Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

So after playing this game a little, I am undecided whether to think of it as

1.) A “master quest” version of Adventure, meant to challenge veterans on replay.

or

2.) Woods picking up loose threads from the 350-point version and trying to tie them.

I suppose it can be both, or at least, in working out the extra challenges it helps to look at them through the lens of unfinished business.

…

Other than the forest maze I mentioned in my last post, the next most obvious change between this game and the previous version happened when I tried to save:

SUSPEND

I can suspend your Adventure for you so that you can resume later, but it will cost you 5 points.

Is this acceptable?

Yow. Fortunately the endgame is triggered by getting all the treasures, and getting a max score is just extra gravy. Especially because of this:

500 turns? That’s another few points you’ve lost.

which means a perfect score requies both winning without saves and under the 500 turn mark. (EDIT: There’s another point deduction even earlier, at 350 moves.)

From Mari Michaelis’s map of Adventure.

I combed through the entire map twice and could not find any new rooms underground. This is not a straightforward expansion. Nearly everything new is hidden, with the common theme of “what would you have liked to try in original Adventure but couldn’t?”

For example, the bird. I am guessing most people used it for the puzzle it was intended (chasing away the snake) and them let it be,  leaving it underground for presumably the rest of its feathery life. Did anyone think to try this?

GO NORTH

You are wandering aimlessly through the forest.

FREE BIRD

OK

which in 430-point Adventure rewards the player with this:

LISTEN

It almost seems as though the bird is trying to tell you something.

OK, not much a reward yet. However, if you have drank the blood of the dragon not far from the Hall of the Mountain King…

The blood-specked body of a huge green dead dragon lies to one side.

DRINK BLOOD

Your head buzzes strangely for a moment.

…you can hear the bird:

The bird is singing to you in gratitude for your having returned it to its home. In return, it informs you of a magic word which it thinks you may find useful somewhere near the Hall of Mists. The magic word changes frequently, but for now the bird believes it to be “A’MIQ”. You thank the bird for this information, and it flies off into the forest.

A new magic word (which changes each game)! I already know where it goes, but that’s only because I was utterly unable to find this on my own and had to check spoilers. Read on if you’d like to know, too:

You are at the edge of a large underground reservoir. An opaque cloud of white mist fills the room and rises rapidly upward. The lake is fed by a stream, which tumbles out of a hole in the wall about 10 feet overhead and splashes noisily into the water somewhere within the mist. There is a passage going back toward the south.

A’MIQ

The waters have parted to form a narrow path across the reservoir.

GO NORTH

You are walking across the bottom of the reservoir. Walls of water rear up on either side. The roar of the water cascading past is nearly deafening, and the mist is so thick you can barely see.

The reservoir seems particularly attractive to modders of Adventure. Adventure 440 added to it and I recall David Long’s version (which I haven’t written about yet) adds a little. There’s also this home computer port which allows for some rafting.

I suppose the reservoir feels like something special and incomplete far more than the other dead ends (most people reach it after defeating the dragon). Unfinished business has everyone draw in the empty margins.

…

POSTSCRIPT NOTE: It bothered me a great deal afterwards: how could one know to drink the blood of the dragon in order to communicate with the bird? Apparently it’s a mythology reference:

In a Norse legend from the Völsunga saga, the dragonslayer, Sigurd, kills Fafnir – a dwarf who has been turned into a dragon as a result of guarding the cursed ring that had once belonged to the dwarf, Andvari. After slaying the dragon, Sigurd drinks some of the dragon’s blood and thereby gains the ability to understand the speech of birds.
— From Wikipedia, Dragonslayers