You actually can assign a function to variable https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/assign-function-to-a-variable-in-python/ , however you can't assign a function DEFINITION to variable. But once again im saying this is not my code where the error occurs, error lies in the test cases.

Went into comments just to say that, thanks dude for doing the work for me.

Hi,
my def is in fact at the very beginning of the line, I've marked this as an issue, beacouse I think there is a problem with test.py test file, not my solution, and not something I could change.

File "tests.py", line 6
    maze = def maze_runner(maze, directions):
           ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I am getting this error, and I am almost sure this is not my bad, any ideas?