Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have finished the game. This is a direct continuation, so my prior posts are needed for context.

Bastet statue, via the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

It turns out my major issue was technical: I was playing in TRS-80 Model 3 mode. The Model 3 was out when this game was — it was first released in 1980 — but for whatever strange reason the game was refusing to interpret a particular parser command while I was in Model 3 mode versus Model 1. It is faintly possible the development platform was a Video Genie — which was popular in the UK — and there is some obscure technical incompatibility (the Video Genie is the same clone from Hong Kong as the Dick Smith Model 80).

From North Devon Retro Computing Archive.

Anyway, it is only sort of the game’s fault I got stuck; I tried the parser command I needed quite early in my solving process, just it wasn’t understood. The parser is still finicky but Part 2 of the game (in Egypt) is strong and nearly all the puzzles were satisfying to solve.

To recap, I realized I needed to put the “Alice oil” in the sprayer to get it to work, but no amount of whacking helped. One thing I knew (from the instructions) is that the game did understand prepositions and indirect nouns, so I thought maybe this was a case where rather than making a separate prompt for indirect noun, the game switched parser modes and required having the command typed as a whole phrase. Just FILL SPRAYER doesn’t work, you have to FILL SPRAYER WITH LIQUID. Trying this on Model 3 gets

BAD COMMAND FORMAT

LanHawk in my comments had in the meantime tried the game and found the command worked. He was in Model 1 mode, although we didn’t realize yet that was the issue until I did some experimentation.

Voila, what I was expecting to happen. Before stepping through, I want to mention two other things I sleuthed out in part 1 of the game.

First, I was able to recreate picking up the key at the start. I still think this is a bug. One version of the sequence goes: EAST, GET RUG (this reveals the safe), WEST, OPEN CUPBOARD, DROP RUG, MOVE SWITCH, LOOK SWITCH. There is a hidden key now with that sequence.

I still think this is a bug. Without dropping the rug, if you LOOK SWITCH before moving it, the game says SWITCH IS OFF. After you move it, the game says I DON’T SEE ONE upon doing LOOK SWITCH (but you can move the switch back to off!) The I DON’T SEE ONE gets overridden if and only if you’ve dropped the rug in the room. That’s in the territory of Koble’s Chinese Puzzle in terms of not making sense. I assume something in the game’s object table got jumbled up.

Somewhat more sensical (but still frustrating) I managed to pull off making a fishing line. I had a PIN and a THREAD; before you can tie the thread to the pin you need to BEND PIN. Then the tying works. You can also then BAIT the PIN with some spaghetti.

All remaining screenshots, passing through the mirror into Egypt, will be in Model 1 mode.

You land on the other side of the mirror at a dais, right next to a temple. The temple is guarded by “foo dogs” who give “kamic vibrations” if you try to enter the temple.

You can FISH LAKE in this location and get a fish which will be useful later. It’s also helpful to visit the bottom of the lake (just DIVE LAKE or, if you’re holding too much, you’ll sink down by going into the lake anyway). You can then use the SCREWDRIVER from way back at the house to PRY the grating open.

The water tunnel then takes you up into the temple.

The “tingling sensation” at the pool is important and will come back shortly. This whole section is a very tight puzzle, akin to the opening area, but without having to fuss about combining objects together. This section is more about magic, but there’s at least enough logic that I never felt like I needed to wave things randomly everywhere, and the tight space itself limits the things you can do with magical objects besides.

Going north is blocked by the same dogs as before, but you can go south.

The message is quite serious and you need to read it literally. You must be invited in. If you go in without the invitation you will die. The clever bit is the death isn’t immediate; you start getting chased by a mummy and can try some futile fighting back (for example, using fire against it; a message later indicates the mummy is flameproof).

Mucking about with options, I realized I could RUB the LAMP in the main temple. Rubbing once gets a dire warning, so of course I had to rub it again.

This is not a game over! You need to get turned into a rat. As you are not a (wo)man but a rat, you can now go into the tomb. You can then grab a “silver ankh” (it is small enough) but not do anything else.

The presence of the mirror is a classy bit of game design here. It clearly is set up to go back home using Alice-spray, but its location here also serves to emphasize the rat-ness of the player at this moment.

Fortunately, the pool with strange tingling also works for spell removal so you can turn back into a person. If you’re carrying the ankh, it will drop to the bottom of the pool, but you can DIVE to retrieve it again.

Now, what to do with the silver ankh? I prodded around a bit thinking about how it represents “life”, and tried touching the cat statue.

This is of course the Temple of Bast, the cat god, so the cat is able to invite us in the tomb.

You are then safe from the mummy. Unfortunately, while you are free to safely get the gold, you can’t get it out again (remember the weight pulls you down in water!) You have to get out via the front, but the foo dogs are still stopping you.

There’s another secret object farther in. First, you need to get the torch by the archway lit (SOAK TORCH WITH OIL, and yes, that took a while to find, followed by LIGHT TORCH at the eternal flame) and the you can go in the sarcophagus and close it. After closing it (and only after closing) do you see a “secret panel” you can enter.

I was originally confused thinking it was something you were supposed to SLIDE.

The maze is mercifully tiny; small enough that it mainly serves to cause a little drama as the torch light is limited.

At the end there’s an electrum amulet, which will let you get by the dogs. You can grab mirror, gold, amulet, and spray and take them all outside back to the starting point.

You can attempt to revive the foo dogs along the way.

Once there you can drop the mirror off and spray it with the Alice oil.

So you’re back in London: now what? There’s not even a SCORE command, nor some special trophy case you take the gold to where the game says “you’ve won!” However, there’s a mobster lurking outside.

He is now your friend.

This ended up being much better than I expected. I ran into parser oddities early so didn’t have high confidence. However, the intricate use of object ended up being fairly logical in the end, and despite solving-for-unprompted-magic-items being one of my major grumpy points, the use of magic was sparse and clear enough I didn’t run into the issue of having to mark up a large map and test every single magic word in every single room or wave completely random objects hoping they had something to them, etc.

The main fall-down overall was technical. This is a case where I wish the author had a modern copy of Inform because they could have done a bang-up job. I especially liked how the steal-the-treasure concept ended up getting both played straight (you are, indeed, just going in a sacred place and grabbing gold) averted (you are invited in) and subverted again (the whole goal was to pay off a mobster) all in the same plot.

Let’s get back to graphics, shall we? Up next on the docket is a Apple II hybrid RPG-strategy-puzzle-adventure game by an innovative author whom some of you may recognize.