Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Part 3 starts at the side of a river. I had a mouse, catcher’s mitt, bottle of booze, egg, and stick of dynamite in hand.

The river is immediately next to a farm. This is the first (and possibly only) Time Zone-esque “big regular grid” map of the game.

Before you get anywhere, though, you potentially die of hunger.

The egg (caught raw out of the sky) works: it is described upon being eaten as a “GOOD EGG, AND GOOD FOR YOU!” You might the think the crops in the field work but the farmer grows poisonous rutabagas.

You can meet the farmer himself who “LOOKS TIRED FROM HARVESTING CROPS” and HELP FARMER.

This is unconventional parser use but I managed to run across it anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever made a term for this kind of situation; I suppose a scenario puzzle will do. That’s where you have details line up to put the player in a specific (possibly cliche) situation and they simply need to react accordingly. Hezarin had a bit (which I did figure out) where you are prompted in a way encouraging you to SURF.

Now you’ve virtually overshadowed by this, arguably the best breaker of the millennium. What about it?

>SURF

You hold the plank out in front of you and throw yourself flat out on it.

Hezarin had another bit (which I most definitely did not figure out) where you were supposed to CHIMNEY up a shaft, which I think was the author invoking a similar logic — this was a situation they know what to do with just from scenario recognition, but not everyone has mountaineering experience.

I bring up all this because we’re going to have another, much more outrageous scenario puzzle shortly.

Moving on: we’ve eaten our egg, gotten some money for harvesting poison rutabagas, and can travel on a road. The road eventually leads to a cat holding a magnifying glass.

You can trade the mouse to the cat for the glass, and then use the glass to light the dynamite.

THE DYNAMITE BLOWS UP IN YOUR HAND.

This might be helpful if you could light the fuse with the dynamite on the ground, but the game doesn’t let you, so I’m not sure what to do here. I haven’t found a good candidate for exploding yet anyway.

Moving to the west is a guard tower. There’s a helicopter that loops overhead (as an animation) and you have to wait for the helicopter to be positioned near the guard.

Incidentally, all along this section there are sometimes guard planes; if you see one you need to just walk the other way, and then go back. The plane will be gone.

Past the guard tower is a plane on the ground.

North of the plane is a gas station, and the game lets you BUY GAS, but you don’t have a container for it.

This is true even if you’ve drank the booze way back when you first found it leaving you with an empty bottle. (If you wait until after the river trip to drink the booze, the effect is incidentally much different, but we’ll get to that.)

The trick here is to first find an ALMANAC off one of the roads (none of the other roads have such a side exit, so this is a “secret item”…

…and south past where the plane is parked into a “jungle” area. Go in too far and you’ll be hustled into a pot.

I’ll link my discussion of cannibals here and leave it at that.

This is the second scenario puzzle. In such a position the cliche is to impress the natives (this happens in Return of the Jedi, for instance, where Luke levitates C3PO to impress the Ewoks). We’ve got an almanac with information about eclipses. So:

I get where the author was going with this given the comedy aspect, but could we have one African game (aside from Egypt) that’s cannibal-free? Erf.

Moving on, if you fill the plane with gas you’ll still get a message that you need a pilot’s license to fly, nevermind we’ve cared about other local laws being broken before. If you walk back to the gas station and go west you can find a guard’s house, and in the mailbox you can find the pilot license you earned by reading that HOW TO FLY book way back at the start.

The absurdism is great, and I’m guessing people did not get seriously stuck here. Checking a mailbox is much easier than predicting eclipses.

Finally with the gas filled in and the license in hand you can FLY PLANE. And if you’re like me, die shortly after.

I have found this section baffling. Upon takeoff, typing N shows a level horizon. You’ll get banking if you type E or W:

If you bank in the same direction more than one turn in a row you turn the plane upside-down and crash. If you type S while level N you try to do a 180 degree maneuver and crash. From the banking W, you can only safely type either N or S.

But what do all these directions mean? They seem to be relative to the plane itself, so N is just “move the plane forward”… maybe? But if you do W then S you also have a level plane horizon and can keep going S, but you aren’t driving the plane backwards.

Also: where am I flying to? There’s a button that lowers gear and you can LAND PLANE while fuel starts running out, but every time I’ve tried it I have crashed in the desert. I assume I need an actual airport or some analogue. There’s no way I can find to look at the ground and spot landmarks, so I am flying blind. My best guess is to go in the direction of El Presidente’s budget cuts and the cat and keep flying that way, because maybe the road picks up again (built from both ends like the Chunnel, possibly).

However, I still am not 100% sure which way the plane is facing on take-off, and what the actual effect of the “E” and “W” are in terms of positioning, and if “one turn flying = one space moved on the regular map” or any of those things. I feel like maybe I’m missing some information here.

You can incidentally literally fly blind. I mentioned the booze you could drink upon initial discovery leaving an empty bottle. If you wait, the booze makes you go blind instead. If you drink while in mid-flight, you crash.

I have two save files, one with a empty bottle and one with the full booze, and I have to keep going in parallel until I figure out what the item is for.