Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I feel like this some days.

So, last time I discovered EXAMINE ROOM was needed to find hidden objects in rooms. (It turns out this was mentioned in the instructions, sort of, as a suggested command.) I also discovered that part of the reason I had trouble referring to objects is they wanted to be referred to by adjective, so to pick up “CHARRED WOOD” I needed to type GET CHARRED rather than GET WOOD.

At this point it seemed like all I needed was to clean up: visit and EXAMINE ROOM at every place on the map, grab the things I needed, and leave. There was one slight wrinkle.

According to the SCORE command I needed

CROWN, ROBE, MASK, POUCH AND APRON, PRECIOUS GEM-IN POUCH, GOLD-IN POUCH, SACRED ITEM-IN POUCH, CHARRED WOOD-IN POUCH

so I found a CEREMONIAL MASK in my first room and put it on.

However, shortly thereafter I was surrounded by a blue light and fell asleep; then I had the message on the top of this post. The gods sent me to the shrinking-walls-of-death room.

It took a bit of exploration to realize that there is more than one mask, and many of the masks are fake. To win, you need the “FEATHERED MASK OF GOLD” specifically; there are also fake crowns and robes.

The robe and mask here are both fake.

I was also foiled by the fact an EARTHQUAKE occasionally happens at random and kills the main character. Again, it states the gods are angry, but I have no idea if there’s any logic to this; one time the earthquake happened before I even entered the temple.

Finally, there’s also an odd trick regarding jaguars:

There are two rooms that have “3 jaguars”. One of the rooms (the one above) has an endless supply of jaguars, and if you try to EXAMINE ROOM to find anything secret the jaguars will kill you. In the other room with “3 jaguars”, the jaguars don’t attack at all; hence, EXAMINE ROOM works fine. I have no idea if this is supposed to be a pun and the jaguars are supposed to be statues or something?

CONGRADULATIONS to me, I guess. This game was interesting in theory that this was essentially an open-world game where you’re just supposed to collect things and avoid tricks and traps along the way, but the myriad problems just led to frustration.

To end on a positive note, I’ll have to admit the “fake treasure” conceit was really fascinating. It did give a unique feel to the final stage of the game.

…

I’m not sure what I’m playing next — Lugi is still going to have to wait, so I might try a different mainframe game, or some oddity from the Apple II or … well, if people have been anxiously awaiting anything in particular, feel free to suggest in the comments.