Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I did manage progress without hints, but in an entirely unprecedented way.

As far as “normal” play goes I still wasn’t having much luck but I realized I hadn’t given Creature Venture my “try every possible verb” treatment yet.

There wasn’t much in the way of surprise (although I’m still not sure what TRADE is referring to yet) but where things got very curious indeed was the verb RESET. When I tested it, I was warped to a new room.

(You may see already where this is going. It took a while for it to dawn on me.)

This was an entirely different area. Rather helpfully, I ended up finding a passage that led me back through a “behind the mirror” room…

… to a room I recognized, with a fireplace. I never could work out what the rectangular thing above the fireplace was, so I figured it out by accident.

EXAMINE MIRROR notes there’s no reflection, so you can just ENTER MIRROR to reach the area I was in. This was a rather unorthodox way to work out what the item was, but having items be so cryptic you can’t refer to them seems more like a bug than a feature, to be honest, so I happily went along with it, even though I was still unsure why RESET was working.

I also noticed, after a couple mapping forays, that the RESET word changed my inventory to include a magic lamp marked with THREE TIMES. I baffled over if any clues I’d seen would indicate this would happen, but still did some tests where I would RUB LAMP in various locations to see if anything useful would come of it.

And then finally, it struck me: the game is only interpreting the first three letters of the input. The game is reading RESET as RESTORE. I was restoring a saved game that was previously on the disk I was using!

In all fairness, it was still using DAVE as the name (I switched from JASON based on suggestions from my comment crew) and because I’m not playing with authentic disk speeds there was no obvious delay. But that certainly counts as my first puzzle-solve via antique pre-existing save.

…

So, what’s past the mirror?

I’ve managed to eke out a few more puzzles. There’s a rebus puzzle on a pillar right when you come in…

…which gives a word which allows opening a door nearby. Behind the door is a bottle of water. You can use the water to grow a tiny tree into a big one.

Climbing the tiny tree gets up to a “Kybor”, and your guess is as good as mine as to what that is. I tested my ill-gotten lamp and the genie made short work, leading to a “Boogieman” guarding a “cage” I still can’t pick up. (There’s a bat elsewhere where if you try to pick it up the game asks where you cage is, so I assume that’s the next step after solving the puzzle.)

To be clear, the save game that’s on the disk has a flashlight that’s almost out of charge, so I’ll need to figure out where the lamp comes from for real. While I was testing the genie out, though, I tried it on the Mimic.

Things don’t turn out too well for the genie.

On the northeast corner of the map there’s some fireflies which you can pick up with the empty bottle (the one that had water). I assume the fireflies might substitute for the flashlight running out, but the problem is the cave-in has me trapped. I don’t have a way of digging myself out and after enough turns you run out of air and die.

So to summarize, I’m stuck on:

a.) the same oozlybub as last time

b.) finding the magic lamp, for real

c.) getting back out of the cave-in

d.) getting by the Boogieman to get the cage