(Reading my prior posts on this game is necessary for this one to make sense.)
I didn’t have much left to go before finishing. Really, with the exception of the rather strange last puzzle, everything was a matter of figuring out the parser.
First off, only 5 minutes after I made my last post, I realized that while holding the log I could GO FLUME and the ride would begin. I assumed you sat down the log and got on it, which seems reasonable, but I guess not. This leads shortly to a beach with a cliff, which you can climb to find a mighty eagle.
With the sighting of Feathers I realized this was the second “ingredient” in my Arrow of Death; I had the arrowhead already, and with feathers I just needed the shaft. However, I was completely and totally unable to interact with either the eagle or the feathers other than — rather unhelpfully — I could kill the eagle with my sword, causing it to disappear.
Frustrated, I went back to the other part I had verb trouble with — the chained slave — and once again found immediate success. I tried FREE SLAVE which instructed me to CUT his CHAINS, so I suppose it’s a really firm sword I’ve been toting around.
Once you free the slave he will follow you. Heading up to the boulder that had me stumped, trying to MOVE BOULDER told me that I received some help, and it opened up a cave.
That’s all that was in the cave. Nothing magic or even new information — I already knew I needed feathers! I spent a long time trying to SEARCH CAVE and the like but even the noun CAVE wasn’t recognized.
Bouncing around futily trying to examine things for the nth time, I went back to the eagle and tried another crack at extract feathers. Here I was saved by my “verb list” procedure I had gone through earlier…
…and I realized, off of my “rare” verbs in the far right column, that PLUCK worked. (I first added it back when playing Vial of Doom and later used it in Ulysses and the Golden Fleece. It has shown up in no other games so far.) PLUCK FEATHERS not only put feathers in my inventory but got the Eagle to fly me to a new area.
And then … I’d like to describe some fabulous adventures here, but it seems like the author ran out of space, or gave up? There’s a brook you pass by…
…there’s a hut with a dead dwarf that has a silver medallion…
…a lot of random grassy locations with nothing…
…and a Cellar with a MASTER FLETCHER. I assumed that after collecting the shaft for the arrow I would be returning here.
Finally, past a marsh, I encountered a willow, and immense parser frustration.
The Guardians of the Willow are the final obstacle for the game, but I have no idea what they even look like! They prevent the action CUT WILLOW without any details. All I know is I was able to take the silver medallion I just got a few minutes before, and throw it; they chased the medallion, distracted.
Guardians
Chase Medallion!
Then I was able to CUT WILLOW and get the last piece of the Arrow, and the game ended, informing me to continue the story in Part 2. Not even a scene returning to the Fletcher and assembling the arrow, booooo.
CONGRATULATIONS!!
You can now make the Arrow
See ARROW OF DEATH (Pt.2)
I think the one thing this game emphasized for me is just how solid the original Scott Adams games are. Now, I had legions of complaints, of course, but I never felt like I was in a scenario where an item was in the room description that couldn’t be referred to, or where I circled for an hour finding the right verb rather than using any kind of logical reasoning. (They had their own, unique problems, mind you, but just not in implementation.) I do strongly get this was possibly Brian Howarth doing the ports from his original TRS-80 games in haste, really wanting to get back to writing new games.
At least the slightly askew ZX Spectrum graphics grew on me. They’re not traditionally pretty, but they’re trying their best. As an aside, I tried out the Z-machine z6 conversion using Frotz, and it lets you see the room description and room graphic on the same page as you play; it made the static nature of the graphics seem a touch more sensible, as I never had a situation where I would read text and then switch to graphics to see a scene that did not resemble the text much; having them both delivered at the same time made the issue feel less irritating.
An example. There’s supposed to be a chained slave here, but I’m honestly not sure what I’m looking at.
I confess this just wasn’t as strong as The Time Machine, and at least Golden Baton had a memorable ending. I’ll just save overall judgment until part 2, I suppose, but that will have to wait until sometime in 1982; I’ll keep with the ZX Spectrum for when I get back to the worlds of Howarth, and his first game that was written solely for the Scott Adams database system.
Renga in Blue 
The game has quite a few opportunities for softlocks, one of the most annoying being at the end – if you enter the sacred grove but don’t have the sword with you, there seems to be no way back to get it (at least in the BBC version). As far as I know, the identity of the beggar is never revealed even in part II.
Yes, I also noticed the structure lent itself more to softlocks than the first two games did. In the ZX version also you really do get stuck if you don’t have the sword at the end.
Incidentally, I think there is a bit that you missed. In the hut with the dead dwarf, some searching reveals a pair of spectacles. With these you can read the book found in the chest, and this gives you a clue to what to do at the grove. (This is also missed in the CASA walkthrough.)
Interesting that there were two bits intended to give hints that ended up not being necessary (although it would have been nice to know about the silver one, it does make a bit more sense gameplay-flow wise with that in there, I just walked to the end and quickly solved the puzzle because there was only the one unused item).
The guardians still could’ve used more description but I think this is a matter of it being a port from the more descriptive version.
An odd oversight is that (in the BBC version, at least) if you get the toadstools before freeing the slave, and don’t return to that location, the slave stays with you until the end of the game. That’s one powerful eagle, to carry two people!