Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished and it was a near thing; I was on the verge of ragequitting for reasons you’ll see in a moment.

Zoomed-in view of the cover.

So, last time I left off I implied I was in for a grind, insofar as the way the middle part of the game works is

a.) find a palace [or turn around at the one you were just at and land again]

b.) find three clues that open secret doors and lead to a the “final room” that lets you charge your ornithopter up using the spell ENCHANT

c.) get any items along the way and USE MAGIC DETECT on them to find the ones that are spells, giving them to the wizards in your party

I’m not going to give all the spell effects, but I will give the names: invisibility, extinguish, reflector, sleep, freeze, ball of fire, jump, flame sword, shrink, spider climb, penetration, part waters, teleport, levitation, rope trick. That’s fifteen spells you need, and if you explore thoroughly enough I think you find six of them on a given run? However, they are a completely randomly chosen six, so if you’re trying to get a full set of spells (as the manual implies you’ll need in the final section of Atlantis) you have the experience akin to open Pokemon deck after Pokemon deck trying to find a shiny Growlithe and failing.

I played through, I am not kidding, 30 times. It started to get very repetitive. It didn’t help at the beginning that I was missing one of my search tools: a command that works, in addition to LOOK ITEM and MOVE ITEM, is LOOK UNDER. Not LOOK UNDER (ITEM), just the phrase LOOK UNDER. I missed it somehow perusing the manual but sometimes that’s how something you need is hidden.

This is just from LOOK, but MOVE and LOOK UNDER are equally likely to find something. The cage is totally useless.

I started to get a pretty good sense of the generation plan the game uses. The game starts with Entrance-Library-Ballroom-Reception, with a clue 1 in one of the rooms, which opens a secret from there. The new section has a clue 2 somewhere in the first couple rooms.

Once entering the last new secret area, there’s a clue 3 again in the first few rooms, and that clue will go to a “Grand Hall”, “Pillared Hall”, or “Windowed Hall”, all which are connected together in some way.

The riddles are all pretty straightforward as long as familiar with a little Western mythology, like “MONSTER WITH ONE EYE” (CYCLOPS) and “A WOODEN HORSE ENDED IT” (TROJAN, referring to the war, not TROY). The rotated-alphabet translated just served to add an extra level of annoyance after about the 4th iteration of the map.

In the midst of all this, you can have people fall in pits or under rubble (use rope or a shovel) some “trogs” which you have to keep shooting (if you turned your “reflex” score up at the start of the game, although I it set to 0 so I could actually ignore them) and enemy warlocks, which were the most annoying of all:

Just like the first part of the game, you can OFFER SPELLNAME to make them happy, but if they refuse your offer, you’ll get in a wizard duel. Then you choose a wizard and a spell to cast, and there’s whole table the game refers to:

I think the intent was to create maybe a rock-paper-scissors sort of game; if you choose EXTINGUISH and they choose to cast a fireball, the attack is canceled. But unless the warlock gets bored (random, sometimes they’ll just let off) that just leads to another round, and there doesn’t really seem to be any real strategy involved, just RNG. I ended up just using save states a lot and restoring if I had an unfriendly wizard so I didn’t have to deal with the duels. I think the one-shot nature of the duels is the main problem; there’s no real accumulation of action that happens that leads to interesting strategic choices.

None of that compares to the fact that I just. could not. get. the last. spells.

Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over … look, grinding in an RPG I can sometimes find sort of soothing, but this isn’t like that. It is like I had to type the same walkthrough 30 times in a row, except some mild elements were jumbled so I couldn’t even do it on autopilot and also I had to keep saving my game just in case one my wizards got killed and I lost a bunch of my precious spells I was accumulating.

I never did find the spell Shrink. I took the gamble that maybe — due to the random nature of the game — I didn’t really need all the spells, and fortunately I was right. I took off, flew northeast long enough, and eventually found Atlantis.

Now the game enters yet another completely different mode. This is a maze where the walls are invisible, and you have to keep using GO DIRECTION in order to search around.

At various spots in the maze you are blocked by obstacles. These obstacles are randomly chosen and placed. The only obstacle that repeats is sometimes you see guards, where you need to use an attack spell (like SLEEP).

Each scene is a sort of puzzle where you have to pick which spell off your collected list works. It is not a highly intense puzzle in that a.) except for the guards which will kill wizards, you can keep going through your spell list until you find the right spell and b.) in some cases it isn’t intuitive anyway which one works so it doesn’t feel encouraged to try to “solve perfectly”.

Why this and not SPIDER CLIMB?

Still, the overall effect was decently novel and fun, with my only problem being the nagging worry that a lack of SHRINK would undo me. It did, once:

I was curious about the randomization anyway so gave the map a re-roll and had different encounters. I don’t know in reality how much leeway I had.

Probably the most interesting puzzle. You need PANIC HORN here.

I finally wound my way through the maze to a Well of the Worlds, leading to a choice of three exits, only one which let me make progress (left, in my case).

After some more searching and crossing my fingers I didn’t hit a SHRINK point, I came across a Crack of Doom.

You need to DROP ORB (not USE ORB, that undoes the whole process to the start of landing at the island) and an explosion will start. You then need to book it off the island. A tunnel nearby leads you to near the exit, and then you need to tangle with the maze a little bit longer to make it back to your ride.

So despite appearances, there was almost no RPG in this game. The adventure aspect was very odd (the single puzzle in part 1, the search-and-solve-riddles in part 2, and use-the-right-spell in part 3) but I’d say it qualifies most squarely in that bracket. I try not to speculate too heavy on what-is-an-RPG or what-is-an-adventure because in the end it is kind of arbitrary but there does seem to be a genuine difference between, say, choosing to use flame because it has a 30′ range and attacks 3 monsters at once, versus using TELEPORT to get past a wall. The spells here are essentially treated as puzzle tools as opposed to strategic options.

This is not the last Clardy we’ll see in 1982. He went on to collaborate on an Atari 8-bit game (dropping the RPG part entirely) which has some similar concepts to this one, except it is science fiction. I’m still going to save that for an entry far into the future in case that one abuses me with the RNG as well.