Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued directly from my last post.)

So, despite this game doing heavy borrowing from Crowther/Woods Adventure (troll at bridge, plant you water to make big, giant snake) it manages to pull a very interesting high concept. It gets somewhat hinted at in the manual:

It is best to explore well before attempting to take anything back as this often raises the alarm and causes you no end of trouble as various people chase you. THERE ARE NO RANDOM FACTORS – if you are killed you did something to cause it – there will be a sensible explanation and a solution.

Remember, the premise is that we are entering an “enemy kingdom” in disguise to retrieve the treasures. This means there are parts of the game that are easy to get in, but hard to get out. In other words, this is as if rather than just being in the classic adventure genre, this is a heist.

I’ll give some examples along the way. Let’s tour the evil land of Grunlock:

My map so far. Based on room count I’ve only seen half of them. The boundary between the kingdoms is marked with a red dotted line.

I count six areas in the eastern section (this is kind of arbitrary, but it makes sense somewhat). First off is the above-ground portion, the first part reached:

Most of this area is “dense forest”, although there’s a canyon crossed by a wooden bridge that seems ominous (it isn’t an obstacle, but I could easily see something causing it to burn/collapse if our adventures go awry). There’s also a classic Adventure bird:

DESCRIBE is the game’s version of EXAMINE. This is the first game since Journey I think we’ve had where DESCRIBE stands in for EXAMINE. It can be shortened to DE.

There’s also a small building, although it is not the Adventure Special.

This is where the troll lives. That’s the same coin that we tossed him before crossing the bridge, and if we try to go back, and use the coin for a toll, he kills us.

This is very similar to how you can throw the eggs and reclaim them via magic in original Adventure — the troll will be mad we frustrated the toll. I’m wondering if this moment is how the author got the conceptual theming I was talking about earlier.

(The upshot is I don’t think I’ve softlocked the game by tossing the coin earlier in the game to the troll, but there needs to be some trickery in order to get back over the river. Still, maybe there’s a sneaky way to get from the west to the east side in a one-way fashion, and the coin gets used on the way back? Since we found the coin on the west side, not in the evil kingdom, I don’t think it counts as one of the stolen treasures.)

Other than that there’s a flower (“A small white flower with a strong smell”) and a “pothole” to go down deeper.

These are mostly straightforward junctions and passages, except for the “huge eyed guard” which you have to go by to go in or out. The guard does not react … yet.

This will mostly definitely be a problem later.

There’s also a classic “snake blocking a door” that looks like the one from Adventure.

I should also point out there’s another one of the odd “maze” sections the game has been putting in. Rather than the game putting one big tough maze to map, there’s just been little ones.

Using a Fish to map things out. Incidentally, if you take the fish from its original spot it gets described as a “dead fish”, which suggests another way I may have already softlocked the game.

Moving on to an area with a spring where I have solved a genuine puzzle:

Other than the spring (where you can load up on water, although that’s true a couple places) the useful part is past a sleeping guard, where there’s a chest.

I am proud to say I nailed this puzzle first time.

Specifically, I locked the chest back again, then ran to the south where there’s a room that’s otherwise empty and not useful. Then, after the guard had left, I was able to scarf away with the diamonds, this time without making any noise.

Heist complete! The diamonds don’t attract the attention of the “huge eyed guard” incidentally, so it isn’t just holding a treasure that activates them.

Off to the northeast, there’s a small genuine maze.

Specifically, you’re in an area with “shafts” where some of the exits explode and kill you. This seems to be consistent and just a matter of mapping things out.

You get a wrench at the end (by a non-functional machine which the game doesn’t let you noodle with), so maybe that’s it.

Going to the southeast, there’s a “kitchen” a “dining room”, and a room with a lot of guards.

You can make your way around and above the room itself. I have a feeling I’m supposed to drop something in on them that will cause them either to run away or pass out.

The last section I’ll call the “farmer area”.

There’s the classic plant you need to water to get higher, where you can find a grainery (where you can safely grab the grain) and a small building (which is locked, and has a spade). If you try to get away with the spade, though, you get stopped at the “Top of Small Pothole” room.

The spade enables the verb DIG which I’m sure will be necessary somewhere, but isn’t helpful anywhere in the farmer area.

With the grain absconded with you can go back and feed the bird way back in the dense forest area and capture it in a cage.

Then you can take it to the snake, where you might expect it to chase the snake away.

Sorry, it isn’t going to be that easy!

I have some theories to test and things to prod at, but I’m fairly confident I’ve got this set of areas thoroughly mapped. Other than the snake I need to deal with the guard room and the farmer, so it doesn’t seem like a lot of hanging obstacles; there may also be obstacles (the wooden bridge, the guard in the tower) I just haven’t activated yet.

One last thing to mention: I did go through my standard verb list looking to see what the game understands.

This is an extremely small list. In may in fact be a record for a game that has a parser and no USE command. Just DIG, DRINK, LIGHT, THROW, LOCK, UNLOCK. I guess in some sense that’s all you need? For watering a plant, that’s throw. I assume you attack with the axe with throw as well. No need for OPEN when anything that needs opening is locked. It’s fascinating that there’s some very complicated depths upcoming using such simple communication (not even USE covering for the lack of verbs!)