Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This continues directly from my previous post on Asylum II.

My mostly-finished map of the opening area. T1 warps to T1, T2 warps to T2, three doors including one to the far east remain locked with my current resources.

In the previous Asylum game, there was a scene with you being “walled in” to a small area and then being chased by an axe-wielding assailant. An approximation appears in the manual.

The way to defeat the murderer is to hand over a note that says LOOK UP. In the Asylum-verse, looking up anywhere in the game causes a piano to fall on your head.

From the DOS version of the game.

This is true of both the player and of other characters! So handing the LOOK UP note to the murderer causes them to look up, which kills them. With enemy defeated via piano, you can then nab the axe, and chop your way out of the sealed area.

The Asylum II copies the same scene, but with a reversal.

In this area, there’s nothing at all that happens until you arrive at the location marked “axe” and pick up the axe. You then hear building happening in the distance (this causes the “dotted wall” to get sealed off) and an electrician appears with a sign.

The implication here is: now you are the axe murderer! And indeed, the way to move on is to KILL ELECTRICIAN WITH AXE, which will let you take both the sign and a fuse he is carrying. Also, just like the first game, you can go to the sealed up wall and CHOP WALL WITH AXE to continue. Unfortunately, I haven’t had anything useful happen with my new-found items. I tried chopping up a psychiatrist (which you’ll see in a bit) but the game just chastised me for violence and sent me to the starting room.

Nearby this axe room is a corridor with 20 doors.

All these doors are closed but unlocked. As you walk around you hear doors slamming and footsteps running every few steps.

Last time I picked up a steel key from one of the rooms to the north. (I should put north in quotes, “north”, since the game has never given out a compass. I just had to pick a direction to be north by random.) The steel key works on the doors, but since they’re already unlocked, the key should be used to lock them. After all 20 doors are locked:

You never see a body or the like, but after the scream, you can find a box with a candle and matches. Again, like the axe/fuse/sign, I have yet to find a use for them, but it is still nice to have progress.

Other than that, the opening area has a pay phone, the hypochondriac, and three locked doors to deal with. I’ve only seen one other thing that kind of qualifies as a puzzle, and that’s in the starting room; if you look under the desk you see “a picture” but are unable to refer to it because you can’t see it. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or some such, as I checked in the C64 and DOS versions and nothing like that happened. My best guess is the picture gets revealed later in the game but the TRS-80 version is coded so it is already “in the room” even when the game doesn’t recognize it as such.

Moving on to the door to the west:

This map is not entirely accurate, and I’m not meaning just the doors not filled in yet (neither the fork nor key I have work). I mean this is actually in the shape of a hexagon. At the midway-spots on the top of the bottom there’s extra 90-degree turns, but since that’s not really possible to do in physical reality, I compromised and squished it down.

Upon entering this area there’s a clunking sound, which suggests to me a new item somewhere, especially because in the DOS version of the game it says “something has dropped in the maze”. I have yet to locate where in the maze this might be but I suspect I need to scan through all the opening area again.

(Yes, I’m mainly playing TRS-80 still; I checked in on DOS, and C64 was giving me some control issues so I haven’t tried it yet.)

Moving on: upon entering PSYCHIATRY we have a psychiatrist “talk to us soothingly” and then after two turns more we die by getting bored to death. This gives enough time to react and do an action or even escape. I mentioned already trying the axe; I also tried the sign but the psychiatrist ignored it. I’m not sure violence is the answer to this one.

I was also able to bust into a plastic surgery room, but I need anesthetics it seems?

Finally, I managed to get into an unlocked ELECTRO-SHOCK room. This causes the screen to blink fast and for you to get sent back to the opening room (just like if you try to kill someone random with an axe).

I’ve got a couple threads to pull on; finding the thing dropped in the maze, trying to chop more walls, maybe seeing if I can bust open the pay phone (I have a feeling I’m supposed to bring money and make a call, though). Instead of the puzzle-solving end I can consider the object-using end; I’ve got a bean bag and a bird costume (!) still, and all of the items from the south portion (candle, matches, fuse, sign, axe) that likely have more uses. Nothing occurs immediately to mind, but the entire Med System series has always had at least one slightly random action, so I’ll try some more patient prodding first before inevitably collapsing and resorting to hints.