(Prior posts on this game here.)
To kick things off, I found the actual tape cover. At least the author was trying.
I’m as puzzled as you are and any speculations on what the picture is meant to depict are welcome.
One of the puzzles I left off on last time involved a farmer very, very, upset at our theft of a spade.
K speculated about chopping down the plant, which didn’t work. However, nearby there’s a “beach section” which has some brandy, and I tried refilling the jug with that and tossing to no effect. It was rather later that I realized that the beach also has access to a completely different kind of water which might be hurtful rather than helpful.
I like how the saltwater is still “water” but it has an opposite effect.
After killing the plant it was safe to tote the spade away. I fortunately zeroed in fairly quickly on a good place to take it, as there was a “flower” in a “small wood” which seemed like it could have other plants.
The game’s weird lack of feedback here is hiding the fact I dug up some garlic.
One of the other things I had been experimenting with is the snake; since I knew it ate the bird, I tried poisoning various things and essentially chucking my entire inventory to see what would happen. Behold:
This leads to a “maze” which is just a single room that goes nowhere. Hmmm.
I rewound a bit and kept the garlic in case that was a softlock. Fortunately, there’s a bit later garlic is quite obviously helpful, so I guess it was. (One of the common themes in the game is having bits of the map change in their nature, so I can’t say the snake is entirely useless to deal with. Maybe, even, on the final escape from the kingdom, the snake will be moved as guard duty, and we’ll have needed to take it out earlier, and the room behind it is unneeded.)
Both Voltgloss and K also sharply observed how the dust covered bird is like the “canary in the coal mine”, and I should try taking it back with me to the maze to see what happened. I tried to do so and … nothing happened. By nothing I mean no explosions. I briefly thought perhaps the bird was preventing them somehow (??). A brief show of what going boom looks like:
On a later run (I was experimenting with a few things) I tried to go in again with the bird and found this time an entirely different reaction. Sometimes it would sing, and sometimes it would stop singing.
In the “stop singing” rooms, those are the places where most or all of the exits are deadly. After some more puzzling, I realized the only thing significant that changed between the runs is in one I had nabbed the wrench from the broken machine, and in the other I didn’t. Going back in the broken machine room after taking the wrench along served to clarify: the machine (I assume pumping out the dangerous gases) starts working again once you take the wrench.
With that cleared up, I went back over all the rooms that killed me before to look for exits, and I found an entirely new area, in fact multiple new areas. Here’s a meta-map:
To be clear, this is meant to show the interconnectivity of the various regions, and isn’t exact about directions. Once getting by the coal maze you get into a “mace maze”, a small outdoors section, a castle, and a pyramid. (Well, theoretically a pyramid. I haven’t solved that part yet, but I have dealt with the others.)
The mace maze is prefaced by a room with a simple sign.
The maze itself is a nightmare. Remember what I said about maybe the author not being interested in mazes? They’re interested, they just saved the pain for this section.
I confess, after realizing there was zero gimmick and I just needed to not only drop objects in rooms but tote them along to places farther in the maze (because I didn’t have enough objects for every single place) that I just looked up the route. I’ll suffer for your entertainment if it seems necessary but there just was no new point being made here.
I’m not entirely sure what causes the guard of the mace to wake up, but a second visit with a minimal inventory allowed me to grab the mace safely.
For the pyramid, well, it’s in a desert, and I die of thirst. That’s even having water being toted along in a jug. I’m wondering if I can somehow scrounge a second container.
As far as I’ve gotten. One more step kills.
The castle I’ve been able to both tackle and (probably) finish.
That’s because the castle seems to be almost entirely abandoned.
There’s at least a semi-logical reason, because if you follow the path all the way through, you reach a vampire.
If you’re holding a garlic (I told you it was obvious) you can enter safely, and retrieve a ring, I presume one of the treasures we’re trying to rescue. However, now the game’s theme kicks in. We aren’t in the clear yet.
Ominous! But this isn’t a timed thing, rather there are two locations where the dogs can show up. One is if you try to head east to the Pyramid.
The other is if you try to head south to the bridge and get back to the mine. Fortunately, you can use another semi-maze section and pass through a forest the long way to evade the dogs.
(The red spot is death, but the Dense Forest lets you take the long way around.)
The bad thing is that having the ring means the pyramid is now closed off. So that’s another softlock. At least in this case the treasures need to be gathered in a particular sequence.
I do suspect (just based on my room count) I’m starting to close in on the ending. I need to work out how to make it in the pyramid, drive off the people in the room under heavy guard, and then somehow make it out safely with all the treasures. I have a suspicion the last task will be the most difficult.
Renga in Blue 
I’m curious – is the water/thirst an actual time/turns based puzzle, or does it seem based on locations (where it could check your inventory for water and it then has to be used up – actively or passively – or you die)?
It’s based on locations, insofar as I think the author did some brute force to make all the locations reflect the player’s thirst level rather than make it a separate stat.
(I think it does check your inventory for one room but it still doesn’t drink it automatically? It’s a little curious.)
I’d forgotten how ridiculous the mazes are in this game; the author seems to have had a real fetish for them. I make it six if you discount the twisting paths through the woods and the mine. The one east of the “to the mace” sign is particularly scattergun.
The mace maze is the one I just looked up the steps for. It just wasn’t worth it.
I’d recommend this game to other people but only if they use pre-made maps
I am one of those odd people who love mazes but even my powers of tolerance were tested with this one. However having braved out the mine maze below the lodestone room in Acheton most subsequent mazes seem fairly benign. I would have loved to see what CJ Coombs could have concocted with more of a canvas to paint on. The Austin brothers and Peter Kilworth are rightly apotheosised for their text compression techniques but this author is certainly in that exalted company.
I can confirm that it is the bird’s singing that awakens the guards. Tricky as once the cage is dropped you can’t pick the bird up again although apart from the coal mine it is redundant anyway. I had wondered if the garlic would rouse the guards but perhaps they are of Gallic origin or suffer with their sinuses.