The first thing experienced card players notice about Corridors is the rule that isn't there: you don't shuffle. The deck arrives in factory order — the same 72 cards in the same sequence, every game — and the box is telling the truth when it calls that order the maze as it was built. It is a hand-crafted dungeon, tuned card by card across nine revisions, provably winnable by a careful player and provably fatal to a careless one.
Why would a card game refuse its own shuffle? Because Corridors is a game about buying information, and information is only worth buying in a world that holds still. A peek is an investment; a note is a map. In a shuffled deck, sight decays — the transformations that churn the maze would make every purchased fact a depreciating asset, and the correct strategy would collapse into reactive play. In factory order, knowledge compounds. Your third run knows things your first run paid for. The game rewards study the way the physical deck rewards wear.
Determinism also makes the design honest in a way shuffled games cannot be. The factory order is maintained under a standing invariant: the deck must be winnable, at full health margins, by lines we verify every revision — the engine replays canonical solutions through every rules change, and a change that breaks winnability doesn't ship. When you lose, the loss is yours; we can prove the maze offered a way through, because we keep the proof.
And for those who find all this too much civilization: Chaos mode shuffles everything, the Heart included, and makes no promises at all. Its rulebook blurb ends with the closest thing the game has to a philosophy — sometimes the maze deals a dead end. Such is life and labyrinths. Our telemetry's first Chaos runs include one dealt LOST from its opening card, dead in eleven turns through no fault of its own. The mode is working as intended.