In 05.226 we read:

“I flagged down a passing sailor and showed him the note. He nodded and gestured for me to follow. He led me through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, until we arrived back at the room I’d been in the previous day.”

The expression “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” might sound odd but it’s a reference to the classic text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (also called just Adventure or, because of filename length limitations on early computers, even just ADVENT).

It was first written by Will Crowther and was released in 1976 for the PDP-10 computer. It was then expanded by Don Woods in 1977 and has since been ported to a wide variety of platforms and is even playable online.

In the game, there is a maze with ten rooms, each of which is described exactly the same:

"YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE."

This phrase became popular in hacker culture and Nick Montfort’s 2003 book on text-based adventure games is even titled “Twisty Little Passages“.

It’s another example of Andy Weir bringing various pop culture references into the novel.