, containing the messiness that implies it served a purpose other than the reader/player's personal amusement. This version navigates that divide really successfully, more than most puzzles like this I've seen, and feels like genuine self expression in a way many puzzles don't.

So yeah, I liked it a lot! It made kid me and adult me pretty happy :)

I'm starting to try to spend some time actually solving the puzzle. I think that the html-version of the original may have a mistake in it. Clicking on room 18 from room 44 takes me to room 11. Since this bug wasn't caught, I'm assuming that it is not the optimal route; still, I wanted to mention it.
I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm fine with that. I enjoy not knowing how to solve the puzzle because I end up hypothesizing about what information is relevant. Are the symbols paths? Does the direction of the lighting tell me something? Is this just a math-thing? Why do some of the doors have no numbers? How are the objects in the rooms (like the alligator/crocodile chained to a palm-tree) relevant? Don't answer any of that, I just wanted to give you an idea of what types of methods I'm currently imagining.

This continues to perplex me to an absurd degree. Clicking on the face/furnace on page 18 of your version takes me to room 46. So now I'm wondering things like "Are the objects in the room doubling as page-numbers?". I love being so bad at games. The state of confusion is under-rated. I'm thinking that for my submission I should just take some of my hypothesis on how to solve these puzzles and try and make my own rooms where those methods are supposed to be used. I'm also considering just making a bunch of rooms that have random objects in them that only suggest solutions, but don't actually have any coherency. We will see.

I like how in the original on page 26, the font for the '3's vary. Also the door-knobs are drawn like nipples.