I wrote about IFComp in my last post. One popular game amongst followers of the IFComp is the “how many entries will it have this year” game.
It’s definitely more than 60 this year, which would make it the largest ever, as this blog post indicates:
When we wrote up the prize chart, we estimated there would be 60 entries. The actual number isn’t final yet — wait until Sunday! — but it’s safe to say that it’s higher than 60.
However, given last year had 58 entries (technically 60 at the start, 2 were disqualified), there are strong hints from this tweet (and elsewhere) the number may be much higher:
I’m not announcing the final entry-count before Sunday, but *very leaning into microphone voice* we’re gonna need more judges.
In the early days of IFComp, most people played every game and then posted their reviews on the rec.games.int-fiction newsgroup. Then came the year 2000, which saw a jump from 37 entries to 53, and reviewing everything got a lot harder. A fair number of people still did it, although the standard for most people what constituted a review was relatively short. (Paul O’Brian being a notable exception.)
In a way, the act of completion helps finish the the playing and reviewing in the first place. For the last 10 or so of my reviews from 2015 (53 entries) I started to feel the pain, but there were only! 10! more! and then only! 9! more! and etc.
Supposing the number is at, say, 100, the completionist approach just doesn’t work any more. What’s the best approach, then?
1. Randomize the list of games, pick the top 15 (or some other small fixed number) and stop. No rush, no pressure.
2. Randomize the list of games, start from the top, and keep going until time runs out. This is what I did last year and is still no pressure for a certain mentality.
3. Play everything, but only pick a couple highlights to write about. (This is typically what I see in the larger itch.io gamejams.)
4. Play everything, but make very short comments on each rather than longish paragraphs or essays.
5. Play what looks good from browsing the blurbs, and only review those games.
The Interactive Fiction Competition is a yearly event held since 1995 for short interactive fiction works (generally, 2 hours of playing time or less; there’s no strict rule about this, but the judges are supposed to make their rating after 2 hours). Authors can enter as many as three works. There is no entry fee.
The works are released on October 1st, and judges (anyone interested who isn’t a participant) have until November 15th to vote on them using a scale from 1 to 10. Judges must rate at least five entries for their votes to count.
Q: Is this a text adventure only thing?
It started with text adventures, but there’s no requirement, and in recent years only a little less than half of the entries had a “parser” of some sort.
Q: Are you going to write reviews again?
Some. I doubt I’ll ever have another year where I can review every entry. The numbers haven’t come out for this year yet, but there likely will be over 50 of them. I aim to review more than 10 this time.
Q: Will All the Adventures be on hold during the competition?
I’ve got something that might make a surprise appearance near the middle. IFComp will likely eat most of my writing energy, though.
Q: I’m an author! Could I ask you more about a review you wrote?
This has absolutely nothing to do with IFComp, but enjoy this reading by Sam Kabo Ashwell of Sherwin Tjia’s Pick a Plot Book 2: You Are a Cat in the Zombie Apocalypse!
In all seriousness, feel free to comment to this post if you want; I’ve heard very little discussion coming up to IFComp this year, and I’m frankly wondering where everyone went. If you’re going to be a judge, what do you predict you’ll see this year? If you’re an author, post if you’re nervous, and I will find a funny cat video for you.
Back in the 1979s when I was writing about Joel Mick’s Burial Ground Adventure I found a scroll in the game:
BUY JOEL MICK’S NEXT ADVENTURE – DAMSEL IN DISTRESS – AVAILABLE SOON
The “next adventure” was part of a trilogy. Unfortunately, the game (and the other two) was nowhere to be found on any of the usual TRS-80 archives. (There was a number after the message above to call — it’s possible it was only available at the time by direct mail.) After my blog post here, I received a helpful email from a “John Doe” who happened to have snagged copies from a now-defunct website, and uploaded them to if-archive on my suggestion. They should now (hopefully!) be available forever.
I just wanted to point out how much of a near miss this was: the original files themselves were copied by a “David J. Cooper” off a mysterious disk titled “DD Games 20” in 2009, which was thankfully still intact. Then, John Doe had to have saved copies when the archive they were on went under, and then he had to care enough to want to pass them on.
Odyssey #1, Damsel in Distress is credited to Joel Mick and Jeffrey M. Richter, while the other two games (Treasure Island and Journey Through Time) have James Taranto as a co-author instead. I don’t know the story there; perhaps they helped with the coding, because while Burial Ground Adventure was in BASIC, the Odyssey trilogy is in native machine code.
Damsel in Distress opens quite strangely: you’re in a tavern with a sword and bottle, and a royal messenger walks in.
I assumed this was a “you are approached by a stranger with a quest” type setup, but nothing happens: the royal messenger just sits there. Any attempt to >TALK or otherwise communicate failed. I had to >KILL MESSENGER to get something to happen, upon which I found a scroll.
So…. I guess killing the messenger was ok? The lack of communication verbs structurally suggested the direction the plot needed to move (a bit like how Quondam lacked the verb UNLOCK suggesting a key was of a certain type). This is sort of a “motivation media res”; it’s fairly clear the character had some idea of what was going on enough to randomly murder someone, and the player catches up along the way.
A rescue mission! Not a terribly complicated one, as it turns out, although there was one early puzzle that stumped me enough I had to stop playing for a while. While away from playing, a solution occured to me; back at the computer, I tried to implement it and it worked. (If you want to avoid spoiling the puzzle for some reason, avert your eyes from the next screenshot.)
It’s been a while since I’ve done a solve off the computer. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about adventure games, but the early-era ones often rely on in-game experimentation in a way that just stopping and thinking isn’t quite enough to solve a tricky puzzle.
After the curious opening (which I won’t say is good or bad, but it made me think) and the actually-decent puzzle, I am sad to say the rest of the game was perfectly ordinary. There’s a castle you explore; down below there is a dungeon with a prisoner.
The prisoner informs you of a secret passage (but you don’t get to rescue them, sorry prisoner!) and in the secret passage you find the titular damsel which you can carry out of the castle. There is no opposition from guards when leaving; in fact, other than those two people there’s nobody in the castle at all. The only danger comes from setting down the damsel too early:
Fortunately you have a shack in the woods where you can find safety (?!) and win the game.
OK, fair, this wasn’t great. But: it’s easy to take for granted I’m able to get to these games, but often it’s luck they’re available at all. I don’t think my time spent was valueless; the startling opening in particular is of theoretical value, and no matter the quality the game is a piece of history.
I want to thank all of the archivists and obsessive collectors who make my writing possible.
In the era of adventure games we’ve seen, they’ve been in one of three categories:
1.) Commercial releases, on disk or tape.
2.) Source code printed in magazines (“type-ins”).
3.) On large mainframes, meant to be played by those who could access the games, but were not released in a method accessible to the general public.
Quite often these meshed together, with a mainframe release being pared down and sold on home systems, or games released both in source code and tape format. There’s a fourth category that hasn’t come up yet.
4.) Private games, meant to be played by a small audience (possibly just friends and family, possibly just the author themselves), without distribution.
And even if we don’t or can’t do this all the time, writing some games for friends helps – well, at least, it helps me – resolve some of the false market-vs-art dichotomy. The things that we make don’t have to be only for ourselves or only for someone else: they can be both. They can be honest and still accommodate someone else’s truth.
Games in category #4 tends not be studied or written about for the obvious reason that by definition the public (and historians) don’t have access. While there is a wealth of diaries and letters from the past (the non-interactive equivalent of private games) the ephemeral nature of digital media means most private games are destined for oblivion.
He considers his seventh adventure (The Vial of Doom) to be his first “good” adventure game. His early works give more of a feel of just noodling around and learning how to design. They’re also fairly short, so I’ve packaged together Adventures #1 through #3 in this post.
Misadventure
The scientists of your time have developed a time machine, with which to travel any place on Earth, at any time. However, they have not perfected a way to get you back, unless you are above ground. They have you aimed for a small underground cavern, and have armed you with a light source. Your mission is to find as much medieval material as possible (they have the time machine set for 1223 A.D.), and probably bring back your own treasure as well.
To move about, use the directions NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, and WEST (N, S, E, and W will suffice) and/or GO. To pick up something, say GET, TAKE, or .; to put it down say DROP, PUT, or P.
The transporting time machine is ready, you enter, and disappear!
You are in a damp, dusty 3-way intersection.
Passages lead: North South East
Grab stuff, bust past simple obstacles, survive. It took me roughly 10 minutes to finish. There’s insect repellent in one room guarded by a dwarf (more on him in a second). There’s a spider that you can drive away with the repellent; it was guarding a “snake-bite kit”. There’s a snake you can drive away with the kit. Then there’s a giant you can shoot with a phaser (?).
This is from the author’s port for 32-bit Windows. The original TRS-80 files are only available for some of the games.
The dwarf, in addition to being codged off Adventure, has an awkward issue with the random number generator.
You’re in the “small room.”
There is a threatening little dwarf in the room with you!
There is some insect repellent spray here.
Passages lead: South East West
The dwarf takes a swing at you!
The blow missed you completely!
Here’s the problem: there’s a strong chance upon just entering the room the dwarf will (randomly) hit and kill you. There’s armor in another room that slightly reduces the possibility (the dwarf will sometimes hit the armor) but essentially this is a situation where death can come by random chance in a way the player has literally no control over.
I rebooted the game about 6 times until I made it through the dwarf. If anything in this game felt like a rookie mistake, this was it.
There is one “actual” puzzle to the game:
This room is called “magic central.”
Written randomly about it are the letters “X”, “Q”, and “Y”.
>XQY
Nothing happens. Don’t forget, the letters may not necessarily belong in the order they appeared.
>XYQ
Nothing happens
>QYX
I don’t know how to “QYX” something.
It essentially gives away its only puzzle-aspect right away, it’s still good to note, since any sort of threads of authorship may mutate and reappear in later work.
In fact, there’s a similar start to the next game …
Star Cruiser
… where ZLP is the magic word to get things started.
This is pretty much the same structure as Misadventure: single items spread out and used to defeat enemies either violently or by scaring them off. It’s only slightly trickier than Adventure #1; I was stalled by a “prismatic square” which reflected my phaser fire. (There’s a silver ball you throw at it: “The ball dents the prismatic square out of existence!”)
There’s an alien that starts shoot right as you enter, just like Misadventure, and can randomly kill you with no recourse. Immediately after there are three buttons:
>1
You’ve started the self-destruct countdown at 20 seconds!!
>2
Self-destruct sequence terminated.
>3
You are now the commander of the star cruiser. Suddenly, Federation H.Q. appears on the screen, and tells you that this is the “Enterprise”, and that you must stop the Klingons. To continue, play “Another Star-Trek Game”.
The Star-Trek game is not an adventure game, and seems to be another branch off of Mike Mayfield’s 1971 game. It wasn’t written until 1981 so I assume either this message was added in a later revision or the author already had plans to make it.
Jailbreak
No intro here: you’re in jail, struggling to get a parser to do something. >KILL GUARD yields “Be more specific as to how.” and led me to a sad / amusing list of ways to kill a videogame NPC, none which were successful. I had to check the source code.
>THROW VOICE
The guard, hearing the sound, runs to the north.
In doing so, he drops his keys.
Young Mr. Wilcox seems to have fallen into the same “puzzles are too easy or too hard” trap of many other adventure authors.
Later, >SEARCH (just the word, by itself) is necessary to find a secret passage, and a loaded revolver. You can then blast the next security guard you see. (“The guard, unprepared for the attack, dies.”)
Then you find a disguise and badge, and manage to sneak by the world’s most unalert warden. This gets you outside where someone is selling shovels. Buying the shovel (with some cash that just happened to be lying around) and digging in an open field yields some “Evidence”.
Then you can go in the courthouse, which is right next to the prison, and win:
The (now much older) author does have self-awareness of the absurdity. This is from the source code:
// Never mind the prison guard you had to kill in cold blood to get to this point,
// or the judicial procedures required to overturn a felony conviction when new
// evidence is uncovered….
adventure_over();
In the first game you shoot a giant, in the second an alien, and the third a security guard. All are treated equally.
The endgames to computer RPGs inherently have what I call the “item creep” problem: the player has amassed so many skills and items that it becomes hard to balance things and keep the game challenging. Adventure game endgames also sometimes have trouble keeping up difficulty, but in the opposite direction: as items get used up, there are less and less of them that are possible solutions to a puzzle.
While some of Quondam’s puzzles start to succumb to the “try every inventory item” method near the end, there are still a couple of truly evil ones.
>NW
You are standing in a forest glade, full of trees except for a road south. There is a small cave nearby, boarded up, with a sign saying ‘Emergency only’.
There is a red and white striped pole standing vertically here.
>U
You are perched on a pole (and look VERY silly)!
Before how I explain how this one is solved, I need to mention another item, a “strange lamp”:
>ON
What do you want to switch on?
>LAMP
The lamp gives one large flash.
You’re blinded fatally.
I tend to make an object list as I play to help solve puzzles, but I had left one off. I had a blind spot (ahem) based on a false assumption. I assumed that this portion of the game was just a gag:
>SAVE
A legal gentleman appears, saying ‘We do not like your use of ‘save’. There are few places we cannot reach, so please avoid trouble.’ He vanishes in a cloud of smoke.
>SAVE
The legal gentleman returns with two persons who are definitely NOT gentlemen, who beat you up. You knock the dark glasses off one but you are near death when they leave.
A pair of dark glasses lies here.
You are in agony.
Even though this normally kills you, you actually need to go through with this scene because you need the dark glasses to avoid getting blinded by the flash.
It turns out the glade is the only place you can suffer the beating and survive:
>GET GLASSES
OK
Just as you are dying, a man in a white coat runs out of the cave, pulls you inside and cures you.
You are in a dingy shop belonging to the local apothecary, barber and mortician, judging from the certificates plastered on the wall. There are racks which once held sunglasses, empty herb bottles, and coloured postcards over the cracks in the wall.
A wheezing apothecary wants payment.
A small white capsule lies here.
One extra bizarre aspect: in trying to solve this I was googling red-and-white striped poles in the UK because I assumed there was some extra meaning to them, like with the British Rail sandwich. However, due to all the modern elements, I was looking for 1980s-ish interpretations. I never thought “doctor” which would be appropriate for a medieval version of the same symbol. This wasn’t exactly a “continuity error”, but this felt to me like the bird from my last post being near and far at the same time — being rescued from a beating by the Mafia from a medieval doctor requires a bit of chronological confusion.
Puzzle #2: The Cards
The most truly frustrating item in the game might be some “decorative cards”. >PLAY CARDS in a random location will cause them to just disappear when they hit the floor. Later you find a green felt table, and playing the cards causes this to happen:
>PLAY CARDS
A sorceror appears, snatches the cards off the table, says ‘..even cheats at solitaire..’ and vanishes.
I definitely needed hints here; I might be bold enough to say 99% of the players needed hints here.
>SHUFFLE CARDS
OK
>SHUFFLE CARDS
OK
>PLAY CARDS
You deal four cards and see that they are the 3 of spades, the 5 of hearts, the 4 of diamonds and the 2 of clubs before they all disappear!
This puzzle might be remotely fair if it was a “new” deck of cards, since new decks of cards tend to be unshuffled. There was other no reason at all to assume the above actions were necessary (you do need to shuffle twice; shuffling once will cause the same sorceror scene to happen).
Puzzle #3: The Horse
This puzzle exemplifies more than anywhere how the game abuses the notion of being your “eyes and ears”.
After getting below the Kitchen from last time (not too hard, once I had the repaired sword) …
You are in the kitchen of Beelzebub’s restaurant, full of imps preparing revolting food. The smell of sulfur and roast flesh catch at your throat.
A roast ox is turning on a spit.
A goblin is coming, the light gleaming off its many eyes and claws!
A ring is set in the floor.
… I came across a scene with a demon, followed by another with a troll. Solving for the troll left me in this position:
You are in a room covered in carvings. There is a large hole in the roof far above you and an exit south.
A stone troll stands here.
I was completely stuck here, and it turned out I needed to use this item:
There is a small silver figurine of a horse here, with a square hole in one side!
I assumed later I would encounter something “squarish” that would fit. But no: it was an item I already had for most of the game, a small key:
>WIND HORSE
You place the key in the horse’s side and wind. The horse grows and you drop it, as it turns into a living winged stallion!
The horse stares at the troll, fascinated.
Allow me to chronicle the unfair:
1. The small key is described as just that. There is no implication it is a “winding key” or has a square end. I think the game must have thought a “hint” was the fact “unlock” isn’t even a word in the game.
2. Speaking of verbs, “insert key” or the like doesn’t work. The only way to operate the horse figurine is with the verb WIND.
3. The horse-winding works anywhere, but usually results in “The horse seems unafraid and flies off.” There’s no particular reason to think that a stone troll would cause the horse to be more afraid than anything else. (This one isn’t as bad as points #1 and #2, since at this point the number of items that haven’t been used yet is pretty low.)
Puzzle #4: The Snake
This one was right at the end.
You seem to have ended up on Death Row. An iron maiden stands to one side, and gas hisses through vents. The roof seems to be getting lower!
There is a large electric chair here.
A mighty serpent lunges for you, its jaws agape!
>THROW FLUTE
The serpent eats the flute with no difficulty.
A mighty serpent lunges for you, its jaws agape!
This is after hitting the “I’ve used every item, haven’t I?” limit. The solution turned out to be very clever, enough so that I’m not going to spoil it here (if you’ve been following my posts, you should be able to solve it in the comments).
Ending Thoughts
>ON
What do you want to switch on?
>CHAIR
Your body (which was getting pretty battered, let’s face it) dies but your spirit is passed into a fine new body. You appear in an office full of mountain photos. A gnome demands the number of your bank account.
(This comes from the card puzzle I mentioned earlier.)
>5442
The gnome gives you your interest and returns your treasure.
You have scored 250 out of 250.
I’ve run out of problems. That means you’ve won (curse).. I mean well done!
That’s the end!
Would you like another game?
Let me record some hyperbole for posterity, then make some clarifications:
Quondam is the most difficult adventure game ever made.
I can think of certain adventures that rely enough on moon logic that random usage of objects is the only way through. This is harder than that! There are no near misses. If you don’t think to “WIND HORSE” or “SHUFFLE CARDS” you’re not going to get anywhere. This is in addition to the leaps required to utilize the save game feature as a puzzle solving method, or work out the “bank” puns, or handle the fact the game actively aims to describe items in a deceptive way.
Having said that, I’m sure there are some truly broken and terrible games that are harder to get through, but there’s a difference between broken and hard.
Should you try to play this? Well, I didn’t spoil all the puzzles, so you’re still up for an uphill climb if you’re up for it. I suppose it’s worth it for a glimpse into early 80s sadism that’s heavy enough I can make a claim like the one above with a straight face.
Since last time, I had managed to apply the mysterious message in a sandwich (see details in the comments) to break into a demonic restraurant:
You are in the kitchen of Beelzebub’s restaurant, full of imps preparing revolting food. The smell of sulfur and roast flesh catch at your throat.
A roast ox is turning on a spit.
A goblin is coming, the light gleaming off its many eyes and claws!
A ring is set in the floor.
Unfortunately, I spent many fruitless hours afterwards with no progress at all, and I decided it was time to break open the hints. In the commercial version, they were provided with the game itself as an envelope meant to be broken open in time of emergency.
It’s time.
Immediately I found my “stopping point” puzzle; it was Yet Another Visualization Problem, but I don’t blame myself here because the text suggests contradictory things.
>NE
You are lost in a trackless forest.
A little bird sings nearby.
>GET BIRD
You grab the bird, but it expires and you drop its remains.
Being able to grab the bird suggests that is literally “nearby” enough that one can reach out and grab it, not that it is perched a few trees over or anything like that. Consequently, it never occurred to me I could do this:
>FOLLOW BIRD
You struggle through briars you thought impassable to get to the bird which then flies to another branch.
>FOLLOW BIRD
You struggle through briars you thought impassable to get to the bird which then flies to another branch.
>FOLLOW BIRD
The bird finally flutters off.
You are on the shore of a wild sea surrounded by forest. There is a misty isle out to sea, which seems to move as you watch it.
An antique brooch lies here!
Compare: the bird is close by and far away at the same time. It’s like the adventure game version of a continuity mistake in a movie.
I’m going to be somewhat forgiving because solving this puzzle is followed by a section which I found breathtaking, enough so that I’m going to give a spoiler warning — this is likely the best part of the game.
I fortunately had my broken blade and my hilt with me (from the “reject sword” gag):
>PLAY HARP
You strum – what else – ‘The minstrel boy’.
The waters carry you off to a strange isle in an eternal twilight. You lose track of time watching its helpful craftsmen.
They mend the sword for you.
You are on the strange timeless isle.
Escape required my “half of a ticket marked ‘Faery'”. Quick question here: is half a ticket normal for transport that uses tickets? Is this some sort of reference? Is it something like “one way is half the ticket, going back again is the other half”?
>WAVE TICKET
A swarm of creatures take the ticket.
There is a Ching! and they carry you back to the beach which has changed subtly. You feel weak, your hands wrinkle and your hair turns white. You have been long on the isle and are paying back the time!
You’re on the shore.
It occurred to me briefly that this was permanent — that you were meant to play the rest of the game as a very aged person — but this always happened on the next turn:
>W
You decay to bones.
Your life is over.
However, you may remember I had an elixir which seemed to be a “shrinking potion”. Not really; that was just a side effect of the true nature:
>DRINK ELIXIR
You drink the elixir. Its youth spell balances your ageing and your health returns.
Aha! The “shrinking” was getting younger, and “vanishing” was simply due to going into negative years.
However, this didn’t turn back the flow of time. This is permanent time travel, on the order of something like 100 years.
Consequently, all parts of the map visited so far changed. The spider web with many small spiders turns into having three large spiders (which you can evade to grab some bones in the center of the web). The knight that has been blocking your way is … still blocking your way.
You’re on a path between two banks. An aged knight in gleaming armour is ready to contest the way.
Think about all the obstacles in generic fantasy worlds you’ve seen, where something / someone is guarding a single room. When you leave, do they still guard that room? Even after 100 years?
>THROW WATER
You slosh the water at the knight, whose armour immediately goes rusty! His movements get slower.
>NW
The rusty armour slows the knight and you slip past him.
You are in a forest clearing.
There is a large climbable tree here.
An elderly dragon puffs smoke rings here.
The “large climbable tree” was previously a “sapling” planted before the magical isle visit occurred.
Note that if you’ve had items lying around, they’ve all disappeared. The way to protect them is to “deposit” them in a bank. There happens to be a bank right where the knight is “You’re on a path between two banks.” (Beware of puns!)
>DEPOSIT KEY
The key is now in your account.
You can get them back again in a “branch office” of the bank in a branch of the tree. (Groan.)
The branch office mentions interest, which suggests if I deposit a treasure before the time travel it might yield some more riches. The only treasure I have to deposit is a “platinum medal” which I can only get I’ve already bribed the knight (meaning I can’t return to the knight’s location until later), so I’m not sure how I would make a deposit yet.
Anyway, as usual, still stuck. The aged dragon is fortunately now easy to get by, but I don’t know what to do in the part beyond:
>NW
You are standing in a forest glade, full of trees except for a road south. There is a small cave nearby, boarded up, with a sign saying ‘Emergency only’.
There is a red and white striped pole standing vertically here.
>U
You are perched on a pole (and look VERY silly)!
—
Let me backtrack to my moment of thinking the unnatural aging was irreversible damage. That’s not a common thing in any game of any genre. In general, games seem to be deeply uncomfortable with permanent consequences that affect the physical aspects of the main character(s). Choices can have major plot effects and change the actions of other characters, sure, but with the exception of certain roguelikes (like UnReal World and Darkest Dungeon) every injury seems to have a cure potion around the next corner. Characters might be killed off, but never disabled. This is curious when you consider the amount of danger and trauma a typical video game character goes through.
I’ve made more progress and still managed to resist the lure of the walkthrough. My main breakthrough was simply finding I could go northwest from the desert and enter a new section.
Included in that area is a place where I can retrieve the items I deposited in “Customs” (the place that had me stuck last time). I also reached what I’ll call an “accidental solve” — if you try to leave the room where you can rescue your treasures, a hermit looks at your inventory disapprovingly and slams the door, trapping you inside. Let me backtrack a little:
You are in a small town square full of churches and monuments. The Spanish Inquisition are here, debating your future.
>W
The crows bars your way.
>PRAY
The throng draws back and leaves a way free.
I had the luck of being stuck at this part (again, just not finding the northwest passage from the desert) and in an attempt to try everything, did this again after the first PRAY in the same location:
>PRAY
A cardinal lays a cross before you.
Eeeeeeeevil. In any case, if you’re carrying the cross (and I was, by luck) the hermit doesn’t shut you away.
I was also able to store treasures permanently.
This is a sunny but cool area. There is a pool of water here, with mud banks by it, and a holiday cottage to the nowrthwest. A path leads west, and all southward directions lead to desert.
>DIG
You find a plate set in the mud, reading ‘Mud bank – alluvial section. Deposits only’ The mud seeps back.
>DEPOSIT DIAMOND
The diamond is now in your account.
Unlike the Customs area I mentioned (where you can retrieve your deposits nearby), this officially “scores” the treasure. This moment is worth a little discussion.
I’ve always thought of puns as a deeply British thing, possibly because of the British crossword. They have the rule that every clue hints at its word (or phrase) twice, except one of the hints is likely some manner of wordplay.
Puzzle jumbled in game (6)
In any case, this section makes clear we’re not in a world-environment in the typical sense; rather, we are in a world of symbols where items can mean things on multiple levels, where signifiers are detached from the things they signify, and the computer-narrator which is supposedly the “eyes and ears” of the player is out to deceive and trick. (The sandwich from last time is a good instance of this — the whole segment is one that could not reasonably happen in real life, but was instead a challenge to extract a hidden layer of meaning.)
The game at least set the player up to think in terms of “deposit”, but the “allevial deposit” of a mud bank is still an outrageous pun on the level of a particularly fiendish crossword in The Guardian.
I feel like I’m not conveying everything by just talking about it, so here’s an opportunity for you, the readers, to solve a puzzle from the game. This didn’t require resolving a “pun” exactly but I did have to re-contextualize my visualization of an object in the game. Everything you need is in the text. How do you get by the invisible barriers?
You’re within a circle of stones. There are triliths to the northwest, southwest, and southeast; a pair of monoliths flanks the northeast path.
>SW
An invisible force stops you.
>SE
An invisible force stops you.
>U
You are on top of a pillar. Nearby is another.
>INV
You are holding:
A harp!
A rock
Half a ticket
A metal rod
Some mushrooms
A stone slab
A sapling
A rope
From the Book of Kells again. Horror vacui still remains an appropriate metaphor, as solving one puzzle just tightens the game’s net leading to another. I feel a palpable pressure while playing.
One of the puzzles I was stuck on last time involved this object:
There is a B.R. takeaway sandwich here.
Eating it invoked a solution, but also a problem:
You eat the sandwich and its crunchy outside. Your stomach rumbles but you feel a new surge of strength.
You have stomach ache.
>WAIT
OK
You have bad stomach ache.
>WAIT
OK
You are in agony.
>WAIT
OK
You are in agony
Your life is over.
There are some textual clues in retrospect, but the way I solved this was looking at the structure of the game. The sandwich is in a short underground section with many items that seemed necessary to continue, but it also was a one way trip — after exiting and leaving, there didn’t seem to be a way back. I needed to eat the sandwich while still underground to rescue a sword (well, part of one) from a stone, so I knew it was unlikely resolving the sandwich involved some future item. I focused just on what I had, and went through a verb list I had made trying everything reasonable I could think of on the sandwich.
>OPEN SANDWICH
You tear the transparent wrapper off the sandwich.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ok, that one is resolved.
I also managed to escape the spiders that attacked me after visiting the center of a “spider web” area and getting a bottle with an elixir.
A horde of spiders swarms over you and eats you.
I discovered, quite by accident (I was testing out a different theory) that heading west after picking up the elixir did not lead to immediate death. On a hunch, I tried circling the outer portion of the “web” and found the entire route was safe (see the map for some crude MS Paint action):
However, by doing this, it closed off the entire web area — I couldn’t go back without dying. This meant, structurally, that another puzzle in the same area needed to be resolved before the elixir:
You are on a ledge by a cliff. A strand leads northeast to the web and a tunnel leads southeast into the cliff.
A curtain of fire blocks the tunnel!
>SE
You stride into the flames, which don’t burn you – it must be an illusion! You hear a curse and various tinkering noises.
You are in a short cave, where nothing seems to have changed for ages. The only exit is a tunnel northwest.
A curtain of fire blocks the tunnel!
A small mirror lies here.
There is a harp made from rare woods here!
>GET MIRROR
OK
>NW
As you leave, you look at the face-up mirror while the flames lick about you. There is a cry of triumph as the flames reach furance heat.
Your life is over.
I had another item (the rucksack) that the mirror can be stuffed into for safety. However, this led to another issue: the rucksack has a hole. (It took a while for me to realize this). Essentially, every step you take unloads an item onto the ground. This is bad with the mirror because you have to then pick it up while standing on the spider web, and this happens:
>GET MIRROR
OK
You see yourself in the mirror and, not looking, fall down a hole.
Your life is over.
Since the bottle was necessary for another part, I figured I must had everything I needed for the puzzle; necessity forced me to focus. I realized, after some more experimentation, that the rucksack holds 3 items and most, and is first-in-last-out — that is, if I put the mirror in, and then kept refilling it as I was dripping items, I could cart the mirror to safety.
(Well, mostly safe — the falling into a hole business actually can happen outside the spider web, so I still can’t carry the mirror far without it being in the rucksack.)
In any case, I’m out of things to do, other than getting by a dragon (which eats me as soon as it sees me) and the weird “Customs” area I wrote about last time; specifically, leaving Customs leads me to a town square …
You are in a small town square full of churches and monuments. The Spanish Inquisition are here, debating your future.
There is a coil of rope here
>WEST
The crowd bars your way.
>PRAY
The throng draws back and leaves a way free.
… and a desert …
>WEST
You are thirsty.
You are in an expanse of featureless sand under a burning sun.
… but I haven’t found a way out of the area past this point. However, handling the burning sun requires emptying the bottle’s elixir and filling it with water. This suggests another structural solving consideration: if the elixir isn’t just a trap to be avoided (drinking it makes you shrink and disappear) then it needs to be used *before* reaching the Customs area.
Horror vacui (“fear of empty space”) refers to the artistic practice of filling every nook and cranny on a page or painting, most famously exemplified by the Book of Kells above.
In the sense of this game, it’s filling every space possible with a puzzle. Nearly every location and object has some aspect that can either a.) kill you outright or b.) cause you to make the game unwinnable.
Like this item adjacent to the very first room:
>WAVE ROD
The star snaps out on a chain. The morningstar is a tricky weapon and you bash your brains out.
Your life is over.
Nearby, you find an elixir on a spider web. While you are predictably killed by the spiders …
>E
A horde of spiders swarms over you and eats you.
You are very dead.
… you are also killed by the elixir itself.
>DRINK ELIXIR
You drink the elixir. You start to shrink… you’re changing .. Hey, where did you go?
You’ve passed away.
So far, this feels like the Philosopher’s Quest strategy, but that map was sprawling compared to this one.
The right half of the map that I have so far. The left half has an arrangement of hexagons making a spider web, but most of the rooms aren’t useful.
I’ve found 13 locations of significance, and I count 11 open puzzles. Here are all of them:
1. There is a sword in a stone (the REJECT one I quoted in my last post). I can eat a sandwich to gain strength and pull out the sword, although it breaks off at the hilt (I have no idea if the breaking is a puzzle, but the hilt counts as a treasure). However, the sandwich causes nausea and death shortly afterwards.
2. There is a “fungi room” with a “rapidly growing vegetable being”. You can JUMP to avoid immediate death (“You leap over the creature’s limbs just before they close over your legs!”) but after a few turns the being grows too large and kills you.
3. I found (via use of magic word) a customs room.
You are at the customs. The only exit is a portal pulsing red-green to the north. There is a notice here: Any goods left here are stored and will be restored when you leave. Items needed for survival are allowed. Duty is charged.
A fanged customs official waits for you to declare your goods.
Saving your game is safe here. I presumed storing treasures might work as well, but if I try to “declare” one it just disappears. I don’t know what that business about things being “restored when you leave” is. Also, if you’re carrying a rucksack with items inside and you try to leave the room all the items in the rucksack disappear.
4. There’s a desert area where you quickly die of thirst. You have a flask which presumably contains water, but it just breaks and gets you wet if you try to open it.
5. There’s the previously mentioned spiders, which trigger when you try to leave the center of a large spider web.
6. There’s a dragon that outright fries you if you try to go by.
7. There’s a knight that “challenges” you and blocks your way. You can distract by handing him your morningstar (see the first excerpt in this post). If you go back to the same room he returns to his normal behavior, and you can’t get the morningstar back.
8. There’s a cave blocked by an illusion of fire. I was able to pass through and rescue a harp, but there’s also a mirror in there that I can’t take out (if I do, I spot an image of the fire in the mirror that causes the character to pause, and the fire becomes real).
9. There’s a bird in a forest that I don’t know what to do with; if I try to pick the bird up it dies immediately.
10. The forest itself is a maze, and I am unclear if there’s a way to navigate it or if you’re just supposed to stumble at random.
11. It’s unclear how to drink the elixir while surviving it, or if you’re even supposed to (I’m guessing either you get rid of the inside and just use the bottle it came in, or you give it to someone else to drink).
I won’t count it as a #12, but I may or may not have incorrectly gotten past a lock. I was able to BREAK LOCK with ease but knowing this game you need to keep the lock for something later. Strangely, the same room had a key, but no verb that resembled UNLOCK LOCK or PUT KEY or the like was even recognized. This game is so unnerving that even after solving a puzzle I wonder if I’ve really solved the puzzle.
Renga in Blue 
