Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

IN ORDER TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY OF THE TITLE ‘MASTER VENTURER’ HIGHLANDS COMPUTERS WILL NOT GIVE ANY HELP REGARDING THIS SECTION. THE ONE CLUE WE WILL GIVE IS THAT IT TAKES A MAGIC WORD TO CROSS THE CHASM TO THE WEST. GOOD LUCK

As with my finale posts in general, if you’ve arrived here from elsewhere, you should read my prior posts on Creature Venture first, even though this part is generally self-contained.

From the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.

I assume it’s due to memory conditions, but the previous Highland games have all been split into “parts” with separate source code files where any “shared code” needs to be copied over. So for the “cutscene death” of The Tarturian the game just sends the information about what items have been acquired in the game and plays the ending appropriately.

Here, the authors have a “traditional” parser but didn’t bother to transfer over the same commands between parts. This is why in Part 1 trying to PUNCH a random item just said NO whereas using it in Part 2, PUNCH gave a hint. This difference extends to verb vocabulary, meaning that words understood in one part aren’t necessarily understood in another, and vice versa.

I fortunately sussed this out before approaching the master quest of Creature Venture, so I caught that, for example, KISS now worked as a verb. However, I still needed quite a few more hints, with a mixture of absurd actions I feel no remorse at spoiling and reasonable puzzles I was just too tired to get after wrestling with the absurd puzzles. What I will do here is narrate the rest of the game straight, without solving difficulties listed, then go back and explain how far I got on each puzzle.

After the warning on the top of this post, about needing a magic word, you are dropped in a new place with a dagger, flashlight, and batteries. The batteries have a limited life, and your inventory limit is changed: you can only carry a maximum of five items.

This means the best way to start is to leave the starting ring behind while you clear some puzzles. To the west there is the promised chasm, and with no hints in particular, you’re supposed to SAY SHAZAM. This makes a bridge leading to a room with some cake (it’ll make you briefly large if you eat it, you’ll need to save it) and a strange tree that you can nevertheless CHOP and get some rubber, even though CHOP never worked in the game prior to this.

Down below there’s a pick in a wall; pull it out and some water start flowing, which you can plug by typing PUT RUBBER.

Heading back to the starting area (ignoring a cup and a tack that are both there, which are complete red herrings) there’s a locked door next to a pool of oil. You can try to BREAK DOOR but it says you need more delicacy, so the thing to do is THROW DAGGER which somehow bounces off a rock creating sparks which then light the oil which sets the door on fire.

Headed north you get trapped by a cage, but fortunately you can EAT CAKE to temporarily get large and bust it open.

Further north there is a complete dead end. The trick is to DIG while holding the pick, which lets you tunnel through the wall. This leads further to a rug and a pencil, although the best thing to do after scarfing them both is to head back to the entrance (assuming you ditched the pick, you you have enough inventory room to grab the ring, too).

To the north there is a “mimic” chest which turns into a medusa.

The right answer here is to KISS SERPENT, and not, as one might fully and logically expect, KISS MEDUSA. This is sufficent to get the mimic/medusa to move revealing stairs going down, where you can find another dead end, where quite naturally, the obvious thing to do is use the pencil to DRAW a DOOR.

Past the door is a key; you can then head back and find a chasm that you can FLY the rug over, a large snake where RUB RING charms it…

…and a locked door where the key can be applied. Then: the final obstacle.

Which you can defeat via…. you know what, let’s save that. Maybe you (as in reader you, not you visualized theoretically playing the game) can come up with it before I spoil the puzzle in a few paragraphs.

…

So I was doomed from the very beginning — I did suss out from the hint in the instructions (that I planted at the top of this post) that I was going to need to guess at a magic word as oppose to extract one from the game in any way (noteworthy: it understands SAY XYZZY, even though nothing happens) but I just couldn’t summon up SHAZAM as a possibility and had to look it up.

The tree, rubber, and cake section I worked out on my own. Then I hit the dagger being thrown making sparks, and pretty much lost all willpower. My first impulse on the initial dead end was to use the PICK which was correct, but I couldn’t find the right syntax of DIG (I tried HIT WALL and the like). I did know to FLY with the rug, and my first impulse with the pencil was to DRAW stuff (including drawing on the snake, as shown) but I was far past patience and sanity to work out DRAW DOOR. I did KISS MEDUSA quite early and needed hints for KISS SERPENT. And finally, RUB RING on the serpent was totally reasonable (even if totally random magic) but I was too weary to work through my items by that point.

In an abstract way, there is something weird and refreshing when all the rules of fairness get broken, but it doesn’t feel as much fun from the inside. The master game portion really harkens back to the ludicrous endgames of works like Adventure and Warp, where I get the feeling it might start to be fun as a group — if 5 people are playing with notes, maybe one of them randomly will try throwing the dagger. I doubt there’s any sane ratiocination process to arrive at throwing the dagger, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t solve it (I hit upon YELL BOO myself last time, remember).

Oh, and the octopus? You’re supposed to TICKLE it. Anyone work that out?

With this kind of puzzle, yes, I suppose there is a theoretical path to what happened, but it gives me an avant-garde feeling, like words and causality have been deconstructed.

Endgame aside, I did enjoy this the most of the Highlands library so far; the goofy humor settled into a rhythm, the janky art was at least consistently so, and the puzzles before the endgame were tricky but not impossible. (According to the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities, this was the best selling of their games, briefly reaching the top 10.) We only have one more game to go to finish with Highlands (Mummy’s Curse) and at least I can say they’ve all been interesting to talk about.