(Continued from my last post.)
PC-98 cover, from the Starcraft translation, via Mobygames.
I talked about “exploration” last time but this ends up being more of a “series of unfortunate events” type game, or as I termed it regarding Wizard and the Princess, a biome journey. The big difference between Rungistan and Wizard (and Rungistan and any text adventure game I’ve played, really) is the heavy reliance on timed events; more than half the puzzles involve typing something in response to an event happening on-screen, and if you are too slow you’ll die.
And if the puzzles don’t kill you, the skiing mini-game might.
The above map shows where we left off last time; the Courtyard is the exit from the prison, and just to the east is the snake where you need to not type while it goes by. Just to the south is a noose and you need to grab the rope.
The rope doesn’t get used until later, and this implies something about the game design: it is cheerfully willing to let you softlock if you miss something. I’ll show getting past the “gorge” on the map in a second, but that’s a one-way trip, so if you somehow skipped getting the rope (or the mouse back at the cell) you’re not going to find out until later. (I’ll take a closer look at this when I get done with the game — I’m not even sure how long you’re supposed to hold the mouse because I haven’t used it yet!)
I then got stuck at a gorge which was “10 feet longer than the world record for standing broad jump”. I initially dismissed the verbosity here as a joke, but it actually is a serious hint: the jumping is described as a “broad jump” meaning the game is interpreting the jump as being done in place. You can explicitly RUN and then JUMP.
But make sure you back up to where the snake was first before you start running!
The running is represented by the edge getting closer and closer; the game requires typing JUMP and then hitting ENTER fast enough in real time. It is not possible to jump “too early”.
The next section is thankfully a little more straightforward (…I think, there’s still the possibility I missed an object).
There’s a knife laying around in the desert and then you need to climb a ledge. Halfway up is a cave with a bear.
KILL BEAR with the just-picked-up knife does the trick. HUG BEAR does not.
The writing on the wall gives instructions which will be pertinent shortly:
Just past the bear is a bridge. Upon stepping on the bridge it sways, and then, in real time, starts falling away.
You need to type JUMP WEST to get off. I was stuck here longer than you might think just because I had got on the bridge via CROSS BRIDGE and thought I was still going north, when the game had invisibly turned our player character to the east.
You can now THROW the ROPE that you hopefully grabbed (otherwise, softlock) and climb your way across.
Up higher it starts to get cold.
There’s a cabin nearby described as “impossibly locked” but fortunately you can can just smash in the door to get in and find some skis.
And now we reach the one part of the game I had heard about beforehand: we have to go back to the snow, GERONIMO, and start skiing. This is an action mini-game.
You just use the right and left arrow keys to steer. I died quite a bit at the start before I realized the game wants you to steer between the trees, not to the far left or right of them. Then it took me only two more goes; it helped to discretely tap the arrow key and count rather than just “push and hold” and hope for perfect alignment.
I saw one account from someone who liked this game but never got past the skiing. This isn’t that far in the game, still; even when people liked these games at the time, they may not have gotten close to winning!
The section after the skis was the hardest I’ve done so far. In particular, one pattern the game previously established gets broken, and one of the puzzles is tough on top of the parser input being ambiguous (in other words, it’s hard to tell if you have the answer wrong or you’re entering the answer wrong).
The pattern that gets broken regards the random environmental scenery. I had examined each and every cactus in the desert and was told it wasn’t important, so by the time I got to the mountains I stopped trying. This was a mistake.
The canteen can be filled at a nearby river — which we’ll be coming back to shortly — and used in a scene with a REBEL GUERILLA.
The fuse starts disappearing and explodes if you don’t stop it in time; you’re “frozen” and unable to run away.
The solution is to POUR WATER with the canteen, but I encountered the fuse before the canteen, so spent a while fruitlessly trying actions like STOMP FUSE and THROW DYNAMITE. This made the puzzle feel different than the timed puzzles before; the bridge and gorge just demanded you type JUMP and have the wits to think about it; here, being an object-based puzzle, I was wanting to run through a lot of possibilities to test especially knowing I might have the right answer stymied by the finicky parser. I appreciated the timed aspect adding drama but it made the puzzle a drag until I had the right item.
Past the rebel is a room with more trees; LOOK TREE reveals a catcher’s mitt and the text “L7” written on the tree. I did not at first interpret the text as letters. The “merged” aspect made them look like part of the graphics, maybe, or at least some kind of arrow symbol, and while they play into a puzzle I haven’t shown you yet, I admit I didn’t make the link until HINT PLEASE told me they were connected.
The catcher’s mitt can be used a bit to the west where a bird drops an egg. Again I found the timed event before the object that would help solve it, and again I was trying fruitlessly to type catching the egg in various ways — and even various times, thinking maybe I needed to hit ENTER right before the egg landed — and it made the puzzle less pleasant than it could be. At least I suspected early here I really needed an item, although I was envisioning a pillow.
The bird is mid-draw. It is hard to get “perfect” frames when the continuous motion is happening, since the game is constantly doing redraws. Mask of the Sun had some screen-flipping tech that made the animation smoother but it likely wouldn’t be able to handle the full range of motion this game does. Honestly the Rungistan tech is extremely good for the era and I’ve not felt any delays at “authentic” machine speeds.
The catcher’s mitt is off course the right item, and lets you CATCH EGG. Now I have an egg. I don’t know what to do with it.
Other than the river, canteen, mitt, rebel scene, and egg scene, there’s a saloon.
When trying to open the cabinet, the game says there’s a lock in it; when trying to open the lock, the game replies
HOW ?
This is where the bad parser comes in. This is another one of the two-part prompts where you are supposed to respond to HOW, but I concieved of this as being something like TURN DIAL or ENTER COMBINATION or even TURN LEFT or the like, setting off a sequence. No, the game actually wants a string typed out in a very specific way. Sample: L2R2L2. In general, by having both a real puzzle and a parser puzzle, the game provides a second-order puzzle, where two probabilities of a potential solution are being multiplied in the player’s mind, making it miserable to solve. I ended up getting the right string to type from a walkthrough (I eyeballed it vaguely enough to not know what the numbers were).
You can look at the horns and see L14 clearly; you can look at the liquor and see 21.
This is a timed event asking you to type REPLACE the same time you are grokking the fact 21 is written on the bottle. (As I was stuck, I thought briefly maybe the one was an I as in the letter I.)
The register has the most important message.
I might have thought this was brilliant if a.) I wasn’t dealing with the parser issue and b.) the L7 clue way back at the tree was a little better-drawn to make it clear what I was looking at. But in summary, we have clues giving:
L14 (from the horns)
L7 (from the tree)
21 (from the bottle)
4R (from the register)
The idea is that in all cases we are seeing part of a string which represents the lock combination. With the slip of paper, there’s even more information if you look at the picture carefully.
The slip originally had the entire code on it, but is ripped. You can see traces of the number before and the number after in the picture. So the actual code, all together is
L14R21L7
That is, you can tell the R is being followed by a “2”, meaning the “21” goes there, L14 and 4R are overlapping to produce the initial part of the string L14R. A different framing might help; I suppose the idea of the codes being placed at random is also a little absurd (including on a far-away tree) but I’m at least willing to accept the game is in the alternate-adventure reality where codes can be slapped on any surface whatsoever from any distance at all from their targets (see: the Rhem games 1 through 4 inclusive).
The cabinet, incidentally, has booze. I haven’t used it yet.
Now we come back to the river. I was originally going to give up there and ask for help, but I combed through the early parts of the game and decided I hadn’t missed anything, so checked very carefully if anything would remotely respond to the possibility of being formed into a boat/raft. (For example, if you try to read the books in the cell again, the guard just confiscates them, but the shelf left behind can’t be referred to.) Since I had no luck there, I re-checked the latter part of the game, and noticed how the doors to the saloon where essentially flat pieces of wood. MAKE RAFT. “With what?”
Since I had read the book on navigating riverways, I could successfully use the raft, landing on THE SOUTH SHORE OF THE RIVER.
The game somewhat politely takes away some objects from your inventory along the trip. I assume this is to prevent solutions to things that are not intentional by using items from prior sections, but it does reduce the combinatorial explosion on the player’s part as well.
It is possible to reach this point and have skipped all five of the items listed (mouse, mitt, booze, egg, dynamite). I’m still paranoid I’ll need to loop back to the past to nab something I missed, and then have to do the skiing all over again, but I’ll just keep hope for now I haven’t softlocked.
Renga in Blue 
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