Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Well, not “kill” because he’s already dead, but it was about as satisfying.

From Mobygames.

I left off last time giving Hitler a piece of some sort of crucial magical object. As Beelzebub indicated earlier, however,

WHEN DEECULA IS RESTORED AND IT’S POWER GLOWS, THE CRYSTAL SEALS HIS FATE.

The crystal is going to come up fairly shortly.

After the scene with Happy followed by Raging Hitler, his goons tossed me down a slide and onto a pillar which was slowly lowering while being surrounded by giant spiders.

The pillar had a “beam of light” and I was able to look up to see a hook and an opening. I had fortunately grabbed the chain I had used earlier to clamber up to the Hitler Area so I threw that up and caught the hook, and was able to climb to safety.

This led to an vent with a wall covered by a canvas. I used the dagger (which was randomly stuck in a door from last time) to cut through and find a giant crystal with a slot. At the same time I collected the dagger I had collected a sword with blue jewels in it, and it seemed about the right size, so I did some reverse Sword in the Stone action:

Crystal in hand, I went down farther in the vent and found a grate I was able to push open leading to Hitler’s office. Crawling in led to, well, let me just show you:

Notice: “stunned”. Hitler had a crown on him which I yoinked, and I was able to retrace my steps all the way back to John Wilkes Booth and Satan’s room, but John Wilkes Booth was now gone.

Technical aside: on the Apple II version you need to sometimes swap disks. The Hitler area required a disk swap, as does walking through this door. There’s still a decent amount of back-and-forth with already visited locations so this isn’t a scenario where the game is neatly partitioned off. Unfortunately, on the emulator I was using (AppleWin) I wasn’t getting any kind of disk swap message and the game locked up instead, so the only way I could keep playing was to swap the disk before entering one of the thresholds (either hopping from disk 1 to 2 or vice versa). Having to anticipate swaps wasn’t part of the original experience but I figured someone in the future might want to re-trace my steps and would like the locking-up mystery resolved.

Exploring farther, I found a giant snake that wanted the crystal. Dropping the crystal led to the snake swallowing it.

You still need the crystal. I’ve always liked the puzzle structure of an item getting lost that needs to be retrieved. It gives sort of a liveliness and dynamism to what normally are static tools.

Incidentally, I tried to KILL SNAKE after the crystal-swallowing scene and was told I didn’t have the right weapon (the dagger doesn’t work), which was a custom message. I mentally marked the location to return to later.

Just above the snake was an unpassable fire.

After some experimentation (and realizing I wasn’t getting through) I figured now was the time to re-re-re-visit ever location to see if a new item had popped up (like when the dagger appeared).

Fortunately, it didn’t take too long to find something new, as shown above. That valve wasn’t visible before! Turning the valve and rushing back (remembering to swap disks yet again) I found that the fire was off.

The Black Mass looks pretty metal, although if you try to talk you get “slain for sacrilege”. Ow.

Here I was stuck a very long time — I could refer to the pews but couldn’t see anything, and started to get the strong intuition that I was just getting stymied by the parser. I took a hint, which told me to SIT DOWN. (I had unsuccessfully tried SIT earlier, so yes, parser issues. What made this spot doubly galling is the parser quite often lets you use verbs without nouns and you can even inadvertently hit a puzzle solve by just testing verbs alone.)

Moving on! The right action here is to PUSH the door (another tough one to find, although it is drawn with no handle) which leads down to a corpse-ridden basement with silver coins and candles with a ball of WAX. There’s also a crystal door with a slot…

…and this was the moment I realized I needed the crystal back.

The WAX needs to be melted, but there is weirdly a shortage of hot things in hell. I originally tried tossing the WAX in at the flames at the very beginning (where the LUCIFAGE keyword was shown) but was rebuffed. I had just recently found a fire I could turn off and on, though! I delivered the wax to the fire-grate room, went back to the valve, cranked the valve up, checked the fire room again, and found a CLUB. (You need to make one more circle to turn the valve back off.)

The CLUB, of course, counts as a weapon, and I already knew I needed one for the snake.

Did I do it … wrong? I wasn’t sure if it was destroyed, but I thought perhaps I could hike all the way back to the original big crystal and cut off another chunk somehow.

One hike across the map later (although to be honest, it still isn’t a big map) and I found what turned out to be the original crystal returned to where I found it. Nabbing it and hiking all the way back — past the bat cave, past the entrance to Satan’s area, past the Black Mass — and finally used it on the slot that needed a crystal. This pulled me into a black forest.

A maze! So exciting!

I mean, a maze, ick. Fortunately not a complicated one. While I mapped it already, I think this is a good spot to stop, although a brief preview:

Jesus, hanging out in hell.

So close I can taste it. Almost certainly next time for the (apocalyptic?) conclusion!