Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior posts on Witches’ Brew here.)

I finished; out of all the Softside games this was the most elaborate, despite remaining in a small map the entire game. The closest analogy I can think of is the VIC-20 game Moon Base Alpha which crammed multiple obstacles in a tiny space just based on necessity; here, there’s more expansive memory to work with, but the density is just scaled up with 11 ingredients to juggle making up the various brews which end up having to be made in a specific order.

Since getting stuck last time I made a verb list (see above). One of the unused verbs was “MOVE” which I decided to try applying to a bunch of things; the thing it works on is the bed the witch is sleeping on (!). I guess that bracelet magic is strong stuff.

(This is one of those odd cases where — based on someone maybe finding the shovel first thing — that someone who lucks onto finding the pillow and wand more quickly might have trouble later, not even realizing there is a genuine magic effect at play, and it isn’t just the witch is a heavy sleeper. Well, the witch might still be a heavy sleeper, because the bracelet doesn’t work on the cat, as you’ll see later.)

The bottle definitely struck me as useful — I still hadn’t found anything to carry water yet, for instance — and a spider leg was on one of the lists but no spider. Even with the new loot I still meandered for a bit and checked help (Gaming After 40’s walkthrough, he does thing in a much different sequence than me). I had previously tried to BREAK some locked cabinets but I apparently wasn’t holding the AXE. Ugh! Normally it getes

SORRY YOU CAN’T DO THAT

but having the AXE in inventory turns it into a SMASHED CUPBOARD, with a plethora of helpful items: a SUGAR CUBE, some CATNIP, and some SEEDS.

Reflecting on the puzzle, I had the BASEBALL BAT along had I had often been picking up the AXE to test things, so I mentally assumed I had tried my best shot at breaking it; I didn’t have the thought “did I have my axe with me?” as much as I assumed it was tested via osmosis. I can’t really begrudge the bat not working — after all, you’re busting through wood — but I would have preferred some kind of message indicating you’ve got the wrong tool for the job. The game doesn’t have disk space for such niceties, though.

I quite quickly took the seeds outside to the garden and tried to PLANT them. You have to come back later (10 turns?) and you can find a beanstalk has grown, which then can be climbed up to the castle. The whole “too steep” thing earlier was a ruse, there’s no way to climb up the mountain. Funny that a beanstalk is easier.

This indicated to me immediately that growth (spit, tears, egg, hair) was needed first (in the walkthrough I mentioned, Dale Dobson went through and interesting sequence where he had more trouble figuring this out). I still didn’t have hair, although I should have been supicious of the dirty piece of metal: it needed cleaning, and then could help get the hair.

I had already tried to clean it before as the outdoors mentions periodic bursts of rain, but you can’t refer to WATER when it gets described. I tried GET WATER while holding the bottle during rain also with no luck. It turns out (yes, I had to check Dale Dobson) that you need to set the bottle down, then wait for some rain. It almost seems like the rain is showing up before you are able to accomplish any action.

That is, the rain shower visible right now has no effect. You have to drop the bottle, then move back and forth until a rain shower happens again, and then you have a bottle of water. Not illogical exactly but it doesn’t quite fit my visualization of the timing.

With the bottle of water I was able to finally clean the metal and find out it was SCISSORS. Well, now I know what to do:

OK, yanking out your hair by your hands would be painful, I get it. At least there’s a moment later where the scissors are definitely required.

Moving the kettle to the fire and waving the wand, I was able to form a BREW and chug it. The game then says YOU’RE GIANT over every room description. I made a beeline for the castle:

Ah-ha, so invisibility next? But would one cancel the other? It turns out, no: you can be giant and invisible at the same time. But invisibility is quite short-lived, so what you need to do is drink the brew right before the camera, then deal with it right then (the shrink potion comes later).

Zipping things ahead, I now needed: snake venom, human blood, nail clippings, cat whiskers. Scissors work on nails, easy enough. The bat I could get blood from, although I was having trouble because I was still trying to use the verb BAT; you need to refer straight for the thing you want out of it, BLOOD, by typing GET BLOOD while holding the bottle.

While I’m at it, the same applies for the third potion, where you need a different ingredient from the same bat so just type GET WING and not CUT BAT or the like.

Snake venom, again: there’s a rattlesnake in the woods, but GET SNAKE doesn’t cut it, you need to specifically type GET VENOM.

Be sure you’re wearing the iron glove from the AXEMAN while doing this!

The whisker gave me a smidge of trouble. I could drop the catnip to get a PURRING CAT but then it got made at me again if I tried to just GET WHISKER. The key here is to use scissors and CUT it instead so the cat doesn’t go ouchy. Fair enough.

Brew in hand, it was time to head back to the castle and go invisible. If you go east there’s a control for the camera, and that’s the entire defenses neutralized. I guess the kidnapper is out on holiday somewhere leaving the princess behind.

The other direction has a locked door which doesn’t break; it’s time for the third potion. Bat wing + spider leg + water. The spider leg required getting a sugar cube over to some flies in the forest, dropping the flies at the web, and then GET LEG (again, any reference to the SPIDER itself is unhelpful).

With the shrinking potion you can slip under the door where the princess is.

And then comes what is honestly and genuinely a great puzzle. It doesn’t require a huge leap of thought, but it requires a slightly lateral assumption from how the game has gone so far.

You know enough information to figure it out. I’ll pause with a picture so you can think about it.

From the April 1981 Softside, same issue as the one advertising Witches’ Brew.

In the prior instances you drank the potion yourself to perform some action, but the shrinking potion you only needed to drink half, so there’s still some left. Rather than you drinking the rest, the princess can drink the rest instead, meaning she’ll get too small for the shackles to hold her.

I needed to pick up the princess, and move back and forth a few tiems to get this message, which feels like a glitch.

And that’s a wrap! Clearly, Kirsch has the creative chops for an adventure, but I really would have liked to see what he could do with more technical capabilities. This had lots of fiddly aspects due to the simple VERB NOUN setup, like how you DROP an item in the kitchen to put it in the kettle, but that means you can accidentally mix in an ingredient you didn’t mean to (like put the wing in too early). The reference to taking a WING or a LEG of a creature makes sense but in practice felt wobbly if it’d even work. There was very little help for if you were doing an action wrong (and no intentionality, like HIT CUPBOARDS WITH AXE).

At the very least, it is promising to know Kirsch was expanding his repertoire. Just in terms of gameplay I still found his simpler work (like Kidnapped or Around the World in Eighty Days) to be more satisfying just because I didn’t have nearly as much parser struggle.