Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

From Sharpsoft User Notes #6, showing all three of the initial Sharp models (K, A, and B) merged together in an Escher-like contraption.

So, since my last post this has mostly been a pleasant experience. Alas, the wolf was not destined to be my friend.

Specifically, the wolf has a fairly low chance (I’m thinking 2%? 3%?) of attacking, as shown above. It can be defeated specifically with the SWORD that was in the lake (USE SWORD) although another wolf will return eventually. So the wolf serves a function something like the dwarves in Crowther/Woods Adventure. I should point out, though

a.) the dwarves weren’t truly and completely random — they had physical locations on the map and moved around, and there was a limit where eventually you kill them all

b.) (more importantly) they can’t kill you immediately upon sight

Regarding b.), at least a couple times through the game I’ve walked into a room to have a newly-spawned wolf only to die immediately after without a chance to even type a command. Adventure did make it possible to die with no chance (you miss with an axe by random luck, they hit with a knife by luck) but that at least felt like going through an unlucky dice roll rather than instant death for mysterious reasons.

In addition to the wolf being random, the fish that gobbles you in the lake is random.

I was able to get the sword, swim over to the nearby island, grab a torch and *silver goblet* (my first treasure, with the asterisks around it), then swim back safely. On a second swim (and there is a reason for a second swim) I died instantly. Fortunately saving isn’t too rough on my emulator (it has save states); the original used tape saving which would no doubt be slow.

The asterisks strongly put this in the territory of Scott Adams clone, which it already had the vibe of. I’m not checking the source code yet (spoilers, arr) but it is possible the author even used a magazine reprint of Adventureland or Pirate Island.

Fortunately, other than those two elements, there’s only been one other random number element. I mentioned getting frozen in the snow last time. It turns out sometimes you can survive going a step through. Using some save state shenanigans I made it all the way to the end of the two mountain branches which resulted in … the game looping back to the lake again.

I also tested out dropping an item in the snow room, and found out that you see it over and over again (that is, if you drop the STAFF, there will always be a staff in the room as you go north). The game seems to be making it a “fake room” to save space. It will actually keep track of how far north you’ve gone, so if you take four NORTHs and then try to turn around, it will still take four SOUTHs to get back again. The whole section is mysterious and even though I’ve solved quite a number of puzzles after (as you’ll see) this section remains mysterious.

Also, on the left branch, the snow doesn’t exist as an item, and the right side, it does and you can pick it up.

Moving on, I still felt like the HEADLESS man from last time had to now be dead. I was reading the room wrong: there’s a tower very clearly described, but despite “there is a tower in front of you” being right there in the text my brain mentally sorted it as being “in the distance”, but no, it is supposed to be right there. If you ENTER TOWER when the man is alive, he’ll stop you; after becoming headless, he will not, hence is clearly dead.

The lever opens an upper level (with no parser feedback, I originally thought I hit a bug). At the upper level there’s a TREASURE CHEST (which I won’t open until later) and an OLD PARCHMENT which SEEMS WORTHLESS. It is of course highly suspicious and it probably is in actuality valuable but I don’t know how to get it to change over.

In the cellar, going down:

I’ve already been to the inside of the tree; that’s where the treasures go.

The warm clothing, of course, lets you survive the snow without any random chance of death, but I still haven’t found anything useful out there. While I was at depositing my first two treasures, I also went ahead and lit my torch (acquired from the lake island) with the flint and cedar box. It does nothing with the cold area (I was hoping to maybe melt the snow).

Prodding further at things, I found that the SEALED DOOR I ran across earlier is described as being made of salt. I had a WATER BAG from the lake that was filled with water, so I tried POUR WATER. This caused part of the door to dissolve and allowed me to enter.

This drops the player into a small cave system.

To the west there’s a pit of snakes; if you have the torch you can safely drop in as the snakes are scared of the torch.

The chain mail syntax is annoying here. You have to use the verb REMOVE to get it off, you can’t just TAKE MAIL.

Going to the south, there’s a rope and a shovel. You then find yourself at the bottom of the well from earlier; you have to THROW ROPE in order to make a route to escape. I appreciated the inversion here; I expected to find a rope and eventually climb down the well, but instead the well was exited from the other side.

Going to the IRON LADY with the newly-found chain mail, I was able to avoid getting spiked:

Inside there’s a *diamond* and a key. The key goes over to the treasure chest, revealing yet another treasure and a hammer.

For the hammer you’re supposed to think creatively. I did not. I wandered around doing USE HAMMER everywhere.

Ha! Ok, I admit that was clever. The stone incidentally is its own separate item I have yet to be able to use.

I was starting to run out of places to hunt for treasure. I did have the shovel so started of regimen of doing DIG everywhere, while being told NOT HERE. I am proud to say I realized fairly quickly the best place to try would be the island back in the lake.

One last treasure I eked out by getting the BOW and ARROW over to the bird and typing SHOOT BIRD. It dropped a gold ring.

This makes me sad.

Putting everything together so far:

I’m truly stumped now, though. Each treasure has been worth 10 points, so there’s almost certainly three left.

Pretty much I just have the snow area left un-prodded. There’s also the OLD PARCHMENT that still claims to be worthless, and the OIL that smells like FIERCE FISH I have yet to use. I have some RAGS where I feel like I could dip them into the OIL, then maybe set a trap for the big monster fish. Unfortunately, that’s just a feeling, because no verb I’ve tried has worked.

A source dive is still possible! We’ll see if I can hang on to the end.

(Oh, and if you’d like to try the game yourself, I have it packaged with an emulator here. Just load the third save state and you’re good to go.)