Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

With everything (mostly) mapped, it was time to tackle the puzzles. I got two from meta-thinking.

The first one involved an animation:

Now, this comes from early in the game – in fact, it was the first thing that happened to me – and I had just happened to have read the in-game instructions, which mention DUCK as a command. DUCK, in fact, works to avoid dying, and you can pick up the boomerang afterward.

This is entirely a visual puzzle. I found it mystifying at first just reacting to something displayed on screen as opposed to parsing text and thinking about it.

I later decided it would be a good idea to hunt for verbs, so I went through a big test list and came up with some the game seemed to accept:

CUT, DUCK, PUSH, OPEN, UNLOCK, CLIMB, READ, WEAR, DRINK, EAT, JUMP, THROW, GIVE, KNOCK, PLAY, RUB, WAVE, HIT, BREAK, KILL, SQUEEZE

If a verb isn’t recognized at all the game says “I CAN’T DO THAT”. If it is recognized it will either attempt the action (for a verb like DUCK) or say “TRY TWO WORDS – MAYBE”.

This list isn’t necessarily comprehensive, but it gave me a starting point. In particular, looking at the fact KNOCK worked, and remember there was a place later with a locked door, I tried KNOCK and it worked, netting me a treasure inside. (This was yet another meta-solve; not really the sort of thing that makes sense if we imagine the “real character” in the world trying to figure the problem out, just me leveraging the system of the game.)

Also, this was another purely visual room, with no text description or feedback that the action solved a puzzle other than the graphics changed.

Unfortunately, further progress required the “try everything on everything” strategy. Essentially, you have to assume everything is magic, and the magic will do nothing unless you are in the right place. For example, there’s a piece of cheese that says “VERY TASTY” if you eat it – fair enough, maybe there’s a mouse later or someone you can bribe? Apparently, though, the magic works if you’re next to a tiny hole …

… at which point eating the cheese shrinks you down and you can enter. Really, this wouldn’t be bad except for it not making any sense the cheese only working to shrink the player when near the hole. Alas, this game falls to the too-common error of letting magic do anything with no particular logic to it, so the player is just forced to experiment wildly.

Take, for example this puzzle:

Would you think to DROP LIME?

I guess there’s … some sort of vague pun involved, because there is lime in some cement, but that’s a totally different kind of lime than the one you eat, and you can otherwise treat the limes like normal limes. If you THROW LIME in an adjacent room, you can get by the quicksand without dying, and find a caterpillar. The way things are going I expect the caterpillar to shoot out laser beams and open a portal to an alternate dimension as long as it’s dropped in a random spot in the forest.

Goblins start you off able to access a *very* large chunk of the map – I’m going to guess, by the capacity of Apple II games, most of it — and most of is terrible. Take a look at the outdoor section above. Starting at “By Lake”, N, SW, S, NW gets you back to where you started. While outdoors. Argh!

The troubles are triple-multiplied by the minimal descriptions also saying nothing about room exits. The only way to tell what the room exits are is to thoroughly test N, S, W, E, NE, SE, SW, NW, U, and D. In every single room in the game. Yes, I had to do this with all of them. It made mapping incredibly slow.

Of course there is a maze. Hoo boy, is there a maze.

This really doesn’t look so bad, does it? However.

a.) Any exit that’s not displayed on the map actually does a loop. I had to keep track of which loops I tested as I went along.

b.) Sometimes (randomly) instead of a loop, you find a “smelly tunnel” and go to a random location in the maze instead. It took me a while to catch on to this and some parts of my map were originally wrong.

c.) The goblins are still out and about and occasionally killing you. I ran out of items to drop in rooms for mapping purposes and tried to go out and get more, but I couldn’t because they kept stabbing me. I ended up resorting to moving the knife around (see “knife 1”, “knife 2”, “knife 3”) and hoping that it wouldn’t get things totally confused.

d.) Unless I’m missing something, the maze is essentially useless – notice it just goes in a loop, with no treasures indicated. There’s a room to the left of the starting room (“Light From Above”) that you can use to poke your head above ground and get killed by the silly-looking ogre you saw from my last post, but that doesn’t require navigating the maze at all.

It’s possible a lot of this was “busy work” trying to justify the game being commercial (it sold for $27.50; in 2017 dollars that would be $75.26).

There is one saving grace, and that is the “safe place” the game wants you to store treasures in has a magic word associated with it — two, in fact. HXME (found on a tree) takes all objects the player is carrying and teleports them to a treehouse, while QIM (found in a mine) will teleport the player (but not what they’re carrying). So you can choose to teleport just treasures to the treehouse, or you can just teleport yourself, or you can teleport both. This has been genuinely handy in a few circumstances, and I don’t recall it in any other game I’ve played.

There’s a little animation of the ghost moving around when you enter (the ghost is that blob-thing in the upper-left of the picture). It doesn’t seem to be either friendly or hostile, it just floats there. I don’t know if I’m supposed to banish it or come up with a way to ally with it or whatnot yet.

I’m at the point now I have a list of objects and obstacles, but they’re all far apart from each other. I’m going to tilt this game over from “easy” to at least “annoying” but it’s starting to lean to the “hard”; I need to keep going to be sure.

We just went through a game Roberta Williams explicitly cited as an influence. But what if there was an influence that was intentionally left out?

Goblins was originally a text-only adventure game for Apple II by Hal Antonson and Linda Stix:

We sent the program to Programma International in California for publishing. It was “released” in 1979. This version was strictly text. There were no graphics. I have forgotten how many copies for which we were paid. I think it was 13 or 30! An interesting note. Roberta and Ken Williams had just moved to Coarsegold and had started Sierra Systems. They had a copy from Programma. Ken was the assembler guy and Roberta became the Queen of fantasy games. There are a dozen similarities in their first game, “The Wizard and the Princess,” to Goblins.

In 1981, a version with graphics was published by Highlands Computer Services. This is the version that survives today.

I’m not sure what to think of the above story – The Wizard and the Princess (from 1980) isn’t the Williams’ first game, and the business names they went through were On-Line Systems and Sierra On-Line respectively. I can chalk the discrepancies up the usual fuzziness of memory, but it means the rest of the story may include some of the same fuzziness. Really, the easiest way to confirm the link is to play the two games. Since Goblins theoretically came first chronologically, I’m playing it first.

However, the 1981 game clearly isn’t identical to the 1979 one. If Sierra borrowed from Goblins, then Goblins must have borrowed back from Sierra, because this game includes some rooms that are described purely by the visuals, which wouldn’t work in a text-only game.

These rooms are scattered throughout regular named text rooms, although the rooms are quite minimally described. (There’s enough of them I can understand why – the game undoubtedly pushed a disk capacity limit.)

Every item has an associated picture which gets drawn on top of the room graphic (those two strange ovals are the limes).

In any case, the premise is that you are tromping through “goblin country”. From the instructions:

GOBLIN COUNTRY IS A LAND OF MAGIC, TREASURE AND ADVENTURE. TO WIN, YOU MUST FIND ALL THE TREASURE AND TAKE IT TO A SAFE PLACE.

Also,

YOU INCREASE YOUR SCORE BY PUTTING YOUR TREASURE IN A SAFE PLACE (YOU MAY HAVE TROUBLE KEEPING THE PLACE SAFE!)

Every once in a while you get attacked by a goblin, with a random chance at killing the player. As far as I can tell so far there is no way to evade or avoid this, which means sometimes the player just dies because a random number generator decreed it to be so.

I’ll report back when I have more of the map filled in; I still can’t tell yet if this is going to be an easy game or a toughie.