Lothar's Labyrinth is a Coco version of the popular Wordsearch games that many magazines publish (a bunch of words are put into a square grid of random letters, and the player has to find the words). Labyrinth has a complete instruction program separate from the main game, and multiple versions of the game with different word lists based on themes. It runs on the standard 32x16 text screen with some semigraphics borders and sound to bring it up from a straight text game. It has various game modes to make the game easier or harder depending the player's desired skill level. The instruction program goes through how to play and how the modes work, with a sense of humor. The game will place a maximum of 48 words into the "maze", although you can hit the SPACEBAR at any time while it is generating to shorten the active number of words in the grid.
For adjusting the difficulty, there are multiple options that you can choose from:
1) How many words in the maze - from 1 to 48.
2) Words can only be spelled forwards, or both forwards and backwards.
3) You can look at the word list (to see which words are in the current game) or try to blindly find them based on the theme.
The game is completely controlled by the keyboard, and even invokes 8 directional cursor movement the same as a lot of Star Trek games do, using the number keys. To select a word, position the cursor on the starting letter, hit the up arrow, and then "draw" in the direction the word goes until you reach the last letter, then hit the up arrow again. It also has options for you to print the word list and the puzzle to a printer, if you prefer doing it the pen and paper method. Making your own word lists is simply a matter of replacing the DATA statements at the end of the program with your own. As for the word lists that come bundled with it, it includes:
Standard: (Computer/Electronics related words)
STATES (States and Capitals)
WORLD (Countries)
NAMES (First names)
My only real complaint about the game is that it doesn't leave select words highlighted in any way. I think that this might be because those same letters can be re-used in other words, but it does make it harder (especially with a lot of words in a labyrinth) to remember what you have already found. This is, of course, solved by printing it out onto the real paper, and then transcribing those into the Coco as you circle them on paper. If you complete a set of words, you get a score, based on the how difficult of game settings you picked and how long it took you to find them all.
There is a comment from Tom Rosenbaum (who created/ran Spectral Associates) as "TLR" in the main game program dated June 14, 1984 - this is well after it went on sale (in September 1981, when it was cassette only), so I assume he did some patching at this point before it became part of the Treasury Pack. The instruction program has a comment from him June 19, 1984.
This game later became part of the 30 game Treasury Pack from Spectral Associates.
Title: Lothar's Labyrinth
Author: Tom Rosenbaum
Publisher: Spectral Associates
Released: September 1981
Requires: Color Computer 1/2/3, 16K RAM (cassette) or 32K RAM (disk), Extended BASIC.