Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior posts on this game are here.)

Via eBay. Notice the lack of backspace. Normally delete (“DEL”) serves as a backspace function but Secret Kingdom has its own string input routine which doesn’t use it. I discovered that the left arrow works as a backspace instead, which is good to remember since it probably applies to the other Sharpsoft games.

Alas: one more treasure, obtained via a source dive, but I can’t seem to get at the last two.

I first want to come back what I said about the game having its own “flavor”. Here’s a comment made by baltasarq to my initial post:

This really seems an advanced adventure for the time, at least in the carefully taking care of answer beyond “you can’t do that”.

This isn’t quite true. Or at least, what’s happening is it tries to nudge its responses in a direction that gives more hints than normal — say, by having a noun that is unrecognized give the response I DO NOT THINK THERE IS ONE OF THOSE — but it context this can mean comedy. For example:

You can ENTER PIT here, but for some reason that’s the only way to reference the pit.

Still, there are small bits of assistance, like here, which is a prime example of what I think baltasarq is referring to:

Nearly every other game would insist you don’t have the right item, or just having the bird fly away while you are fruitlessly swinging. Here, it gives a fairly explicit hint that you should come back with some kind of missile weapon (and if you also use the parser to test if particular nouns exist, you can find out quite swiftly it must be a bow and arrow).

Unfortunately, the game isn’t well coded enough for this always to go well. Consider the OIL which I had trouble with.

“YOU DO NEED IT” is a very nice inverse of the “don’t pay attention to this”; it’s “YES, PLEASE DO PAY ATTENTION TO THIS”. It turns out you can WEAR OIL. At least sometimes. For some strange reason, including in the circumstance above, WEAR OIL just says I’M CONFUSED. I think this happens if you are in one of the lake-adjacent rooms; if you are somewhere without water, you can successfully WEAR OIL and smell like a FIERCE FISH.

I would say, hence, using the staff in the wrong place (which spawns the oil) is a softlock, except you don’t technically need the oil at all. As I suspected, the oil is protection from the lake monster — you stay safe 100% of the time. You also die by getting set on fire if you try to light the torch with the oil on. You can remedy this with USE RAGS, which will get rid of the oil, but the odd thing is that you need the torch to get at a SHOVEL, and once you have the SHOVEL in hand you need to go back in the lake to dig up the crown at the island. So even though the oil gets a bit of removal of random number death, you still need to swim in there anyway, and you can just get lucky all the turns you need to without that much effort. There was some interesting thinking here but the end result was the design didn’t quite fully mesh.

Anyway, returning to the original point about “flavor”: I think the slight boost in customizing parser messages is what makes the game feel a bit different than a standard Scott Adams jam. Other games (including his) have clues in the text, but not to the explicit extent here where you might get a hint without even trying for it.

Speaking of the lake, there’s also this:

You can DIVE. I discovered this before my last post, but I thought this might just be arbitrary death. What changed my mind is I dived in the source code, which had a curious line where the text segment “BRE” is checked in the second-word spot (it clearly isn’t being treated as a noun). Thinking hard what it might mean, I realized I hadn’t used HOLD yet. HOLD BREATH? Yes.

With the rags and oil puzzled out, all I have left to deal with are the OLD PARCHMENT which does nothing, and the snow area which still does nothing. I combed through for relevant messages, and all I could find that seemed new was a reference to WINDOW as a noun and a room that talks about standing on a ledge. I tried ENTER WINDOW in various rooms (even with a window not described) just in case there was a bug of some sort or maybe I’d get a different response than the default (I DO NOT SEE ONE !) but alas, no luck.

So I’m calling it here. If someone wants to check the source code, be my guest; you can use the second save state (or the one marked “1” since it starts numbering at “0”) at the file here with the game + emulator and type LIST. Or you can just use this link where I uploaded a video of the entire source code being listed out. I don’t know a good way to dump it as plaintext, unfortunately.