Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I found all the treasures, and deposited them in the wellhouse as is ancient tradition. I’m short by 3 points, but I’m ok with that; I’m not sure if the points actually exist.

You moved 353 times.
You gave me 477 commands.
Your score was 497 out OF 500.

You have reached master adventure, class C.
You need 3 more points for the next rank.
not completely exploring the park.

First, I wanted to (maybe) backtrack on a statement I made about the “crazy maze”. If you recall from last time it was a maze with an overwhelming number of rooms which I said also had a situation where leaving one exit would randomly go to a different room than normal.

I’m a little unsure about the latter point now, given I found out I was done in by a different trick altogether. Since I was out of objects, the way I was mapping was to save, try a particular exit which led to an indisguishable room, then try all the exits in *that* room to figure out which ones worked. I assumed if, say, the northeast exit led to room I had left a bottle in, that would be the *only* room where leaving northeast goes to a room with a bottle. I was entirely wrong about this. There are at least 3 rooms which in fact intentionally seem oriented to foul up this particular trick. I had to add rooms with names like (1B) to my map to account for the fact I was in a “fake” room 1.

The maze with passages that are all different appears in the game too, changed from the Crowther/Woods version:

To be honest, I was not fond of the original, and this one seemed eminently more workable. I avoided the same mistake I made with original Adventure and made sure I dropped objects in the rooms to help me map, even though the room names could be used for mapping (“little twisty maze of passages”, “maze of little twisting passages”, etc.) Rather than a vending machine, the end of the maze has the pirate’s treasure. (The pirate can appear to steal your treasure just like original Adventure, but he’s a lot rarer in this game.)

I got caught by an entirely evil and new different trick. You see, after you get the chest, if you just backtrack in a normal way, when heading north from the exit room (“little maze of twisty passages”) it will not leave the maze as it normally does. The game switches the passage off to prevent escape. I’m still not 100% sure the logic behind it, but I did eventually find a slightly irregular route back to the little maze of twisty passages where going north did allow for escape.

I would not have needed to be so complete about either mapping job except for a unique scoring feature: the game gives you 1 point for every room you visit. So while I found the crazy maze’s treasures within about 10 minutes of entering, if I wanted the points for the maze I had to map out and create a route that passed through every room. For posterity, so nobody else need suffer in the future:

Crazy Maze walkthrough:

From starting room: D. U. D. W.
GET DIAMOND
SE
GET CUP
NE
GET NECKLACE
E. SE.
GET CUBE
W. NW. D. NE. NW.
E. U. W. U. NE. SE.
GET RUG
SE. W. U. NE. SE. SW. S. NW. E. NE.
U. D. U. W. NW. SW. SW. E.
SW. N. D. D. U. W.
(OUT OF MAZE!)

All Different Maze Walkthrough:

From starting room: D. S. W. S. S. W. E. S. E.
N. SW. D. S. SE. W.
GET CHEST
E. NE. NW. D. E. U. N.
(out!)

There were a few puzzles other than mazes! For example:

• There’s a clam with a pearl in it, just like the original. There’s even a trident sitting nearby, but the trident is no help in opening it. The correct way to open the clam is drop the clam by water; when touching the water, the clam reacts and opens, exposing the pearl.
• You find a hammer, nails, and wood at one point. There is one spot where you can >BUILD BRIDGE and another where you can >BUILD LADDER. Despite the unusual verb, this was fairly well hinted and not hard to figure out. The main issue was logistical, because the wood is quite heavy and it’s hard to carry the necessary construction items as the same time as other things.
• One of the few aspects to remain entirely unchanged from original Adventure is the Ming Vase, which requires that you drop a pillow first before dropping it in the wellhouse.
• The lantern is not electric; it requires oil and matches. There are various oil pools across the map, but once your lantern starts running out of light you have to plan your route to get to an oil pool in time. Additionally, there’s a limited number of matches to light the lantern, so even though the lantern is refillable there’s still a “time limit”. One of the extra implications is you can’t turn the lantern off during outside trips to save turns, because lighting the lantern again after dousing it costs a match!
• There’s a fissure that requires crossing; in the original, you could just wave the rod with a star on one end and a bridge would appear. Here, the same thing occurs, but you have to >THROW ROD for some reason. Waving the rod instead has a random chance of creating a lightning flash and showing the contents of the room (as long as the room is dark).

(Click the image to get the full underground map, excluding mazes.)

In any case, while the game allows for maximum points (or at least close to it) it’s clear this game was an aborted work in progress; there’s an “in construction” room…

> POUR BOTTLE
The oil frees the door and it swings open.
> S
Colossal Cavern is under construction in this area. Please return to this location at a later date for interesting Adventures.

…and a “bear”, “wolf”, “chain”, and “troll” which appear in the source but are nowhere in the game. Because of this and the fact I cross-checked every room in the source code, I have fair confidence (let’s say 65%) that I have in fact visited every possible room, and 497 is the max score.

To be honest, even if those 3 points exist, I’m fine leaving them on the table. This one has exhausted me.