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 Fall of Babylon (1555) by Jean Duvet.
Renga in Blue 
Yup, alluvial DEPOSITs in a mud BANK. Welcome to Quondam.
I hadn’t solved this Stonehenge puzzle on my last visit there, but I realize now I’m missing an item you have.
The scoring system itself has some oddities. You start the game with 18 out of 250 points. And I’ve found at least one action that progresses the game but also lowers your score. Not sure what’s going on there yet.
If you mean running the treasure through Customs, I believe the score reduction was from “duty is charged”.
I’d believe it if score reduction happened elsewhere, too. In a different game, that’d be a hint that something was wrong. In this game, who knows?
I just went back to check. I lost 5 points for simply *arriving* at Customs, and then I lost another 2 points for “declaring” a treasure at Customs (I used the jeweled hilt for this test).
Maybe there’s a “better” way to arrive at Customs (not using the “naughty” word)?
Will shelve that with all the other mysteries I still have to solve.
Does Quondam have a two-verb parser? I guess once you’re on top of the pillar, one of the monoliths, DROP SLAB should convert the monoliths into a trilith. Though it seems like that would make slightly more sense if the invisible barriers were where the triliths weren’t.
The bank deposit thing strikes me as not that evil as this game goes–DIG is a natural thing to try when you’re around the mud banks, and though the alluvial deposit is an awful (fantastic) pun it does make it pretty clear that it’s the other kind of bank and deposit. This seems more convoluted on the designer’s side than on the player’s side, if that makes sense.
DROP SLAB is right. (The pillars are conveyed as *large* — if you try to jump from the top of one you die — so it means you are toting an absurdly huge rock around. So huge that I don’t think absurd adventurer pants really make sense here – it’s more like while it’s in your inventory, it becomes the *idea* of a large slab of rock.)
The puzzle with the mud bank is definitely telegraphed, and possibly even fair, but it does require the player to complete the pun. The player has to be operating on a level that lets them perform a metaphorical act rather than a physical one.
I had a similar scale issue with the rock in For A Change (spoiler: You have a rock!). There was a puzzle involving doing something with the rock where the rock turned out to be a different size than I thought. Which, having just fired up For A Change for three turns, makes me think I must have flat-out forgot to examine the stone, because the game straight-up tells you it is nothing more than a pebble. I’m really bad at interactive fiction sometimes.
Ah, I admit to only skimming the inventory list, but I was thinking the “invisible force” might be the electrostatic force bonding the atoms together into a rock — that by walking in the directions of the triliths, you were
literally trying to walk through solid stone (the answer would be to walk in one of the directions *not* mentioned). In any case, I’ve just recently read through all the old posts in this series, and am looking forward to what else you find in the future, in this game and others.
@WovenTales: That would be kind of awesome. So far, I think if you need to pick between a magical-symbolic solve and a physics solve, this game is going to go with the former. Given the author is a mathematician that might change later.
Surprisingly Rod Underwood was not a mathematician, he was a zoologist (something of an expert on sheep, as it happens). Of course he mixed with mathematicians, and was at one time playing Dungeons and Dragons with me, David Seal, and some other mathematicians who didn’t write adventure games (but did mostly play them). I found this game fiendishly hard, and I don’t think I ever finished it.
It still is (roughly) the hardest adventure I’ve ever played. The only one I found arguably harder is Ferret, and that one was the product of people from Data General working for 40 years, so it lands into its own special category.
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/ferret/?order=ASC
Is Rod Underwood still with us? I would heartily second Jason’s observation about Quondam. It is the only game I have ever played where you can soft lock yourself out of victory by approaching an object from the wrong direction and then taking it; that said it is still a very well constructed text adventure.
I would say of the fifteen or so Phoenix games Quondam is unequivocally the hardest; followed by Brand X in second place, Acheton in bronze medal position and then Xeno and Fyleet in fourth and fifth.
No, sadly Rod died of a heart attack about 15 years ago (he would have been in his late 50s). Yes, Quondam is very hard, and even when I was playing it on the mainframe and persuaded Rod to give me hints, it didn’t make it much easier.
I don’t remember the Phoenix users finding Fyleet particularly hard. I do have a memory of Peter Killworth being driven almost insane trying to do a Klingsor’s Tower puzzle in Sangraal, but I think other people got it almost at once.
That’s a shame. At least his game will stand as a notable memorial.
I personally found Fyleet the most tricky of the loose trilogy (Crobe and Sangraal with its boolean logic gates notwithstanding) seemed more lenient to me; I also used up half a forest’s worth of trees trying to map the rotating maze in Sangraal; very clever indeed! Many thanks to you and Carmel Sprout for all the hours of pleasure I have spent on your games.