Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

THE CONTINUING STORY

You died, and you weren’t a good person.

However, someone else was being a worse person: Hitler.

Hitler wanted to raise an army against Satan, so Satan gave notice that stopping Hitler would be worthy of a a ticket up to the pearly gates.

While you needed to give over a powerful “Deecula” statue in the process (see gloating above), you managed to stop Hitler and gain the favor of both Jesus and Satan.

The end result is that Hitler’s army gets kicked out of Hell, so he decides to turn his fury towards Heaven instead. To save Heaven you have to a final showdown with the Führer of Evil himself.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The Paradise Threat by Jyym Pearson picks up directly where the game Lucifer’s Realm leaves off, and marks the next step in Will Moczarski’s marathon of Med System games over at The Adventure Gamer. Just like with Lucifer’s Realm we are going to both be blogging it at the same time (his first post is here). He will be playing the TRS-80 version and I will be playing the … Apple Atari version.

Sorry, Apple II superfans: this one didn’t get illustrated like the last game. Text-only, making graphics with the power of your imagination!

Before really getting rolling, let’s briefly review the prior Jyym Pearson works, and most particularly the quirks and tendencies that need to be kept in mind while playing one of his games.

Escape from Traam
Curse of Crowley Manor
Earthquake San Francisco 1906
Saigon: The Final Days
The Institute
Lucifer’s Realm

Authors can of course add things to their style, remove things, and do one-off experiments, but they do tend to have certain “signatures” that are visible if you consider an oeuvre in aggregate. In Pearson’s case (with his sometimes collaborator, Robyn) he always has very intense use of the LOOK command. Getting through sections will often involve intensely applying LOOK to each and every noun mentioned, and then to nouns mentioned by using LOOK. Earthquake San Francisco went into shaggy-dog-joke territory, having a CREVICE with a QUARTZ with an INDENTATION with a FLAT SPOT with an OBJECT with a DIAMOND, requiring you to apply LOOK at every step in the chain.

LOOK UNDER is rare but did show up in The Institute.

Pearson also appeals to more than just visual senses; LISTEN was required to localize a child in Earthquake, LISTEN was used to find a dripping sound in The Institute. Lucifer’s Realm had multiple uses of SMELL.

While Escape from Traam was essentially linear, Pearson gradually started to add non-linearity by requiring re-visits to old locations; for example, Lucifer’s Realm had an early encounter with Beelzebub giving general quest information. Late in the game, upon encountering Jesus, he says you should speak to the “evil one” again, requiring a re-visit all the way back to Beelzebub.

With all this preparation I’m still probably going to get crushed somewhere, but that’s how adventure games go. Noteworthy is that this is the first time I’m playing the non-graphical version; I could tell from comparing the TRS-80 and Apple II versions of Lucifer’s Realm that puzzles sometimes went under revision. Here we’ll just have to deal with version 1.

The game starts almost like it ought to be the epilogue to the prior game where you get your long-deserved rest; you rise up to a tunnel and get led by Winston Churchill into heaven who ominously says “only you can help us”.

Abraham Lincoln shows up shortly after to explain that Hitler’s army still has the power of the Deecula statue and is now veering towards heaven. Because we were the one that restored the statue in the first place we are (by some mystical rules) the only ones who are able to destroy it.

The game thus rather generously starts you with a GOLD RING, HELMET, SCEPTER, and SWORD, essentially the Armor of God. At the very first room where you can really start acting (the peaceful meadow) if you LOOK you’ll see something floating in the river, and you can find a wood box that way.

Proceeding further leads to dead lands.

I don’t have much of a map done yet.

Early on you can land in trouble in some quicksand; I haven’t been able to get out and I suspect I might need an item I don’t have yet. Veering away from the quicksand to the south leads to a demon who asks you trivia.

Yes, really, trivia.

He says,Welcome to the new quiz show LET’S MAKE HIM SQUEAL.

Thus you need to know (or be willing to look up) what the capital of Ecuador is and how many yards are in a mile. This is not a moment Pearson has had before but it makes me wonder if the pattern will be demons trying to trick us and play games rather than having to do that much in the way of physical combat.

Past the demon is an ancient stone door.

I was unable to get through, so I stopped to LOOK (as is the Pearson Way) and immediately died.

We are apparently immortal and I could see this getting exploited in a puzzle somewhere. This seems like a good place to leave off for now. I need to do my verb-testing run and of course LOOK and re-LOOK in every location for clues.