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You wake up and find yourself lying on a cold, stone floor. Every part of you aches after your fall through the trapdoor. Ahead of you stands a wooden door, beyond which lies the labyrinth.

Your captor’s instructions were clear:

Find your way through the maze, following the path of words and coloured dots. Reaching the end, however, does not guarantee your safety. To be given your freedom you must shout out one final password - specifically, a colour. Fail, and your bones shall remain in the labyrinth for all eternity…

Wishing you had something warm to keep the freezing air at bay, you set off on foot, twisting this way and that, hitting dead end after dead end. But gradually you begin to realise what is going on here, and you pick up pace, moving faster, jogging, running, sprinting down the corridors, hungrily searching for the route that will bring you freedom.

Finally, you reach the exit, and with all the strength you can muster you bellow out one word, the natural crescendo to your journey through the maze. The locked door opens… and you are free at last…

TASK: Find your way through the maze and deduce the 'colourful' password that will grant you your freedom.

enter image description here Click on the image to see it at full size - I do not recommend attempting this on a mobile! Alternatively, a .xls version of the image is available via filedropper.com. With apologies to solvers with colour-blindness, no colour transcript is provided (deduce from this the relevance of colour to the solution of this puzzle); however, this should not prove too much of a disadvantage since even solvers without colour-blindness will need to resort to using the same identification tools in many cases.

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The maze solution:

enter image description here

We might notice that

along the path, we always go in a pattern of "word-color-word, word-color-word". Each of these colors can be paired with the words before and after it to form a phrase:

enter image description here

The colors, in order, are listed in the lyrics of Joseph's Coat by Andrew Lloyd Webber:

It was red and yellow and green and brown
And scarlet and black and ochre and peach
And ruby and olive and violet and fawn
And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve
And cream and crimson and silver and rose
And azure and lemon and russet and grey
And purple and white and pink and orange and blue

"Blue", the missing color, must be the password.

Easter eggs:

The title is an anagram of JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT.

The unused square near the lower right -- one of only two inaccessible areas in the maze -- spells out TONE PAIR LINK SONG, which is a hint to what to do.

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  • $\begingroup$ Excellent work, and the correct answer :) But what about the title? It's actually an... $\endgroup$
    – Stiv
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 13:11
  • $\begingroup$ (There's also a couple more other Easter Eggs concealed - one in the text and some hidden instructions in the maze... for anyone who'd like to try find them!) $\endgroup$
    – Stiv
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 14:58
  • $\begingroup$ @Stiv Added! Noticed another easter egg too. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 15:10
  • $\begingroup$ Oh, where's the second inaccessible area?? $\endgroup$
    – Stiv
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 15:13
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    $\begingroup$ Oh, curses - a single stray bar! You know how much that's going to bug me now...! Ah well. You've found all the important parts now (there's still one cloaked allusion in the text, but it's not essential for the puzzle). The checkmark is yours :) $\endgroup$
    – Stiv
    Commented Sep 7, 2020 at 15:17

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